Something just pissed me off and I have a blog, so I can bitch and bitch and bitch about it all I want, and no power on the face of this planet or in low Earth orbit can stop me! Only the Moon Pope (he is the Pope of the Moon, you know) can thwart me now, and I don't see him around.
It's this New York Times Magazine article on the Stardust mission. It's not the article itself that bothers me; the rhetorical flourishes are a bit much, but as far as pop science goes it's good enough. It's the introduction that sears my brain with red hot brands of ignorance iron. It takes such a 'Gee whiz, ain't science crazy?' tone. Actually, it's mainly just one sentence that roasts my horse chestnuts. And it's not really the article or its writer I'm roasted at, but what the article tells us about its own likely readers.
Searching for the origins of life in the dust of a comet might sound like a bit of cosmically cockeyed indirection, something straight out of a New Age sci-fi novel.
The trouble is that it shouldn't sound like that at all to anyone who made it through a (decent, which is to say probably imaginary) high school Earth Science course. Describing it in this way panders to people's ignorance; it reassures them, soothes them, strokes their hair and whispers 'Yes, yes, it's okay to find science weird and silly and unreal, it's okay if you don't really know much about the physical universe you live in, let's all have a good "Jeepers gosh!" moment and pretend that flipping through an article one Sunday makes up for a lifetime of wallowing in a culture of ignorance.' I'd guess that this kind of tone is probably effective in roping in readers who wouldn't wade through a less gawky article, and so it does decrease the net ignorance in the world by a tiny yet still meaningful (always meaningful) amount. But into what unplumb'd abysses of uttermost despair it shines its wee light!
These are compelling times we live in. Around the world, wars are being fueled by fundamentalist adherence to ancient creeds. Here in the United States, where religious fervor has in many ways never been stronger, creationism still finds its way into some classrooms, and biblically accurate creation theme parks are built, with scripture accompanying dinosaur-bone displays. And yet all the while, the United States government is allotting millions of dollars each year to the global endeavor of piecing together from an ever-growing body of evidence the actual story of creation.
There are several things to be said about this paragraph. The first thing to say is that it's entirely true. Scientists offer people, if not the whole entire eternal truth of the world we live in, then at least a road to truth, as opposed to a bunch of bedtime stories for retarded cavemen. The second thing to say is that it's clearly preaching to the choir on that score. Dismissing religion out of hand, as the article does, and as I do roughly every seven minutes of my waking life (every fifty-two minutes sleeping), isn't really likely to win over anyone who feels ambivalently towards science due to their religious beliefs. Science desperately needs to win over the religious.
I don't mean that science needs to replace religion in the lives of Americans, even though I love science and hate (most) religion. There's no reason the two can't coexist. Science deals entirely with the things of this world; science has nothing to say about any putative God, only about His creation. You can embrace every single thing modern science has to say about the world, and still worship a transcendent God beyond it all: these two realms of thought are, or can be, entirely separated. Who the fuck cares if God is supposed to have created the world in a single week six thousand years ago? Is that important for anyone's understanding of God, or their relationship with God? Does it have implications for salvation or the next life? No. There are, it is true, people who embrace Biblical inerrancy who would disagree, but these people are stupid and probably nothing can be done for them anyhow.
But there are millions and millions and millions of Americans out there who aren't stupid and are religious. Or superstitious. Or believe in alien abductions. Or just don't know what they believe. In short, there are millions of people out there who think mystically. Trying to make them think rationally instead is, amongst other things, adversarial, patronising, and actually quite tedious. But, and this is a big but, what if we could convince them to think rationally as well as mystically? What if we could infect them with wonder and curiosity towards the laws and nature of the physical world as revealed through scientific inquiry, not as a replacement for their religious impulses (which just won't work; science does not meet the same needs religion does), but as an accessory? What if we could inject a current of updated Hermetic, cosmic piety into American thought? Convince the religious to embrace the physical world as a reflection of the transcendent, and science as a conciliation with the works of God?
Well, it sounds pretty fucking cool to me.
ADDENDUM: I should mention that I found the article via Michael Bérubé, who twists it to his own cultural-studies ends; I should also mention that something needs to be done to encourage American religion to evolve in a more positive direction before it turns into a bunch of right-wing assholes beating heretics with the Left Behind books.
Posted by aloysius at September 26, 2004 03:09 PM | TrackBack |