Adds some partial book reviews: death of nature and torture and truth

1 files changed, 310 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/books/history/death-of-nature.md b/books/history/death-of-nature.md
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..47f94ab
--- /dev/null
+++ b/books/history/death-of-nature.md
@@ -0,0 +1,310 @@
+[[!meta title="The Death of Nature"]]
+
+## Topics
+
+* Bohm's process physics.
+* Ilya Prigogine new thermodynamics.
+
+## Excerpts
+
+    Between the sixteenth andseventeenth cerfturies the image of an or-
+    ganic cosmos with a living female earth at its ceriter gave way to a
+    mechanistic world view in which nature was reconstructed as dead and
+    passive, to be dominated and controlled by hufuans. The Death efNature
+    deals with the economic, cultural, and scientific changes through which
+    this vast transformation came about. In seeking to understand how people
+    conceptualized nature in the Scientific Revolution, I am asking not about
+    unchanging essences, but about connections between social change and
+    changing constructions of nattlre". Similarly. when women today attempt
+    to change society's domination of nature, 1:\1~¥.,~e acting to overturn
+    moder_n constructions of nature and women as culturally passive and
+    subordinate.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Today's feminist and ecological consciousness can be used to examine the
+    historical interconnections between women and nature that devel-
+    oped as the modern scientific and economic world took form in the
+    sixteenth and seventeenth centuries-a transformation that shaped
+    and pervades today's mainstream values and perceptions.
+    Feminist history in the broadest sense requires that we look at
+
+    [...]
+
+    My intent is instead to examine the
+    values associated with the images of women and nature as they re-
+    late to the formation of our modern world and their implications for
+    'our lives today.
+
+    In investigating the roots of our current environmental dilemma
+    and its connections to science, technology, and the economy, we
+    must reexamine the formation of a world view and a science that,
+    by reconceptualizing reality as a machine rather than a living or-
+    ganism, sanctioned the domination of both nature and women. The
+    contributions of such founding "fathers" of modern science as
+    Francis Bacon, William Harvey, Rene Descartes, Thomas Hobbes,
+    and Isaac Newton must be reevaluated. The fate of other options,
+    alternative philosophies, and social groups shaped by the organic
+    world view and resistant to the growing exploitative mentality needs
+    reappraisal. To understand why one road rather than the other was
+    taken requires a broad synthesis of both the natural and cultural
+    environments of Western society at the historical turning point.
+    This book elaborates an ecological perspective that includes both
+
+### Terminology
+
+Nature, art, organic and mechanical:
+
+    A distinction was commonly made
+    between natura naturans, or nature creating, and natura naturata,
+    the natural creation.
+
+    Nature was contrasted with art (techne) and with artificially cre-
+    ated things. It was personified as a female-being, e.g., Dame Na-
+    ture; she was alternately a prudent lady, an empress, a mother, etc.
+    The course of nature and the laws of nature were the actualization
+    of her force. The state of nature was the state of mankind prior to
+    social organization and prior to the state of grace. Nature spirits,
+    nature deities, virgin nymphs, and elementals were thought to re-
+    side in or be associated with natural objects.
+
+    In both Western and non-Western cultures, nature was tradition-
+    ally feminine.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the early modern period, the term organic usually referred to
+    the bodily organs, structures, and organization of living beings,
+    while organicism was the doctrine that organic structure was the
+    result of an inherent, adaptive property in matter. The word organi-
+    cal, however, was also sometimes used to refer to a machine or an
+    instrument. Thus a clock was sometimes called an "organical
+    body," while som~ machines were said to operate by organical,
+    rather than mechanical, action if the touch of a person was in-
+    volved.
