Kicking the Sacred Cow

by James P. Hogan

  The reasons are varied, and as we've seen, go no deeper than human nature. Sometimes a theory is simply too elegant or perfect in its intellectual appeal to be wrong, and any degree of mental contortion to avoid seeing the implication of a result can seemingly become possible. Similarly again, enlistment to social causes or defense of a moral high ground can set off emotional chords (which I would back against intellect and reason every time) that easily drown out any protest from impartiality and rigor. It's difficult to accept negation of a conviction when one's preferred way of life is perceived to be at stake, or even the existence of the world as we know it. And by no means least is the active discouragement of any willingness to question by the system we have in place today of scientific education and training.

  In his book, Disciplined Minds, 258 Jeff Schmidt, a physicist and editor at Physics Today (until he was fired for writing it), argues that the political constraints and demands for conformity imposed by the academic training and selection process, and the priorities of today's workplace suppress independent thought and inclinations toward free creativity.

  Our society features a single, thoroughly integrated system of education and employment," he said when interviewed. "The education component is hierarchical and competitive because it is a sorting machine for employers, a gate-keeper for the corporations and academic institutions. Learning doesn't require credentialing, ranking, grading, high-stakes testing, groveling for letters of recommendation and so on. Good teachers don't need—or want—the power to crush their students socially. 259

  Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson comments: "As science is brought more under centralized control, researchers must concentrate more on the agenda set by paradigm; see what they have been trained to see." 260

  An illusion of democratic freedoms is maintained by the forum of debates that take place over details, so long as the core belief system is not challenged—examples that come to mind here being those we looked at of AIDS and Evolution. As with the priesthoods of old, serious consideration of possibilities beyond the permissible limits becomes literally inconceivable.

  The history of science reveals strikingly that it has been predominantly outsiders, not trained to think within the mental walls of the assumptions governing a given discipline, who have contributed the most to having genuinely new insights and making real breakthroughs, such as formulating basic laws of physics and chemistry, founding entire new disciplines, and making innumerable original inventions and discoveries. A few examples:

  Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), trained as a painter, otherwise for the most part self-taught. A total polymath of original concepts in architecture, hydraulics, mechanics, astronomy, geology, anatomy, military and naval engineering, mapmaking, design of harbors and other works.

  Antony van Leeuwenhoeck (1632–1723), haberdasher and chamberlain for the sheriffs of Delft, Holland. Ground lenses as a hobby and invented the microscope.

  Gottfried Leibnitz (1646–1716), Newton's mathematical rival, trained as a librarian and diplomat.

  Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), Unitarian minister banned from English universities, stimulated by science after meeting Benjamin Franklin (by trade, a printer). Proposed an inverse square law for electrical charge, and credited with being the first to prepare oxygen, nitric oxide, and gaseous ammonia.

  William Herschel (1738–1832), joined a regimental band in Hanover, Germany, at fourteen and went to England to work as a musician. Self-taught in mathematics and astronomy, built his own reflecting telescopes, pioneered the study of binary stars and nebulae, discoverer of Uranus, infrared solar rays, and the basic form of the Milky Way.

  Thomas Young (1773–1879), general medical physician, mostly self-taught, who pioneered discoveries concerning interferometry and the wave theory of light, as well as in fluids and solids, theory of kinetic energy.

  Michael Faraday (1791–1867), prolific experimenter in chemistry and physics, especially of electrical phenomena, apprenticed to a bookbinder.

  Nicolas Leonard Carnot (1796–1832), army engineer of fortifications, pioneered work on mathematics and heat engines as a hobby, effective founder of the science of thermodynamics.

  John Dunlop (1840–1921), Scottish vet, invented the pneumatic tire to help his son win a bicycle race. Went on to found a company that sold for three million pounds in 1896, after five years trading.

  George Westinghouse (1846–1914), ran away as a schoolboy to fight in the Civil War, prolific inventor and electrical pioneer who later secured the services of Nikola Tesla.

  George Eastman (1854–1932), self-educated, worked as a bank clerk. Patented first practicable photographic roll film and perfected the Kodak camera.

  Albert Einstein (1879–1955), patents clerk with no academic qualifications in theoretical physics. 261

  The conventional image of academic research pushing back an ever-widening horizon of pure knowledge, which is formulated into new theories to be applied through technology is tidy and attractive, but doesn't describe the way the real world works. Overwhelmingly, it turns out to be the people with an insatiable need to know that comes from somewhere inside and can't be channeled or trained, or with a practical bent and incentive to roll their sleeves up and find out, who break the new ground. From steam engines and telescopes, through seed improvement and screw propellers, to jet aircraft, rocketry, and electronics, the academic theories to explain what was going on came afterward. While most research today depends ultimately on government funding, either directly through grants or indirectly through support of the participating institutions, history shows that bureaucratic stifling and an inherent commitment to linear thinking makes officially inaugurated programs the least productive in terms of true creativity. 262 Much the same could be said about research commissioned and directed by commercial interests.

  Although lip service is paid to the virtues of truth and integrity, the social dynamic that rules is a reflection of the value system of society at large, where the rewards are in material compensation, power, and prestige. Acceptance to an honored elite can be the greatest source of self-esteem, with excommunication and ostracism the ultimate unthinkable. Pointing to successful applications of technology such as computers and the space telescope as vindicating any theory of "science," as if they were all products of the same method, is to claim false credentials. Notions on such issues as how life originated or the nature of the cosmos face no comparable reality checks that can't be evaded. The Halton Arps and Immanuel Velikovskys, for whom the inner need to know, and a compulsion to speak out, outweigh effects on personal life, career advancement, and all else, are rare. Very rare.

