Looking ahead

THE FRUITS of science have been phenomenal… and what could once be parodied as the inspired labour of eccentric boffins with test tubes, telescopes or butterfly nets is now more likely to be the strategically sophisticated, systematic work of international teams pulling patterns and regularities from the networked analysis of torrents of data, much of it remotely gathered and often from sources and forces invisible to the naked eye.

Nevertheless, science continues to be the patient application of observation, experimentation and measurement, and the collection of data followed by logical analysis and the formulation of testable statements. Over the centuries, it has produced a very powerful body of knowledge. Fields like electronics and nanotechnology, genetics, physics, chemistry and materials science have been leaders in the accelerating delivery of new applications and the articulation of new questions… lots and lots of new questions. But the leading edge of science is far broader even than this.

Science has revolutionised everything from architecture to entertainment, artistic expression to information gathering, work to warfare, education to reproduction… shopping, sports, the contents of our grocery carts and the way we prepare them, what we read and the way we read it. Our ideas of what our homes should be, contain and provide have very largely been shaped by science, and we are not what we would otherwise have been.

Historically, as the major pathways science branched into specialisations with their own diverging pathways and branches, the body of science has become an exponentially growing array of sophisticated sub-disciplines addressing almost every conceivable interest, hundreds of them: acoustics, and aerodynamics, aerology, aeronautics, agronomy, anesthesiology, anatomy, analytical chemistry, archaeology, astrobiology, astrodynamics, astronomy, astrophysics, audiology, bacteriology, biochemistry, bioinformatics, biophysics, botany, calorifics, cardiology, cellular biology, classical mechanics, clinical chemistry, chronobiology, computational physics, condensed matter physics, cosmology, cryogenics, cytology, developmental biology, embryology, endocrinology, all the way through to… zzzz… and each proliferating branch of modern science has its own sets of particular academic and career qualifications, its own specialised technologies, methodologies, conferences and journals, its own applications, relevance and perceived value. Science has so much breadth as to be all but impossible to keep up with: thousands of scientific journals are published each year and scientists struggle to keep abreast of research and theoretical developments in their own and immediately relevant spheres of interest. For non-scientists, it is nigh impossible.

Yet, directly or indirectly, science informs most of the decisions we make in our personal and public lives (or the excuses we offer afterwards), as well as what we conceive of as being “possible” and the ways we imagine achieving it. We find science and applied reason persuasive. With its own language, values and conventions, science has many of the attributes of a culture and, even in places where its principles do not reach, its flag is raised and its cultural forms are mimicked to conjure up reassuring mirages of authority.

The outcomes of scientific achievement haven’t all pleased everyone all the time, or to the same extent — some people, in fact, have fallen violent victim to it. And, because science costs money and is applied to make money, the fruits of science have tended to drop more generously into the laps of the wealthy. Some of the changes made possible by science have been experienced by some people as an imposition, even as the means of their oppression and annihilation. But that has seldom been science’s first intention.

Science was the principle champion of the maturing rationalism that took hold in the West with the European “Enlightenment” of the 18th century, and the elevation of “reason” as the necessary measure, justification and mechanism of human progress. In this role, science has produced an approach to understanding the world, the human condition and, many would say, the universe.

Science is said to have freed people from the chains of “superstition”. Well, it has tried… the upset here arises from a seriously limited public comprehension of science. One consequence of that is our tendency to heap enormous expectations onto science, relying on people in white coats to come running in and mop up after our every social, moral and economic blunder. The popular over-estimation of what science can do is a real danger in public decision-making. It was, we should remember, their sublime confidence in the unsinkability of the Titanic that fatally delayed the effective response of many of its wealthy, well-educated passengers to their real predicament.

