Drastic change is a rule of thumb in history. But it can be hard to see coming—or to accept when it arrives—because every culture has unquestioned ways of doing things, a set of intellectual blinders that shape how people think about the world. That cultural philosophy becomes a guide for what’s right and natural in much of what we do.

The logic of the machine age is ours. During the course of two centuries of industrial revolution we’ve enshrined the mechanistic thinking that made our world possible, converting industrial-era logic into an all-purpose metaphor. As a result of that machine metaphor, our popular speech is littered with terms like “gear up,” “fine-tune,” and “on track” which reinforce the view that people and our affairs can run as smoothly and predictably as machines. the scientific revolution, which was spurred by the ideas of the mathematician and philosopher René Descartes.

Among those ideas he championed that still shape our thought is a dualistic view of humans. For Descartes, the world outside of us was just a vast and intricate machine. But, he held, in each of our minds there is a kind of inner sanctum, a conscious awareness disconnected from that mechanistic outside world. He believed that inner realm houses the human soul, which makes conscious reason and free will possible. There were implications in that for other creatures, too. Because they lacked our consciousness and free will, Descartes said, animals were just bundles of reflexes, responding automatically to whatever stimuli the world presented. As he put it, they were nothing more than complex watchworks (and if a watchwork dog can be considered alive, say today’s heirs of that view, why not computers and robots?).

During the centuries since then, as the concept of “world as mechanism” increasingly shaped how people thought, it shaped the culture they created. That’s also true of “reductionism,” another potent concept put forward by Descartes. Aided and abetted by the writer, philosopher, and statesman Francis Bacon, he pushed the view that nature’s so-called watchworks can best be understood by breaking them down into parts.

Isaac Newton built on this outlook (now referred to as Cartesian) to lay the foundations of classical physics. He showed that important properties of the physical world can be discovered through reductionism, and by a linear, 1 + 2 = 3 analysis of direct causes and effects. He then went on to show how reliable mechanical systems could be designed with that approach.

After centuries of medieval mysticism, all this came as a revelation. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Newton’s successors had explored hydrodynamics, electricity, and the smelting of iron, and developed standardization and interchangeable parts. With the invention of the steam engine, the industrial revolution was on its way. As mathematician Alfred North Whitehead later observed, it was around this time, too, that “the mechanical explanation of…nature finally hardened into a dogma of science.”

The story of that time and of the machine age that followed is actually a great many stories—of rapid advances in science and industry, of the coming of public education and democracy, of destructive world wars and the rise of a global economy. But beneath all that another drama was unfolding, one now poised to have an even larger impact on our world. This was the rise of a complex view of nature, one recognizing that life is more than a big machine.

Just as with the new biology now, the machine age in its own time was an effort to use lessons learned from nature as a guide for human design. And over the course of two centuries its growing power made clear just how solid and well-founded the mechanical view of life is. For the new biology to subsume that, it has to show how the machine age view is incomplete, to demonstrate that a fuller understanding of nature is possible. This is a fundamental contest, one that’s been developing for centuries. Throughout that time, as machine age methods spread across the globe, the alternate view of nature posed a rising challenge. The ongoing twists and turns of that debate help illustrate the ideas behind the new biology, and to reveal its deep roots. They also make a good story—one of brilliant, sometimes headstrong personalities and the rough-and-tumble clash of two great ideas.

Tags: Alfred North Whitehead, dualism, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, machine age, reductionism, rene descartes, scientific revolution

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Posted on April 11th, 2006 @ 6:00 am