Fooling Ourselves With the Help of Higher Authorities
You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but the easiest person to fool is yourself. Especially when the products of your own wishful thinking are also being peddled by higher authorities.
So it struck me as particularly apt that I took a class of students last week to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City--while the Enron mirage was dissolving; while dubious claims for the production of fusion energy graced the cover of the journal Science; while Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson was in town trying to turn people’s attention to wholesale extinction of life; while military planners were blithely bringing back nuclear weapons as instruments of foreign policy.
The struggle of science has always been somehow to get outside ourselves, so we can see the world objectively. The struggle has always been doomed. “We each live our mental life in a prison-house from which there is no escape,” wrote the British physicist James Jeans. “It is our body; and its only communication with the outer world is through our sense organs--eyes, ears, etc. These form windows through which we can look out on to the outer world and acquire knowledge of it.”
The windows are cloudy, of course, veiled by expectations, distorted by frames of reference, disturbed by our very attempts to look. Especially when we stand so close that we can’t see through the fog of our own hot breath, our own smudgy fingerprints.
This is the sort of thinking bound to trail you like a wake out of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. If you haven’t been there, I’m not going to recommend it. It will make you laugh, but it will also upset you. It will leave you wondering if you just didn’t get it, or if you got it too well, or if someone was pulling your leg, or if you were pulling your own. You will wonder what thoughts are yours, and which are planted, and why we are so exceedingly well-wired to believe official pronouncements--especially when they are obscure, pompous and make us feel a little stupid.
Probably just as artist/creator David Wilson intended.
For example, this funky piece of performance art might bring to mind--as it did for one of my students--Enron. How could so many people, so many accountants and investors and regulators and business journalists, believe so completely in so much thin air? At least in part because the “authorities” convinced us it was OK to do so and, worse, convinced each other.
The mind creates reality as well as muddles it. That is how placebos work. As a friend likes to say, far more insidious than an emperor without clothes are clothes without an emperor. Authorities should always be stripped.
Scientists have thin patience for mere veneers, which is why many physicists complained loudly last week when the prestigious journal Science touted on its cover a breakthrough in tabletop fusion technology--despite the widespread skepticism of the scientific community, despite failure to duplicate the results. Not that there was no there there. Just maybe there was. But tentative truths do not deserve such royal window dressing. The authority of science (or Science) is too powerful to toss around lightly.
Of course, as Jeans pointed out, our view is always partly cloudy. The closer we are, the harder it is to see. The greatest danger is believing we can ever completely separate ourselves from our surroundings.
Consider, as Wilson does, the whole absurdity of talking about the environment as if it were something apart from ourselves, a special-interest lobby, remote and foreign, like “outer space” or Afghanistan.
Increasingly, we are the environment.
As Wilson points out in “The Future of Life,” when humanity passed the 6-billion mark, “we had already exceeded by as much as a hundred times the biomass of any large animal species that ever existed on land.” We consume and exhale stuff in such huge quantities that we have already changed the air, the water, the continents. By the end of this century, we may well have extinguished half the species of plants and animals that ever lived.
We take comfort in the thought that extinction happens only to exotic creatures--big scary dinosaurs and tiny insignificant fish. Not in our backyards. The truth is, we are in serious danger of extinguishing almost everything, not excluding ourselves. And we can’t stop if we can’t see. Self-referential systems are a bear. This sentence is false. Or not.
The authorities aren’t helping. Instead, some authorities are telling us that we should be ready to use nuclear weapons--which do not merely destroy cities but vaporize them--to make the world safe from terror.
Somebody please get the Windex.