This widespread but mistakenly uncritical trust in “science” and technology has been aggressively exploited. Thus for example, over-prescription is particularly rampant in North America where a rich vein of credulity has been mined to sell psychiatric and psychoactive medication. Therapists and their patients can look like co-conspirators in thrall to drug companies. The pharmaceuticals industry is driven first and foremost by the pursuit of financial returns and led by marketing objectives, hence its interest in natural, universal, unavoidable “afflictions” — enduring markets, like the effects of ageing, freed from limiting diagnoses that involve injury or infection — as rich fields for drug diversification.

Intellectually, few have turned the contamination of popular knowledge to greater profit than Walt Disney, the billionaire anthropomorphist, who was personally responsible for so much of the Western mind’s confusion and “anti-knowledge” about nature. He depicted nature as weak and vulnerable and, worst of all, as “cute”. Nature simply IS. It is nature that is invincible; we are the vulnerable ones. Nature can wipe us off the face of the planet as soon as we cross the line, impassively and without the least concern about collateral damage. Nature will go on.

Walt Disney is why stupid people get mauled by bears. One of his most characteristically despicable acts of charlatanism was to have a special centrifuge built to fling lemmings over a cliff so his cameras could affirm a popular but totally wrong-headed folk myth. But I find him most objectionable for his stunting of so many people’s capacity for awe. He put wonder in a safe little suburban headspace called “cute” that helped open the door to an unprecedented depredation of the natural world. The world described by science is nothing at all like Disneyland.

A large part of our vulnerability to the likes of “cute” is that, as adults, we get most of our science through the filters of the scientifically careless (or feckless) and sensationalising popular media. And we are far more socially predisposed to hearing stuff that affirms us or amuses us, even if it’s been generated with that purpose solely in mind. We recoil from information that challenges us.

Very significantly, science is a disciplined commitment to change: old ideas are constantly being jettisoned as their failings are identified and new, better-proven ideas supplanted them. Science offers no guarantees of absolute certainty. Its “dead” ideas file includes phrenology; the “balance of nature” (a notion that ecosystems, left alone, will arrive at a stable state of maximum productivity); the notion of human “races”; the “steady state theory” of the Universe; the principle of a “vital force”; the argument that instinct is evidence of hereditary knowledge; the theory of a “triune brain” that was popularised by Carl Sagan in his 1977 book, The Dragons of Eden… all have been consigned to science’s dead files’ drawer.

Then there are, of course, a good number of scientific theories that are best thought of as “in formation”. So, for example, there’s no agreed, conclusive theory of gravity, or of the origin of the universe. And there are a number of competing theories and ongoing scientific debates about the origin of the Moon, the demise of the dinosaurs, the nature of time… scientific issues seldom remain closed forever.

And, in public contexts, there’s a fraught line in North America between an interest in science — real science — and a kind of nervous hysteria that’s expressed in extremes, as doctrinaire “scientism” or atheism on the one hand or, on the other, as a credulous “belief” in alien abductions and the special effects imagery of films like Star Wars, Avatar and Lord of the Rings… yet we remain so innumerate that we buy lottery tickets every week. We hold obsessive fears about infinitesimal risks, but harbour gross over-estimations of our capacities for consumption and problem-solving. Then we brandish the existence of science as an assertion of our good sense. While our self-deceptions seem life threatening in the end, we’re very lucky to get as much good science as we do, even if we understand scarcely a word of it.

Science, we must remember, is a human activity. It began as a human response to the great mystery that is the Universe. In his diary, Rene Descartes, the 15th century French soldier whose mathematical genius paved the way for the emergence of modern science, recorded that “one night when I was in a deep sleep, the Angel of Truth came to me and whispered the secret connection between geometry and algebra.” Then there is the story of the great Danish physicist, Niels Bohr, a co-founder of quantum mechanics, who was asked by a student about the superstition attached to the horseshoe Bohr had nailed to the door of his summerhouse. Bohr denied believing that the horse shoe brought him luck, then mischievously added: “but I understand that it works whether you believe it or not.”

