the mystic west

 

Writing in the British journal, New Scientist, the famed poet and histo­rian Robert Graves recently said: "Technology is now warring openly against the crafts, and science cov­ertly against poetry."

What Graves seems to be saying is that technology is allowing machines to replace human muscle power and handiwork—a discovery that the Luddites made nearly two centuries ago. What he doesn't say, but appar­ently fears, is the possibility that ma­chines, such as electronic computers, might replace human brain power.

Graves's fears about technology are bad enough. Unfounded, maybe, but what the hell. 'Tis the season for pointing quavering fingers at tech­nology and science. His attack on science itself is on a more mystical level, and seems even more un­founded. He contrasts science with poetry, and claims that poetry has a power that scientists can't recognize, "because, at its most intense—po­etry—works in the Fifth Dimension, independent of time."

He goes on to say that poetry is usually the product of intuitive thinking, and grants that some math­ematical theories have also sprung from intuition. Then he says, "Yet scientists would dismiss a similar process . . . as 'illogical'."

Apparently Graves sees scientists as a sober, plodding phalanx of soul­less thinking machines, doing every­thing rationally, never making a step that hasn't been carefully scouted out in advance. He should try work­ing with a few, or even reading "The Double Helix."

As a historian, Graves ought to be aware that James Clerk Maxwell's brilliant insight about elec­tromagnetism—the guess that visible light is only one small slice of the huge spectrum of electromagnetic energy—was an intuitive leap into the unknown. Maxwell had precious little real evidence to back his guess. It wasn't until Hertz produced radio waves and Roentgen stumbled onto X rays that Maxwell's theoretical predictions were verified. Max Planck's original concept of the quan­tum theory was also mainly intuition. And the list of wild jumps of intuition made by these supposedly stolid, hu­morless scientists is long indeed.

It turns out that scientists are just as human, just as intuitive, just as emotional as any of us. But most people don't realize this. They don't know scientists, any more than they know science.

As C. P. Snow pointed out decades ago, there is a gap between the Two Cultures, and Graves shows a partic­ularly painful chasm. Graves is a scholar who is widely and justly re­nowned for his work in ancient mythology, where he's combined his gifts of poetry and historical research in a truly beautiful way.

But he doesn't seem to know sci­entists, the men and women who do science. That's just as bad—worse, maybe—as not caring to know any­thing about science itself. And a per­son who doesn't understand science is simply not well-educated. Not in today's world.

Graves's attack on science gets particularly virulent when he says: "The worst that one can say about modern science is that it lacks a uni­fied conscience, or at least it has been forced to accept the power of Mammon. Mammon . . . exploits the discoveries of science for the benefit of the international finan­ciers, enabling them . . . to control all markets and governments every­where."

He ends by saying, "There need have been no war between Science and Poetry, nor between Technology and the Arts, had not the power of money forced too many poor, mar­ried scientists and technologists to break what should have been a Hip­pocratic oath to use their skills only for the benefit of mankind."

That's a serious charge, made all the more serious by Graves's un­doubted stature as a scholar. It points out problems that go far be­yond the work of the scientists themselves. What significant group of people in the world today has "a uni­fied conscience?" Do "international financiers" really control most na­tional governments? How can scien­tists—or poets, or plumbers—deter­mine what is "the benefit of mankind?"

It's significant that Graves ends up by attacking not science itself, but the uses to which science is put: the interface between scientific research and political policies, between the laboratory and the market place.

If this is where the problem is, why blame only the scientist? What part of the responsibility belongs to the politician and industrialist? To the taxpayer and the poet? After all, all that a scientist wants to do—as a scientist—is the research that interests him. But the world isn't that kind to anyone. A scientist can only get to do the research that somebody will pay for.

Since the earliest flickerings of sci­entific curiosity, more than a hun­dred centuries ago, the scientist had to justify his existence. Why should a king support someone who does no useful work? The farmers produce food, the soldiers protect the king­dom or enlarge it, the tax-gatherers . . . well, everybody knows what they do. Why support a stargazer?

It turned out that the stargazers had some practical help to give. They could make calendars and pre­dict the seasons—a very important trick in an agricultural society. And since they showed that the patterns of the stars affected events here on Earth, such as seasons, it was only a short step to astrology—predicting the affairs of individual people by the positions of the stars.

