Most science, as it is often practiced today, tries to control nature. But for all science’s success, the world is becoming too toxic, human violence remains undiminished, and we are less content than most plants and animals. We may be living longer, but hardly better. This is what comes of ourContinue Reading
Science provides a fairly successful way of “listening” to ecosystems. After all, most creatures in the diminishing wilderness, just like a sad pet or an abused child, don’t really know that something is not right — they just grow up accepting it as normal. They can’t, or they won’t dare,Continue Reading
Ritual allows us to express subjunctive, would-be, could-be states of mind. Through ritualing we make the unknown known. In today’s world, this is often the realm of the scientist, or the artist, although the virtual universe is filled with true, lifestyle-changing individuals. (And there are charlatans, too, but they areContinue Reading
Science — more properly, scientific method — is a ritual; just like magic and religion, its “central aim,” as Susanne K. Langer writes, “is to symbolize a Presence, to aid in the formulation of a religious universe.” It is, simply and fundamentally, an attempt to express the unknown. The ability of scienceContinue Reading
If a ritual helps to solve a problem — if it is good — it gets repeated and another seemingly irrational tradition is born. But is a ritual merely an attempt to control some crisis? Or, rather, is it an expression of something much more meaningful? When asked by theContinue Reading