A pagan science manifesto
What do we see through the tunnel of our vision?
Pagan?
Paganism is a spiritual or religious path based in reverence for the earth and all life.
As a pagan I celebrate life. For me all that lives is holy. I consider the world to be my lover, and daily life to be my means of giving and exchanging love. As with sexual love, I can be better or worse at this, more reverential and loving, or else selfish, preoccupied, forgetful.
By "the world" I don't mean only the visible world, but also the invisible, audible and inaudible, manifest and unmanifest. The world always remains something of a mystery to me, never fully known or knowable, always unfolding. And "knowing" that world is rarely easy. It is not one thing, but many. Its richness and diversity creates opportunities for disagreement, for competition, for in-group and out-group formation, for boundary-working of all kinds, resulting in challenges that require patience, perseverance, wisdom, and artfulness in managing.
As a devotee, my way of coming to know the world differs from that of an "objective" scientist. I approach the world not by dissecting and examining it, as if it were dead matter, in order to uncover its secrets, but by participating in it, with others, to learn its patterns, and to learn how they express themselves through me and my social and natural environment. And generally I follow those patterns, with an eye for what the effects of my following them will be
For me, there is no "outside" from which I can scrutinize the world as an object. Every "outside" is created by separating an in-here from an out-there. Nor is there any need to posit a transcendent "heaven" or any creator who made the world once and for all, and has since left it to its own devices, or watches it from a distance from his celestial satellite. I realize, of course, that these might simply be different metaphors or languages to describe the same world; but I realize also that metaphors have consequences.
Life, for me, is in its essence always here, now. It is the embodiment of divinity. As a celebrant and devotee, I am drawn to deepen my understanding and appreciation of this everpresent and everchanging sacred milieu. I do this with the means humans have always used: stories, myths, images, personifications, rites, i.e., modelling practices of various sorts.
As my understanding and appreciation deepens, I become more empathetic, compassionate and loving, and more appreciative of life's diverse forms of self-expression. In striving to live reverentially, I act to protect that diversity and beauty as I have come to know it.
Science?
Science, as we know it today, is an accumulated body of knowledge, and a method of gaining knowledge, about the world. It has come to be associated with ideas of "objectivity," dispassionate observation, demonstration and replicability.
In recent years, however, philosophers, historians, and sociologists of science have questioned the common-sense, positivist ideas of what science is, particularly its pretentions to objectivity and supposed neutrality. With these criticisms in mind, is a pagan perspective compatible with science? What could a pagan science look like?
Such a science would acknowledge its own participation in the social-natural world. It would admit its own inability to stand completely apart from that world, as an "objective" outsider. It would replace dispassionate observation with compassionate and empathetic participant-observation. It would aim not to accumulate knowledge for its own sake, but in order to improve its (our) participation in the world, for instance, by bringing about less harm to others and to life in general than it might otherwise.
A compassionate, participatory science has begun to be practiced by some of those involved in the "human sciences," where objectivity is no longer held with the reverence it still maintains in the "hard," "natural sciences." So the question becomes: Can we remodel the natural sciences after the post-positivist, post-objectivist human sciences? Is the division between the social and natural science themselves not simply a division of convenience, which allows natural scientists to pretend the nonhuman world were dead, inert matter? Can we treat the world we study as if we were part of it, interpreting it with the means at our disposal so as to better live in and with it?
A pagan science would assume, from the outset, the following points:
(1) The world is fully animated, enspirited, and alive, and ought to be treated at such. The game of "let's-pretend-it's-dead" is over.
(2) All our activities, including those of science, are ways of participating in that world, interpreting and telling stories about it, feeling, imagining, and co-creating it into existence – activities which we share, in different ways and to varying degrees, with all sentient beings.
(3) Our interpretations and stories have consequences. Interpreting the world as a machine leads us to treat it as a machine. Interpreting it as a vast computer or cybernetic system leads us to treat it, and ourselves, as circulating bits of information. Interpreting it as a pluralistic commonwealth of subjects, leads us to treat ourselves and others with respect and through dialogue – though this may be a dialogue carried out not only through human language, but by other, more or less direct, means as well. Interpreting it as the passionate love play between Goddess and God, or Shakti and Shiva (as would Wiccan neo-pagans, or Tantric Buddhists and Hindus, respectively) leads us to treat it, and ourselves, as lovers learning how to participate in divinity.
Let us free up our metaphors and models and envision a pagan science that is compassionate, participatory, imaginative, critical (where criticism is due), and joyful! It may be the only hope for transforming the trajectory of contemporary civilization.
pagus = Latin for 'locality'; paganus
= Latin for 'country-dweller'; 'pagans' were thus the followers of the religion
of the land or locality. Today, paganism is a growing religious movement that
takes many forms, especially as 'neo-paganism.' Click here to
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Scientia = Latin for 'knowledge'.Click here to
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