“What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.” - C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1944).
“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.” G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World? (1910).
No wonder Zizek is called the most dangerous philosopher today. He makes “egalitarian terror” sound like a water-downed version of totalitarianism combined with an improved version of democracy, when really, we shouldn't forget, that in order to be terrorized, someone or something has to do the terrifying- meaning they will be the ones presumably free from terror.
Zizek is interesting to read because he is difficult to pin down. That means that his Lacanian-Marxists views sometimes hook onto Chesterton's distributivist politics, but are released before they are latched onto his Catholicism. He carries the torch for Hegelian dialecticism to an extent, but is cautious about scientific progress, referring to it as an “ideological institution” that also needs to be checked (445). Because of these and other seemingly paradoxes, Zizek can be both a friend and enemy to a variety of worldviews. That being said, I find myself agreeing with him on some points, but largely disagreeing with him overall.
His problem, as I understood it, is finding a solution to the imbalance of scientific progress with the fallibility of our common sense, our will to believe against our notions of freedom and autonomy. In the realm of science, biogenetics has enabled scientists “with interventions into man's genetic inheritance, the domination over nature reverts into an act of taking-control-over-oneself” (435). But I'm not so sure about this. Isn't the case that someone always takes control of someone else? On a larger scale, a world-state, wouldn't this mean the power of one nation over another?
Zizek says the price we pay for curtailing science is the split between science and ethics. But this should be viewed as a good thing, for why should science be the only one to tell us about autonomy and freedom? Aristotle's magnanimous (great-souled) man is self-sufficient. Socrates proposes that we seek freedom in the city, even if the city will ultimately deny us both dialogue and life itself, for the unexamined life can profit nothing. In other words, science doesn't hold the keys to our ultimate notions of freedom and necessity. We need another Kant to critique the “scientism” of today.
Zizek shows how up-to-date science says it will soon create “a brain more powerful than a human brain.” And perhaps I am one of the ones whom Zizek blames for having my common sense interfere with scientific data, but I at least pose this question: For human intelligence to create an intelligence more intelligent than itself, wouldn't it have to be more intelligent than itself to begin with?
In terms of Zizek's critique that the Church's message of hope is defending life against death, it is here, that I find agreement and disagreement. Zizek should know (because of his admiration for a good ol' Chestertonian paradox) that the Church's message about life and death has been two-fold: It is the guardian of life and nature, because God created it and saw that it was good, and so has built hospitals, healed the sick and helped the poor, and blessed marriage, among other things. But it is also a religion that has its God, as its central image, dying a slowly death on the cross, has glorified martyrs and martyrdom, and entrusts its followers to bid all their cares to another world. Is then science the only one occupied with this so called death-drive?
As I am reaching my max word count, I'd like to skip over all the other points and questions of agreement and disagreement (Zizek neglects to mention for example that Darwin posited God as an alternative for the evolutionary process, regarding somethings he had difficulty explaining, such as the human eye). Zizek's solution to the problem of our ontology and scientific endeavors (and I think he goes beyond the ecological movement) is his egalitarian terror. Here is where philosophy, the wisdom of the past, “the democracy of the dead” (as Chesterton calls its), can offer an alternative. It is to replace Hegel's notion of “earth” with that old idea of “soul.” Today, the body has attributes that once belonged to the soul, and so is better understood as a mechanism, something that can be manipulated. This reduction of complex mental phenomena to mechanical models is what drives science to dissect and explain the human away. In the end, we may even find that it is no longer “man's control over nature,” but nature's control over man, as Zizek also mentions.
Good post, Johnny. Let me take a stab at answering your question and challenge to the idea of making a computer smarter than a human. In a nutshell, how it works is that we build a machine with improved circuitry and processing, minus other limitations that we have. In other words, we have been able to identify the physiological reasons for what holds our own intelligence in check. Theoretically, we can build a machine modeled on the human mind that does not have these limitations and can teach itself more information much more quickly, estimated by Ray Kurzweil to to someday be smarter than not just a single human brain–––but an entire planet's worth. Exhilarating and frightening at the same time.
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