Scribd

C H A P T E R 3

The Artificial Society

W

hat is the endgame of the mechanistic ideology? o answer this question, we must return to the cathedral of Pisa where the eyes of seventeen-year-old Galileo Galilei follow a swinging lamp. With his youthful openness and curiosity, Galileo sees something that countless eyes had never noticed: Whether the pendulum makes a long or a short swing, the time it takes to swing hence and forth is always the same. Upon closer analysis, this makes sense. Long swings start from a higher position and as the object begins its downward motion, it accelerates in its path. Shorter swings start from a lower position, and as the object begins its downward motion, it accelerates less. Te speed at which the pendulum travels on its path is directly proportional to the length of the arc it makes—and therefore the movement of the pendulum always lasts the same amount of time.Galileo’s discovery was brilliant, no doubt. But it wasn’t quite right. Christiaan Huyghens noticed something when he was building his pendulum clocks: If he attached several clocks to the same wall, their pendulums would eventually move in a perfect simultaneous manner.¹ He couldn’t help but conclude that somehow the clocks were in com-munication with one another. Huyghens assumed—rightly, as it turned out—that the vibrations of the pendulums spread through the wall,

PROPERTY OF CHELSEA GREEN PUBLISHING

38

Science and Its Psychological Effects

causing small deviations in duration that, in a way that is difficult to understand, eventually cause the pendulum movements synchronize. Tat is to say, pendulums are more complex than Galileo’s simple law suggests. Apparently, they have the ability to adjust their movements under the influence of their environment. Precision measurements of the duration of motion confirm Huyghens’s view, at least to the follow-ing extent: Contrary to what Galileo thought, pendulums do not always swing for exactly the same amount of time. Sometimes it takes just a little longer, sometimes just a little less time to complete its movement.² And this also turned out to be the case if a pendulum is swinging in an isolated state, without the process of synchronization: Te swings’ dura-tions are not exactly the same. Initially, these deviations were dismissed as a form of insignificant “noise.” Te irregularity in the pendulum was believed to be the result of coincidental mechanical factors, such as changes in surrounding airflow or the chain twisting.It took until the second half of the twentieth century to discover that this is not correct. Tese apparently random deviations form a pattern that can be described with a mathematical formula but is nevertheless strictly unpredictable. (Pendulums have the characteristic of determin-istic unpredictability, which we will revisit in chapter 9). What’s more, the aforementioned pattern is unique to each pendulum. Pendulums had been regarded as dull, mechanical phenomena that dutifully fol-lowed Galileo’s laws, but those elementary mechanical devices were, in fact, creative in nature and idiosyncratically capable of disobedience. In

Chaos

, James Gleick puts it this way: “Tose studying chaotic dynamics discovered that the disorderly behavior of simple systems acted as a creative process. It generated complexity: richly organized patterns, sometimes stable and sometimes unstable, sometimes finite and some-times infinite, but always with the fascination of living things.”³Reducing the pendulum’s behavior to Galileo’s law robs it of its “social” qualities, as well as its individuality and creativity. If you were to create a virtual pendulum in a computer program that behaves strictly according to Galileo’s law, it would look very much like a real pendu-lum, but it would be a death phenomenon, lacking the lively chaos of a real pendulum.


Te Artificial Society

39

* * *

Galileo’s pendulum illustrates a universal law: Te logic and rational explanation of a natural phenomenon—however comprehensive it may be—always makes an abstraction of that phenomenon. Teoretical models never capture anything fully; they always leave an unexplained remainder. Tis remainder is not just insignificant, random “noise.” It is the essence of the object. It is its living component. You can see this, for example, in the difference between “natural” and “artificial” products. Whether it’s a genetically engineered plant, lab-printed meat, vaccine-induced immunity, or high-tech sex dolls— whenever we artificially reproduce a natural phenomenon from rational analysis, the artificial phenomenon is not identical to the original. Te loss is not always immediately visible. Sometimes it is barely visible at all. And yet, it is crucial, both on a physical and psychological level. Te digitalization of human interactions—replacing real human interactions with digital ones—is a good example thereof.󰀴 With the coronavirus crisis, the trend toward a digital society made a big leap forward. eleworking became the norm, student life took place online,󰀵 aperitif and coffee were consumed in front of a televi-sion or computer screen,󰀶 even sex was mediated through technological machinery󰀷 and the death penalty was carried out from a safe digital distance.󰀸 Initially, it was mainly seen as a necessity and occasionally as an advantage. People felt protected from the virus, saved time, avoided traffic jams, reduced their ecological footprint, and spared themselves the stress and discomfort that can characterize human encounters.However, this acceleration of online existence also accelerated burnout and exhaustion, to the extent that some now speak of

digital depression

.󰀹 Perhaps the heart of the problem lies in the following: A conversation not only conveys information; there is also a subtle but equally profound bodily exchange and this is disrupted by digitaliza-tion. Tis physical aspect of speaking is of vital importance. It makes language a matter of love and lust, charged with a refined eroticizing power. Tat’s why we physically crave a real conversation after a week of working online.
