Knowledge as power and nature as material: the instrumental program, and its corruption of the Genesis mandate into ownership without accountability.
The domination model holds knowledge to be power over nature, to be taken and used: Francis Bacon’s program of ‘effecting all things possible’, read without his own theological framing, becomes the charter of a purely instrumental science. In religious dress, domination appears as a reading of the Genesis mandate (subdue the earth) that makes creation raw material and humanity its owner rather than its tenant.
The model is named here because it is practiced, and because the traditions themselves have produced its sharpest critics: Lynn White Jr.’s famous 1967 essay blamed the domination reading of Genesis for the ecological crisis — and proposed Saint Francis, from inside the same tradition, as the counter-model.
References
- Lynn White Jr., ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’, Science (1967)
- Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)