There is a chapter in Eco's new book: Turning back the clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism entitled "Science, Technology, and Magic" that really is fun! Eco can be as sarcastic as anyone and he outdoes himself here. My diaries have been about the same thing but not nearly as funny and enlightening.
He starts like this
We believe that we live in a period that Isaiah Berlin identified ain its earliest stages as the age of reason. The shadows of the Middle Ages having been dispelled by the critical light of the Renaisance, we now maintain we live in an age dominated by science
Now who can argue with that? Look at the results of the two polls I have used here, for example (Attached to each of my other two diaries). Well, he can! First
People today not only expect but demand everything from technology and make no distinction between destructive and productive technology.
Maybe that's too harsh? Let us look further.
Science is different. The mass media confuse it with technology and transmit this confusion to their users, who think that everything scientific is technological, effectively unaware of the dimension proper to science. I mean to say that science of which technology is an application and a consequence but not the primary substance.
This distinction is anything but trivial. He speaks of our being dominated or even hypnotized by speed. Travel, communication, etc.
This addiction to technology has nothing to do with the practice of science. It has to do with the eternal resort to magic
(My emphasis) Now I have been dealing with the role of causality in people's world views as it relates to politics, religion and science so he is touching a cord in my brain here.
What has magic been over the centuries, and what is it still today, allbeit in disguise? The assumptionn that it is possible to go from cause to effect without taking intermediate steps. I stick a pin in the effigy of an enemy, and he dies. I utter a formula and transform ioron into gold.
There it is. The relationship of cause to effect. Now it really gets good.
Magic is indifferent to the long chain of causes and effects, and above all it does not trouble itself to establish by constant experiment that there is a replicable relation between cause and effect. Hence its appeal, from primitive cultures to the Reneaissance to the myriad occult sects to be found all over the internet.
(My emphasis again) But we don't do that now do we?
Faith and hope in magic did not by any means fade away with the advent of experimental science.
He uses the evolution of computer technology as an example. Those of us who began using computers long ago and wrote in FORTRAN or BASIC or other languages were not so far removed from what cause and effect are in this milleu. Those who wrote machine language were even more in touch. Now the computer does what we ask at the click of a mouse. Is this the modern magic? Eco thinks so.
It might seem strange that this magic mentality should persist in our day, but if we look around, it is triumphant and everywhere.
This is the point I have been trying to develop as I compare Lakoff's distinction between direct cause and systemic (or as I say, complex) cause. Most of traditional reductionist science can be shown to prefer direct causal explanations. I also need to point out that Eco refers to long chains of cause being the real situation. I would extend this idea to intertwined networks of cause being the essence of complex reality. So now we have it.
Now the science that emerges through the mass media is, alas, only its magical aspect. When science does appear, it appears only becauses it promises a miracle of technology.
I think you get the picture. Just to add a bit from my own work, the notion Lakoff tries to develop is that resorting to the simple version of causality in one's way of viewing the world is totally in line with the conservative political view. It is progressives who are able to see the fallacy here and understand the role of complex cause in the scheme of things. Given Eco's use of the notion of a mentality beholden to magic, do we have to agree with Lakoff's model? And if we agree with Lakoff's model do we then have to recognize that the reason every problem is given a framework to provide simple direct cause solutions is woven deeply into the fabric of our use of language, the way the media portrays the world to us and even most of reductionist science itself? These are important questions and they need our attention.