+
+    Mechanical referred to the machine and tool trades; the manual
+    operations of the handicrafts; inanimate machines that lacked spon-
+    taneity, volition, and thought; and the mechanical sciences. 1
+
+### Nature that nurtures and thats also uncontrollable, replaced by "the machine"
+
+    NATURE AS NURTURE: CONTROLLING IMAGERY. Central to
+    the organic theory was the identification of nature, especially the
+    earth, with a nurturing mother: a kindly beneficent female who pro-
+    vided for the needs of mankind in an ordered, planned universe. But
+    another opposing image of nature as female was also prevalent:
+    wild and uncontrollable nature that could render violence, storms,
+    droughts, and general chaos. Both were identified with the female
+    sex and were projections of human perceptions onto the external
+    world. The metaphor of the earth as a nurturing mother was gradu-
+    ally to vanish as a dominant image as the Scientific Revolution pro-
+    ceeded to mechanize and to rationalize the world view. The second
+    image, nature as disorder, called forth an important modern idea,
+    that of power over nature. Two new ideas, those of mechanism and
+    of the domination and mastery of nature, became core concepts of
+    the modern world. An organically oriented mentality in which fe-
+    male principles played an important role was undermined and re-
+    placed by a mechanically oriented mentality that either eliminated
+    or used female principles in an exploitative manner. As Western
+    culture became increasingly mechanized in the 1600s, the female
+    earth and virgin earth spirit were subdued by the machine. 1
+
+### Mining and the female body
+
+    The image of the earth as a living organism and nurturing
+    mother had served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of
+    human beings. One does not readily slay a mother, dig into her en-
+    trails for gold or mutilate her body, although commercial mining
+    would soon require that. As long as the earth was considered to be
+    alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical
+    behavior to carry out destructive acts against it. For most tradition-
+    al cultures, minerals and metals ripened in the uterus of the Earth
+    Mother, mines were compared to her vagina, and metallurgy was
+    the human hastening of the birth of the living metal in the artificial
+    womb of the furnace-an abortion of the metal's natural growth
+    cycle before its time. Miners offered propitiation to the deities of
+    the soil and subterranean world, performed ceremonial sacrifices,
+    · and observed strict cleanliness, sexual abstinence, and fasting be-
+    fore violating the sacredness of the living earth by sinking a mine.
+    Smiths assumed an awesome responsibility in precipitating the met-
+    al's birth through smeltin,.g, fusing, and beating it with hammer and
+    anvil; they were often accorded the status of shaman in tribal rit-
+    uals and their tools were thought to hold special powers.
+
+Is there a relation between torture (basanos), extraction of "truth" and
+mining gold out of a mine? See discussions both on "The Counterrevolution"
+and "Torture and Truth".
+
+### Hidden norms: controlling images
+
+    Controlling images operate as ethical restraints or as ethical sanc-
+    tions-as subtle "oughts" or "ought-nots." Thus as the descriptive
+    metaphors and images of nature change, a behavioral restraint can
+    be changed into a sanction. Such a change in the image and de'-
+    scription of nature was occurring during the course of the Scientific
+    Revolution.
+
+    It is important to recognize the normative import of descriptive
+    statements about nature. Contemporary philosophers of language
+    have critically reassessed the earlier positivist distinction between
+    the "is" of science and the "ought" of society, arguing that descrip-
+    tions and norms are not opposed to one another by linguistic sepa-
+    ration into separate "is" and "ought" statements, but are contained
+    within each other. Descriptive statements about the world can pre-
+    suppose the normative; they are then ethic-laden.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The writer
+    or culture may not be conscious of the ethical import yet may act in
+    accordance with its dictates. The hidden norms may become con-
+    scious or explicit when an alternative or contradiction presents it-
+    self. Because language contains a culture within itself, when lan-
+    guage changes, a culture is also changing in important way~~ By
+    examining changes in descriptions of nature, we can then perceive
+    something of the changes in cultural values. To be aware of the in-.
+
+### Renaissance: hierarchical order
+
+    The Renaissance view of nature and society was based on the or-
+    ganic analogy between the human body, or microcosm, and the
+    larger world, or macrocosm.
+
+    [...]
+
+    But while the pastoral tradition symbolized nature as a benevo-
+    lent female, it contained the implication that nature when plowed
+    and cultivated could be used as a commodity and manipulated as a
+    resource. Nature, tamed and subdued, could be transformed into a
+    garden to provide both material and spiritual food to enhance the
+    comfort and soothe the anxieties of men distraught by the demands
+    of the urban world and the stresses of the marketplace. It depended
+    on a masculine perception of nature as a mother and bride whose
+    primary function was to comfort; nurture, and provide for the well-
+    being of the male. In pastoral imagery, both nature and women are
+    subordinate and essentially passive. They nurture but do not control
+    or exhibit disruptive passion. The pastoral mode, although it viewed
+    nature as benevolent, was a model created as an antidote to the
+    pressures of urbanization and mechanization. It represented a ful-
+    fillment of human needs for nurture, but by conceiving of nature as
+    passive, it nevertheless allowed for the possibility of its use and ma-
+    nipulation. Unlike the dialectical image of nature as the active uni-
+    ty of opposites in tension, the Arcadian image rendered nature pas-
+    sive and manageable.
