To: letters@nytimes.com
Re: What the world revolves around
Date: Mon, 14 July 2003 

 

Deciding the World Does Not Revolve Around Galileo, NYT book review, July 11, 2003

Dear Sir/Madam,

Prior to the 17th Century, the notion that our world is a planet (literally, "wandering star"!) which revolves on its axis while orbiting the Sun, rather than being stationary at the centre of everything, did not only contradict the authority of the prevailing geocentric system and church teaching, it also contradicted the evidence of everyone's eyes! And in those days, with no artificial lighting to impair the view and no TV to distract them, most people knew the heavens intimately: They could see on every clear night that it is the sky, with its complement of fixed and wandering stars, which circles the Earth. To suggest anything else (except to a very experienced and thoughtful astronomer), let alone that our solid and manifestly stationary world was a "wandering star" like those shifting points of light, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, must have seemed pure lunacy!

Nowadays we all learn the Copernican system, and much more besides, accepting it on the authority that science now enjoys, but with very little, if any, appreciation of just how amazing it is. Current models of the physical world are often taught in a way that either ignores or belittles the models (theories) they replaced, and we are encouraged to identify with our superior knowledge, which makes us feel somehow superior to those who went before.

We are so preoccupied with the application and commercial exploitation of what modern science has achieved that we hardly have time to appreciate it for its own sake. Many school children and students are stuffed full of knowledge, the answers to questions they have never had the chance to ask, in a way analogous to force feeding someone with the finest foods. It is no wonder there is so little appreciation of it, or that it makes many of them feel sick.

Because there is so little appreciation of what we now have, both in the way of knowledge and in the ways its application has benefited (and completely transformed) our lives, instead of rejoicing and giving thanks, as we should, we remain dissatisfied and desirous of even more, which is what our growth-dependent economy requires, but nevertheless finds necessary to devote a whole industry and billions of dollars annually to maintaining or increasing.

Just as the Ptolemaic world system, in which everything revolved around the Earth, seemed self-evident 400 years ago, so today it seems self-evident that everything does and should revolve around money and the economics of making it. Our experience teaches us that whatever we want, money is the way to get it. Whether personal ambitions, national defence, social services (health care, education, environmental protection, etc.), or whatever, money is THE key factor in achieving them. For this reason, our free-market economy is designed to encourage everyone to pursue their own economic (materialistic) self-interests, making as much money as possible, thus increasing the material wealth of society as a whole, with the state providing the legal framework and creaming off a greater or lesser portion of the created wealth to finance essential infrastructure and those things which cannot be left to market forces alone.

Between the middle of the 16th and 17th Centuries a handful of philosophers and astronomers succeeded in removing man from the centre of the physical universe. Today we have to pull off an analogous, no less important, and in fact much more urgent revolution: one which will remove economics (the household of man) and money-making from the centre, around which most human activity revolves and fatefully causes us to believe and act as though it were more important than ecology (the household of nature), the climate, and the life-supporting ecosystems on which all life - including our own - depends.

We must recognise that there is a limit to the burden we can place on Earth's finite resources and carrying capacity, and that this burden translates into a per capita burden, which the average North American and West European is already overstepping, and is being encouraged to overstep even further by our growth-dependent and profit-driven economy.

We could have gone on believing in the Earth-centred Ptolemaic system for a long time with negligible consequences (the development of modern science would merely have been delayed), but the same is not true of our current belief in the primacy of economics over ecology. If we do not learn to subordinate economics and man's, more animal than human, desire for ever increasing material wealth to the need for sustainability on our planet, Spaceship Earth, and to create sustainable economies and lifestyles for its 7-9 billion inhabitants within the next 2 or 3 decades we may not get another chance.