  I remember a lunch with Peter Duesberg and others on one occasion, when his funding had been cut off, his laboratory effectively shut down, his marriage had broken up partly as a consequence, and the department had snubbed him by giving him as his only official appointment that year the chairing of its picnic committee. Somebody asked him if it was worth the destruction of his professional and personal life; wouldn't he have been better off just forgetting the whole thing and going with the mainstream Establishment? Duesberg blinked, frowned, and thought for a moment as if trying to make sense of the question. Finally, he replied, "But it wouldn't alter what is true."

  Corruption of society's primary institution of faith accelerated the decline of the medieval order. When Martin Luther nailed his accusations up on the church door, a new era began. I see faith in what has been presented as the primary vehicle for revealing truth in our order eroding too. Science is losing its popular constituency as the rewards and the accolades are seen more blatantly to flow not in recognition of contribution to human knowledge, but of efficacy in contributing to profit-making or military capability. The way toward truth that was to be unique in the human experience, a model of impartiality and integrity, turns out to be as open to the serving of vested interests and as subject to all the familiar human propensities toward self-delusion and wilful deception. Small wonder, then, that w
e arrive at an age where lying and the packaging of things and people as other than what they are become richly rewarded professions, classes are offered in the faking of résumés, and the arts of what used to be statecraft are reduced to coaching in how to look good on TV.

  Will there be a new Reformation and Renaissance, and if so, what will drive them? My answers would be first, yes, because in the long run the human animal is incapable of giving in, and second, I don't know. But it will have to be something larger than an individual life, something that will give meaning to a life to have been a part of, and which will last long after the individual has gone; something that will provide the kind of vision and spiritual force that motivated whole Gothic communities to embark on projects to build the towering cathedrals that inspire awe in us today, in which the work was completed by the grandchildren of the initiators.

  Presumably such an age would be founded on a different value system than buying and selling, shopkeeper economics, petty promotions, and emphasis on Darwinian rivalries, that produce alienated societies in which everyone becomes a threat or an opportunity to be exploited for some kind of gain. If the romance with materialism has taught anything, it's surely that the foundation has to rest on solid, culturally instilled human qualities that no amount of gimmickry or slick talk from self-help bestsellers can substitute for. Such old-fashioned words as truth, justice, honor, integrity, compassion come to mind, among which technology has its place in securing the material aspects of life, without dominating life or becoming a substitute for it, and education means being taught how to think, not drilled in what to say. Imagine what a difference it would make if businesses saw their foremost function in society as the providing of employment and the supplying of needs, and departments of government existed to actually serve its citizens. And where truth is valued for its own sake, without having to be conscripted to politics or economics, real science flourishes naturally.

  And here we come to a great irony. For it could be that the system of values needed to make real science, the new world view that was to replace religion, work, turns out to be just what all the world's true religions—the original models, as opposed to the counterfeits they were turned into later to serve power structures—have been trying to say all along. The first discipline to be mastered for truth to be apprehended clearly is control of passions, delusions, and material distractions; in other words, the cultivation of true objectivity: the ability, honestly, to have no preconception or emotional investment in what the answers turn out to be. For unmastered passions enslave us to those who control what we imagine will satisfy them.

  Like a lot of the other ideals that we've touched upon, it's probably unrealizable. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to get closer to. I think that those philosophers who wonder if the world is perfectible, and then, on arriving after maybe years of agonizing at the answer that should have been obvious, "No, its not," get depressed even to the point of suicide, ask the wrong question. They should be asking instead, "Is the world improvable?" Since nothing could be plainer that a resounding "Yes!" they could then live content in the knowledge that contributing even a nickel's worth to leaving things better than they found them would make an existence worthwhile.

  Meanwhile, of course, we have some wonderful themes to be explored in science fiction—which after all is the genre of asking "what if?" questions about the future and creating pictures of possible answers. Submarines, flying machines, space ships, computers, and wrist TVs aren't science fiction anymore. At least not real science fiction, in the sense that stretches the imagination. But we can still paint visions of an age, possibly, in which confidence and a sharing of the simple fact of being human replace fear and suspicion, the experience of living life is the greatest reward to be had from it, and the ships of the new Gothic builders launch outward to explore the universe for no better reason than that it's out there.

  And who knows? Maybe one day those dreams of science fiction will come true too.

  Section Notes

  258 Schmidt, 2000

  259 Schmidt, 2001

  260 Johnson, 1991, p. 121

  261 A sample from Newgrosh, 2000

  262 Kealey, 199

  REFERENCES & FURTHER READING

  ONE

  HUMANISTIC RELIGION—The Rush

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  Dawkins, Richard, 1996, Climbing Mount Improbable, Norton, NY

  Dawkins, Richard, 1997, "Is Science a Religion?" The Humanist, Vol. 57, Jan-Feb, p. 26

  Dembski, William A., 1998, The Design Inference: Eliminating Chance Through Small Probabilities, Cambridge Univ. Press, NY

  Dembski, William A., 1999, Intelligent Design, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL

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  TWO

  OF BANGS AND BRAIDS: Cosmology's Mathematical Abstractions
>
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