Science Flunk You

A few months ago, a friend sent me this article: Why America is flunking Science (Salon.com)

He also commented: 

Honestly, I can't remember seeing a scientist depicted in a positive light in entertainment at all (where the character was an authentic scientist, and not just in name).

I think the bit of Anathem that was commentary on this was one of my favorite parts.  The narrator and his friends, cloistered scientist/philosophers, are trained in an iconography of the ways people have tended to misunderstand and misrepresent them over the millenia.  Recurrent themes like "binder of powers best not meddled with," "ambitious and crazed with power," "unemotional and sterile," (and/or "juvenile and sexually frustrated,") "resentful and untrustworthy," "absent-minded and obsessed with the unimportant," but with evocative names and drawings.  The Anti-Intellectual Tarot.

A few days ago, Aaron Reed published a comic called Caveman Science Fiction, on much of the same subject.

That prompted me to remember a short story by Umberto Eco, called The Thing (unrelated to either movie of that name).  It's collected in the book Misreadings and...hey, look!  It's available in the Google Books free preview!  Have a read, it's very short (but don't miss the italicized bit at the end, which makes the real last page).



I recall having a different understanding of the story when I first read it (I might have been 12) than I do now.  Then, I saw it as commentary on mankind's fallen state, a look at what V for Vendetta calls "some monstrous flaw in all of us," that turns every tool for betterment into a tool for oppression.  But re-reading it today, I suddenly remembered the context of the book, which includes a publishing editor's criticisms and suggestions for the Christian bible, a condescending anthropological study of a region in Italy, and a transcript of the live broadcast of Columbus' landing, complete with excited talking heads commentating on the rapine.  So I can only interpret The Thing as being, like the others, commentary on a particular form of writing, applied to an unusual subject, with ironic results.

For what reason I don't know, we've built a culture-tradition over the last few decades (especially in movies) of making caricatures of geeks, despite huge swathes of people with money identifying with them.  It's become so ingrained that it's a joke.

Since they don't have real existence, I'm not precisely sure, when it comes to characters, what counts as being a scientist, or how to distinguish them from engineers, or rationalists.  I think that I've read books with scientists as the heroes (certainly Anathem counts, as well as several others by Stephenson), and I've even read ones where the action of the story was people doing science (Michael Creighton was good at this, with Andromeda Strain, Sphere, and of course, huge swathes of Jurassic Park).  As for film, the geekiest-in-a-normal-way movie I've seen in years was Primer, which is what you get if you took a commercially successful film and "reversed its polarity."  

And don't say it doesn't matter.  Social recognition is a proven factor in the popularity of different careers, and popularity is a proven factor in broad and deep advances in a field.  But we're on the other side of the coin.

What painted us into this corner?  We know it's not always this way: the 40s and 50s were awash with science-heroes, sending us to space, protecting us from the reds and the browns, uncovering the mysteries of what-went-on-before.  The medieval Caliphate tended not to burn people who determined the circumference of the world and the motions of the heavens.  Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries was science-crazy, at least compared to today.  Ambitions for explaining things without (apparent) recourse to (traditional) superstitions was so in vogue, that it caused Mary Shelly to imagine a new kind of Prometheus, driven to do a thing that had never been done, to completely ignore the very concept of "forbidden knowledge."

But the pendulum swings the other way too.  The phrase "Dark Ages" has been criticized as uninformative, cruel and self-centered ever since Petrarch complained that for six-hundred years, no one had been writing any new literature in Latin.  But people persist in using it for the same reason he coined it: it seems to entirely lack development of a thing they believe essential, or at least important, or at least greatly to be desired.  And that's why I use it: because for hundreds of years, the people whose job it was to think preferred to illuminate manuscripts, eat and sing.  And maybe we're back in that groove, and have been since at least when Umberto Eco (famed medievalist) published Travels in Hyperreality, the first chapter of which is about America and the second chapter of which is about the New Middle Ages...or it could almost as easily be the other way around.

What digs that groove, swings that pendulum, drives that curve?  Are there times when new ideas are more rewarded?  Maybe it's just a matter of prosperity and safety; that would explain the Victorian and post-WW2 boom.  Which would bode very ill indeed for our future, looking relatively un-safe and un-prosperous, if it weren't for technology's proven tendency to disproportionately empower individuals and small groups.  I guess it depends on how much optimism you can muster, or how much you value scientific progress.

Recommended reading, beyond works already mentioned:

• Fleep, a brief (44 pages of six panels each) meditation on the nature of Rational Heroism.
• Makers, Cory Doctorow's next novel, being released serially on Tor before physical publication, attempting to point a path to hope through America's trash-strewn future.  Think of it as a cross between Snow Crash and a Michael Moore film (but please don't let that scare you off).

-Nick