But his conservative impulse that would be desirable in a sustainable culture seems incompatible with the task of changing our unsustainable one. He is conservative because change-restlessness-is what drives the world eaters. He saw the hippies (contemporary to Eiseley's writing) as another manifestation of the same rejection of tradition-"Faustian hunger" (p.109)-that remains our culture's greatest pride and most lethal attribute. The question that arises to me is, wrapped up in these unquestionables of science and technology, is there a kind of social power that desperately needs to be questioned with at least as much vigor as the power of the state and capital? Eiseley does not break it down this way, and I suspect he would resist my doing so. Through myth, past cultures "had achieved what modern man in his thickening shell of technology is only now seeking unsuccessfully to accomplish." (p.114) While our modern science is of great value on its own terms, on a larger scale, its value is less certain. Science, and the epistemology of any culture, pursues a comprehensive understanding of the natural world that is meaningful to us in cultural terms. Eiseley says that, propelled by modern science, we are the most aggressive society in history, that "the future has become our primary obsession." (p.105) We took to heart all of Bacon's scientific genius, but we ignored his belief that the all learning should contribute to the enlightened life. We, the "world eaters," continue to manifest this now demonstrably mistaken belief in our current society as we gobble up every non-renewable resource as fast as we can. Complex agricultural society plunged us exclusively into this second world, enabling us for the first time to observe nature with the detachment that would give rise to modern science, the "invisible pyramid." (p.87) Before that, earlier civilizations devoted similar attention and energy to the construction of the real pyramids which memorialized their belief that the second world is of primary importance.
He distinguishes this long experience of our "first world" of nature from our more recent immersion in the "second world" of culture.
After a long discussion of this possibility and its implications, he concludes that our destructiveness is not innate as demonstrated by our four million years of hunting and gathering.
He has a bravery to try to objectively consider ideas that conflict with his personal prejudices, like the possibility that there is an innate human drive to consume the planet until no option remains but escape to outer space. I found myself really relating to his almost casual style of thought exploration, and despite some reservations I had with his admiration for Francis Bacon I found myself unable to essentially disagree with anything he said.
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