+
+### Undressing
+
+    An allegory (1160) by Alain of Lille, of the School of Chartres,
+    portrays Natura, God's powerful but humble servant, as stricken
+    with grief at the failure of man (in contrast to other species) to
+    obey her laws. Owing to faulty supervision by Venus, human beings
+    engage in adulterous sensual love. In aggressively penetrating the
+    secrets of heaven, they tear Natura's undergarments, exposing her
+    to the view of the vulgar. She complains that "by the unlawful as-
+    saults of man alone the garments of my modesty suffer disgrace
+    and division."
+
+    [...]
+
+    Such basic attitudes
+    toward ·male-female roles in biological generation where the female
+    and the earth are both passive receptors could easily become sanc-
+    tions for exploitation as the organic context was transformed by the
+    rise of commercial capitalism.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The macrocosm theory, as we have seen, likened the cosmos to
+    the human body, soul, and spirit with male and female reproductive
+    components. Similarly, the geocosm theory compared the earth to
+    the living human body, with breath, blood, sweat, and elimination
+    systems.
+
+    [...]
+
+    The earth's springs were akin to the human blood system; its oth-
+    er various fluids were likened to the mucus, saliva, sweat, and other
+    forins of lubrication in the human body, the earth being organized
+    "'. .. much after the plan of our bodies, in which there are both
+    veins and arteries, the former blood vessels, the latter air vessels ....
+    So exactly alike is the resemblance to our bodies in nature's forma-
+    tion of the earth, that our ancestors have spoken of veins [springs]
+    of water." Just as the human body contained blood, marrow, mu-
+    cus, saliva, tears, and lubricating fluids, so in the earth there were
+    various fluids. Liquids that turned hard became metals, such as
+    gold and silver; other fluids turned into stones, bitumens, and veins
+    of sulfur. Like the human body, the earth gave forth sweat: "There
+    is often a gathering of thin, scattered moisture like dew, which from
+    many points flows into one spot. The dowsers call it sweat, because
+    a kind of drop is either squeezed out by the pressure of the ground
+    or raised by the heat."
+
+    Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) enlarged the Greek analogy be-
+    tween the waters of the earth and the ebb and flow of human blood
+    through the veins and heart
+
+    [...]
+
+    A widely held alchemical belief was the growth of the baser met-
+    als into gold in womblike matrices in the earth. The appearance of
+    silver in lead ores or gold in silvery assays was evidence that this
+    transformation was under way. Just as the child grew in the
+    warmth of the female womb, so the growth of metals was fostered
+
+### Matrix
+
+    The earth in the Paracelsian philosophy was the mother or matrix
+    giving birth to plants, animals, and men.
+
+### Renaissance was diverse
+
+    In general, the Renaissance view was that all things were permeat-
+    ed by life, there being no adequate method by which to designate
+    the inanimate from the animate.
+    [...] but criteria by which to differentiate the living from
+    the nonliving could not successfully be formulated. This was due
+    not only to the vitalistic framework of the period but to striking
+    similarities between them.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Popular Renaissance literature was filled with hundreds of im-
+    ages associating nature, matter, and the earth with the female sex.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the 1960s, the Native-American became a symbol in the ecol-
+    ogy movement's search for alternatives to Western exploitative atti-
+    tudes. The Indian animistic belief-system and reverence for the
+    earth as a · mother were contrasted with the Judeo-Christian heri-
+    tage of dominion over nature and with capitalist practices resulting
+    in the "tragedy of the commons" (exploitation of resources avail-
+    able for any person's or nation's use). But as will be seen, European
+    culture was more complex and varied than this judgment allows. It
+    ignores the Renaissance philosophy of the nurturing earth as well
+    as those philosophies and social movements resistant to mainstream
+    economic change.
+
+### Mining as revealing the hidden secrets
+
+    In his defense, the miner argued that the earth was not a real moth-
+    er, but a wicked stepmother who hides and conceals the metals in
+    her inner parts instead of making them available for human use.
+
+    [...]
+
+    In the old hermit's tale, we have a fascina,ting example·of the re:·
+    lationship between images and values. The older view of nature as a
+    kindly mother is challenged by the growing interests of the mining
+    industry in Saxony, Bohemia, and the Harz Mountains, regions of
+    newly found prosperity (Fig. 6). The miner, representing these
+    newer commercial activities, transforms the irnage of the nurturing
+    mother into that of a stepmother who wickedly conceals her bounty
+    from the deserving and needy children. In the seventeenth century,
+    the image will be seen to undergo yet another transformation, as
+    natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) sets forth the need
+    for prying into nature's nooks and crannies in searching out her se-
+    crets for human improvement.
+
+    -- 33