William T. Vollmann, Uncentering the Earth. Vollmann notes that what made the groping progression away from geocentrism (and other errors in astronomy) inevitable was less that they were not explanatory -they were, and worked with our metaphysics at the time!- but that they were not predictive.
Walker Percy felt this was a major element of the paradigmatic shift to what he called “scientism” in the West: as technology has become the most important concern of our civilization, the predictive capacity of any system of knowledge has become how we judge that system’s value. Technology needs theories that can predict how it can relate to and dominate the natural world: so what tells us what will happen is more important than anything else told.
Science has supremely powerful predictive capacities; it has very powerful explanatory capacities, although those explanations must necessarily be developed in inhuman language; it has virtually no capacity for generating human meaning. That is: it is observational, predictive, explanatory only in the ways dictated by the natural world’s contours.
Culture (religion, art, politics) has less powerful predictive capabilities (most believers will admit that its predictions are either eschatological or vague: this will happen to you at the end of time; this will happen after death; but nothing about what will happen to you if you inhale this or that bacteria or travel at a speed approaching that of light; and its predictions do not expand and refine themselves). Culture is better at providing morality and meaning, however, because it can exist apart from the natural world in the world of the mind and heart and in the language of human experience.
I note this only because I found Vollmann’s condensation fascinating: here is the point in which our obsession with understanding and predicting phenomena -with mastering the natural world and the future- begins to supersede our adherence to value systems of another sort.
“Predictive power grew ever more irresistible…” sounds almost Faustian. And perhaps it is.
