Don Steehler sent me a note to take a look at the writings of Tom Robertson at the Energy Resources Yahoogroup.
Tom Robertson
The note below marks this month as the 400th birthday of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kirchner.
400 years ago, the world was beginning to pick up steam (literally) on what was to be known as the “Industrial Age.” The first heat engines had been built and thirty years after Kircher’s death in 1680, Newcomen’s steam engine would lead to the wholesale conversion of coal into mechanical power.
By the time of Athanasius Kirchner’s death, the social organization required to take the energy in photosynthetic productivity and turn it to powering great nation/states was well under way. At the same time, reward systems for intellectual behavior were heading toward where they are today: to increasingly “do things,” with little reward for building the intellectual capacity to know why things work as they do at scales larger than human will, and what it may be best for us to be doing in terms of our long term interests.
And none of this is new.
In the last three pages of his novel, War and Peace, Tolstoy steps to a higher level of human perception.
He tells us that as Copernicus and Galileo destroyed the cosmology of the ancients who placed earth at the center of the universe, we must once again shift our conceptual universe. “…by admitting our free will we arrive at an absurdity, while admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, on cause, we arrive at laws.”
War and Peace was first published whole in 1869, just after the Civil War in the U.S.
Ten years before, in the United States, oil was discovered in Pennsylvania.
In the next half-century, the basis for most modern science was laid, as were the great engines of commerce, such as limited liability investment and associated financial processes, all of which became highly amplified by increasing communications capabilities, first by wire-borne analog and then, beginning in the 1960s, by digital technologies.
In the ensuing grand rush to “do things,” from making cars, wars, suburbia, and all the other attributes of consumer society, there was little room for warnings like those Tolstoy would have us hear from the stranger, who is identified as the Mason, in Book Five Chapter II of War and Peace:
“The highest wisdom is not founded on reason alone, not on those worldly sciences of physics, history, chemistry, and the like, into which intellectual knowledge is divided. The highest wisdom is one. The highest wisdom has but one science—the science of the whole—the science explaining the whole creation and man’s place in it.”
…and while that “higher wisdom” exists and is even being expanded upon, you will not find it in today’s world without taking special effort to dig it out from under the overburden of our grand explorations into the particulates of intellectual disciplines, highly reinforced by all sorts of supporting agencies—all trying with increasing hopelessness to “do more” with parts and thus driving themselves farther from any understanding of the whole.
Of course, then there is also economics, the ultimate study of the workings of human will, a field of “inquiry” that holds within it no capacity to warn us of the likes of the Enron disaster and its diverse spawns to come—and the implications such financial manipulations hold for decimating the retirement savings of us all—including those caught up in the knowing parts at the cost of knowing the whole.