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My husband manages a rural retreat (“the Center”) that provides residential treatment for people who are ‘complex cases’— that is, they have several problems, conflicting ones that make it harder to help them recover. Most have survived traumas, some have personality disorders or mood disorders, many have substance abuse problems and there are numerous physical complications. These are patients no one else wants to treat. They need a staff of extraordinary dedication, compassion, and professionalism, and the Center is lucky to have many such staff.
Lately the Center’s staff has been embroiled in a minor controversy over the fate of a couple of large (12-ft tall,) pole-like stacks of hand-painted wooden blocks. A past program for Center alumni encouraged them to celebrate emotional catharsis by painting the boxes and nailing them to the stacks; this program hasn’t been part of the alumni celebrations at the Center for some time. The Center is in the process of re-landscaping, and the staff is heavily involved, designing (and placing) a labyrinth and a meditation garden with a medicine wheel, as well as more conventional re-planting, modifying walking paths, etc.
Some of the staff consider the poles unattractive, no longer reflective of the patients’ current therapy experience, and incompatible with the new landscaping; they want the poles removed or relegated to an inconspicuous area of the grounds. Some of the staff consider the poles a record of achievement, a form of folk-art-like decoration, a statement of positive action; they want the poles retained and/or prominently featured. My husband, who claims he has ‘no aesthetic sense’ in addition to being color-blind, doesn’t really have a dog in the hunt, other than to try and keep the low-key controversy from becoming a high-drama conflict.
The other day a staff member, (we’ll call him Rick) during a meeting with my husband, pleaded a case for keeping the poles. “It would attract bad karma to remove them. They mean a lot. People put their demons into those boxes, and it reflects their struggle. Destroying the poles could free that negative energy.”
In telling me about this later, my husband looked both amused and rueful. “I reminded Rick as gently as possible,” he said “that although I understood the symbolism he and other pro-polers valued, in twenty-first century behavioral medicine, we try to avoid references to ‘demons.’” I got a mild chuckle from that, and contributed “Just as we no longer burn witches, eh?” And we left it there.
But that scrap of discussion has haunted me. It pops up at odd times, in seemingly unrelated contexts, until finally it crystallized, and I realized what has been disturbing me so profoundly, what that innocent exchange evoked for me. Bear with me while I describe a few more pieces of the puzzle.
Last week I was in one of many local gift/art/souvenir shops looking over an array of handmade candles labeled ‘empowerment candles,’ each with a little card detailing what type of empowerment the candle was supposed to provoke: I remember there was one for tranquility, one for prosperity, one for ‘love relationships,’ etc. Later that day, or perhaps the next day, I was waiting in line to pay for a bottle of water at a gas station/convenience store, and looking over a display of “guardian angel” lapel pins.
Recently I’ve read several articles about the reception Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” has received, focusing on the solid nature of the factual information presented and the overwhelming consensus of a very broad community of scientists on the relationship between human behavior and rising temperatures worldwide. Many of the articles’ authors pointed out that the information has been freely and abundantly available for decades. Yet how much energy and money has been spent trying to cast doubt, create controversy, or otherwise deny its implications?
I was both relieved by the loss of many of the more extreme creationism candidates in the Kansas local election primaries and deeply uneasy about the fact that not only had they been viable candidates, there remain many elected officials in Kansas who seriously wish to integrate creationism and other religious-based cosmology into the public education curriculum. And that Kansas is not the only state where strident popular sentiment is being successfully mobilized against science.
Politically, these very different slices of experience seem to reflect divergent ideologies, and yet with Rick’s remark and my husband’s response I realized that they are in fact merely ideologically different aspects of the same phenomenon, a phenomenon I’ve come to think of as “anti-science.”
Scientists themselves are the first to admit that one of the major functions of science is to make clear to us how little we know, how little we understand, and how little we can explain of the universe we experience. Science —as any scientist will tell you— has no answers for a myriad of questions. Science and the technology that derives from it have created more questions than it answers, and revealed at least as many problems as solutions.
Once upon a time it seemed as though science would have solved all our problems by tomorrow. Or at least within our lifetimes, or maybe our childrens’ lifetimes. Science promised futures ranging from “The Jetsons” to “Star Trek,” utopias where environmental problems were solved, resources were never scarce, lifespans lengthened for everyone, and the babe-alicious women wore tinfoil bikinis and everyone drank futuristic purple cocktails that left no hangover and didn’t impair driving (because, of course, no one drove anyway, we all took some futuristic mode of transport.) Is anti-science an oppositional reaction to our disillusionment?
Is anti-science a sinister conspiracy by the uberclass to prevent the masses from freeing themselves?
Is anti-science an escapist compensation for the dystopian problems resulting from rapid technological change and glacial sociological progress?
Is anti-science an expression of anxiety and fear of the unknown? Is it a wistful hope that the unknown has answers that can be accessed more easily than by decades of painstaking scientific experimentation and progress?
A bit of all of that, I expect. There are relatively harmless expressions of anti-science, indeed, we may need some aspects of anti-scientific expression. Science will never provide some answers, technology will never fill some voids. All the digitizing in the world cannot deliver the experience of a Beethoven’s Ninth in an open-air concert on a starry night, surrounded by twenty thousand music lovers. There is no drug we can synthesize that will heal the loss of a loved one, however effectively we can temporarily dull the pain.
Myths can convey profound truths in a way that facts cannot. Dry descriptions of the function of endocrinological phenomena in individuals, and their cumulative effects on sociological interactions, can’t capture the essence of the story of Pandora and the box with hope at the bottom. And yet, the fact is that feelings are based in endocrinology, and that the Welbutrin I take to stave off the deep, overwhelming certainty that the best way to stop feeling pain is to stop living is as important to me as the loving arms of my husband reminding me of what I have to live for.
We all need hope, we all need to acknowledge the realities science will never be able to encompass as well as the realities science simply hasn’t yet evolved the tools to describe. We need to acknowledge the benefits of a little frivolity, a little whimsy, a little unreason in our lives. Individually, we need it to add particular dimensions of fun and enjoyment in our lives that can keep us healthy. I confess, I bought one of those candles —and heck, the laugh I get from the irony of spending six bucks for something utterly useless in a quest for material prosperity is probably worth it.
Collectively, however, anti-science is a deadly phenomenon. The rejection of science and the embrace of unreason, whatever its cause, could not possibly come at a worse time for the human race. Maybe there is no harm in pinning a goldtone angel to your lapel and half-wishing, half-hoping that Something will benevolently overlook you in consequence. Yet there is not a long leap from an individual belief/hope in Benevolent Somethings to a conviction that since science doesn’t have all the answers, it’s a good idea to teach fantasy hypotheses to our children in school as explanations for physical phenomena.
Angels and demons, earth-spirits and Mother Gaeia, channeling past lives and waiting for the rapture aren’t necessarily harmful or helpful beliefs, until we act on them. Harmless actions include putting Goddess bumperstickers on our cars and wearing angel lapel pins. Helpful actions include feeding the hungry and reaching out to embrace enemies in the spirit of common humanity. But far too many harmful actions are rooted in anti-science. Perhaps even more harmful are the inactions. Science will never have all the answers or solve all the problems. But how many answers are denied us, how many problems fester unresolved, because we prefer the rainbow fogs of anti-science?
P.S. The poles are staying, but moving to a low-traffic area of the property.
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