Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

by Jason Hickel

For Bacon, science and technology were to serve as the instruments of domination. ‘Science should as it were torture nature’s secrets out of her,’ Bacon wrote. And with the knowledge thus gained, ‘man’ would not ‘merely exert a gentle guidance over nature’s course’, but ‘have the power to conquer and subdue, to shake her to her foundations’. Nature must be ‘bound into service’ and made into a ‘slave,’ ‘forced out of her natural state and squeezed and moulded’ for human ends. Bacon’s use of torture as a metaphor here is revealing, as he himself – in his role as Attorney General under King James I – deployed torture against the peasant rebels and heretics of his time, and worked to legitimise the practice as a means of defending the state. Just as Bacon saw torture as a weapon against peasant insurrection, so he saw science as a weapon against nature. Like peasants, nature had resisted domination too long. Science was to break her once and for all.