ilya_prigogine_isabelle_stengers_alvin_tofflerbookfi-org

31 THE TRIUMPH OF REASON
downgraded from a source of inspiration for Western culture
to a threat. Not only does it threaten man's material existence,
but also, more subtly, it threatens to destroy the traditions and
experiences that are most deeply rooted in our cultural life. It
is not just the technological fallout of one or another scientific
breakthrough that is being accused, but "the spirit of science"
itself.
Whether the accusation refers to a global skepticism exuded
by scientific culture or to specific conclusions reached
through scientific theories, it is often asserted today that science
is debasing our world. What for generations had been a
source of joy and amazement withers at its touch. Everything
it touches is dehumanized.
Oddly enough, the idea of a fatal disenchantment brought
about by scientific progress is an idea held not only by the
critics of science but often also by those who defend or glorify
it. Thus, in his book The Edge of Objectivity, historian C. C.
Gillispie expresses sympathy for those who criticize science
and constantly endeavor to blunt the "cutting edge of objectivity":
Indeed, the renewals of the subjective approach to nature
make a pathetic theme. Its ruins lie strewn like good intentions
aU along the ground traversed by science, until it
survives only in strange corners like Lysenkoism and anthroposophy,
where nature is socialized or moralized.
Such survivals are relics of the perpetual attempt to escape
the consequences of western man's most characteristic
and successful campaign, which must doom to
conquer. So like any thrust in the face of the inevitable,
romantic natural philosophy has induced every nuance of
mood from desperation to heroism. At the ugliest, it is
sentimental or vulgar hostility to intellect. At the noblest,
it inspired Diderot's naturalistic and moralizing science,
Goethe's personification of nature, the poetry of Wordsworth,
and the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, or
of any other who would find a place in science for our
qualitative and aesthetic appreciation of nature. It is the
science of those who would make botany of blossoms and
meteorology of sunsets. 5