INDUST-REALITY
Suddenly a universe that had seemed complex, cluttered, unpredictable, richly crowded, mysterious, and messy, began to look neat and tidy. Every phenomenon from the atom inside a human cell to the coldest star in the distant night sky could be understood as matter in motion, each particle activating the next, forcing it to move in an endless dance of existence. For the atheist this view provided an explanation of life in which, as Laplace later put it, the hypothesis of God was unnecessary. For the religious, however, it still left room for God, since He could be regarded as the Prime Mover who used the cue stick to set the billiard balls in motion, then perhaps retired from the game.
This metaphor for reality came like a shot of intellectual adrenaline into the emerging indust-real culture. One of the radical philosophers who helped set the climate of the French Revolution, the Baron d’Holbach, exulted, “The universe, that vast assemblage of everything that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects.”
It is all there—all implied in that one short, triumphant statement: the universe is an assembled reality, made of discrete parts put together into an “assemblage.” Matter can only be understood hi terms of motion—i.e., movement through space. Events occur in a [linear] succession, a parade of events moving down the line of time. Human passions like hatred, selfishness, or love, d’Holbach went on, could be compared to physical forces like repulsion, inertia, or traction, and a wise political state could manipulate them for the public good just as science could manipulate the physical world for the common good.
It is precisely from this indust-real image of the universe, from the assumptions buried within it, that some of the most potent of our personal, social, and political behavior patterns have come. Buried within them was the implication that not only the cosmos and nature but society and people behaved according to certain fixed and predictable laws. Indeed, the greatest thinkers of the Second Wave were precisely those who most logically and forcefully argued the lawfulness of the universe.
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