Albert Einstein said his life work in physics was an extended meditation on a dream he’d had as a child: he was on a toboggan and the stars — it was night time — changed color as the toboggan accelerated down the hill. And, in his late 60s, he described a moment he vividly remembered from his childhood: “I experienced a miracle… as a child of four or five when my father showed me a compass.” It excited him so much that he trembled and grew cold. “There had to be something behind objects that lay deeply hidden… the development of (our) world of thought is in a certain sense a flight away from the miraculous.”

Science is a creative, exciting, powerfully enabling and imaginative realm, and it is a powerful tool. A great part of science’s inspiration is awe: an experience of awe that is not totally different from the awe that, for millennia, has been inspiring the genuine mystics of many cultures. But science has not yet unraveled the mystery. Nor, in its entirety, is it ever likely to.

For that to happen, and for it to be intelligible, the mystery would have to be no greater than the reach of the human mind, and the human mind’s shortcomings make themselves abundantly clear. Science would also have to become something it is not. Its questions are all about “how?” and, without the “why?” it can leave us in the cold.

A large part of life is sustained by a sense of “meaning” and the scientific worldview does not extend to that. Meaning is left to culture and to religion, both of which give every appearance of creative fatigue and intellectual torpor. But, coasting downhill with their tanks dry, they are rolling past the abundant replenishments that science and philosophy offer.

Material reality is science’s domain. And it is so often breathtaking: the capacity of science to resolve the paths and study the intertwined histories of subatomic particles in nanoseconds, and to track the passage of billions of far-off stars and galaxies back to the point of their cosmic creation; to discover the vulnerabilities of a bacterium and the marvellous accomplishments of a spider; to demonstrate that all life is interconnected… yet popular culture and contemporary religion give the appearance of being impassively unimpressed by all of this.

That’s too bad, because the pursuit of knowledge on its own puts us on a classically tragic path… glorious without question, but tragic because we can never know quite enough. Every path forks and every fork leads to new needs to know and, along the way, we release genies that we can never again hold captive. It is a one-way quest because its pursuit erases the reality that lay behind us. We are changed and, changed, we yearn for more change but we cannot know where we are going. There is no Minotaur to overcome at the end of this labyrinth, just the entry to another labyrinth.

The discoveries, the insights, the narratives and the visions of reality that science lays before us lead us to the very extremes of human understanding and, ultimately, that is our final boundary, our horizon: even science is bounded by the capacities of the human mind… despite the head-splitting intellectual accomplishments of mathematicians and theoreticians whose conclusions defy human capacities of visualisation and imagining.

It is precisely at this point that culture and religion should be vigorously, explosively evident: creating, celebrating, encouraging, exploring and debating, opening channels for gratitude and delight, generating ideas, insights, tears and laughter… science is delivering its contribution, but we can only make good use of “reason” — pragmatic good sense — when we weigh it against, for example, “compassion”.

It is not good enough that qualities like generosity, loving-kindness, courtesy, forgiveness, pity, mutuality of respect and hospitality should be set aside as aspects of private personal morality… as eccentric, individualised options distanced from political expression, social policy and public debate. Without them, science and reason will do us no good at all.

We need to ease up on reason — it’s not like we’re all THAT good at it — and demand more of our poets, theologians, visionaries, painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, priests, dancers, writers, liturgists and choreographers: we need fresh visions and imaginings of our own redemptive place in the universe. We need an existential present tense that fills us with excitement and awe. We need reinvigorated curiosity, a quickened conscience, a poetic of purpose, a livelier aesthetic sense… new capacities for love, trust, adventure and morality…

This is the hope-giving essence of humanity’s continued progress. This is where we must demand priority and investment and resourcing: in means of making reason virtuous and progress worthwhile.

There’s not a lot of point flying to Mars if our hearts and hopes, spirits and ideals can’t flap their wearied way to the top of nearest hill.

And (click here): The bagpiping connection (Michael Grey)