Astrology became a rooted part of astronomy for many long centuries. Galileo and Kepler cast horoscopes. Kings and emperors kept astrono­mers about them for their astrologi­cal predictions, not their studies of the universe. The astronomical went on, but only because the astrological forecasts were in demand.

Even today, the scientist still must pay his "astrological" dues to his pa­tron. They're no longer casting horo­scopes but their patrons still exact the same kind of payment. For example, a physics student looking for a research position in almost any na­tion on Earth has a much easier time finding funds if he works on a de­fense-related project.

Major astronomical installations have been built first because they could help the military watch poten­tial enemies better, and only sec­ondly because they might be useful in unraveling the mysteries of the universe. Chemists and biologists, for many years, found it easier to get funding in chemical and biological warfare programs than in public health research.

If it's the fault of the scientists for letting themselves be used in this way, it's equally the fault of the tax­paying public for insisting on strong military defense programs. Viet­nam has drastically changed the mood of most Americans toward the military. But hardly anyone really wants us to disarm completely. And at this point in history, scientific re­search is a vital part of military power.

There's an old poolroom saying, "Put your money where your mouth is." Despite the loud noises being made in Washington and elsewhere about beating swords into plowshares and using our scientific and technological know-how to solve "the problems of the people," we are still spending more on military re­search and development than on all other forms of government-spon­sored R&D. The Pentagon's R&D budget is about eight billion dollars. That's just about as much as all the other government agencies—from Health to NASA—have in total.

A scientist who wants to do re­search in his chosen field will almost inevitably be drawn into a defense-related program, unless his field is completely outside the Pentagon's areas of interest. You can't do re­search on promises, or political speeches. You need equipment and assistants. You need money. The Pentagon gets the money and calls the tune. If the tune is to be changed, it can’t be by the scientists alone. It must be by the taxpayers, who have more power to decide where their re­search money should he spent.

Which brings us back to the crux of the problem: the average man doesn't know the scientists.

 

Since the prehistoric days of tribal shamans, most people have held an ambivalent attitude toward the med­icine man-astrologer-wizard-scien­tist. On the one hand they envied his abilities and sought to use his power for their own gain. On the other hand they feared his power, hated his seeming superiority and knew damn well that he was in league with the dark forces of evil.

There's been very little change in that double-edged attitude over the centuries. Today we still tend to hold the scientists in awe. After all, they're the ones who brought us nuclear power, modern medicines, space flight, and underarm deodorants. Yet at the same time we also see scientists derided as fuzzy‑brained eggheads or coldly ruthless, emotionless makers of monsters.

Scientists are a minority group, and like most minority groups, they're largely hidden from the pub­lic's sight. They're tucked away in ghettos—laboratories, campuses, field sites out in the desert, or on Pacific atolls. Before the public can really understand what science can and cannot do, the people must get to see and understand the scientists themselves. See them as human beings. Get to know their work, their aims, their dreams and their fears.

A possible answer to this problem of humanizing scientists comes from the same field in which Graves has made his biggest contribution: the study of mythology.

Joseph Campbell, Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence Col­lege, has spent a good deal of his life studying mythology and writing books on the subject, such as the four-volume "The Masks of God" and "Hero With a Thousand Faces." He has pointed out that modern man has no real mythology to depend on. The old myths are dead, but no new mythology has been raised to take their place.

And man needs a mythology, he insists, to give a sort of emotional meaning to the world in which we live. A mythology is a kind of codifi­cation on an emotional level of man's attitudes toward life, death, and the whole vast, sometimes scar­ifying universe.

An example. Almost every primi­tive culture has a Prometheus leg­end. In our western culture, the Greek version is the one most quoted. Prometheus was a demigod who saw man as a weak, starving, freezing creature, barely surviving among the animals of the fields and woods. Taking pity on man, Pro­metheus stole fire from the heavens and gave it to man, at the cost of a horrible punishment to himself. But man, with fire, became master of the Earth and even a challenge to the gods.

A typical myth, fantastic in detail, yet absolutely correct in spirit. One of man's early ancestors "discov­ered" fire about half a million years ago. Most likely, these primitive Homo erectus types saw lightning turn shrubbery into flame: hence the legend of the gift from the heavens. Before fire, our primitive ancestors were just another marginal anthropoid. With fire, we've become the dominant species on this planet.

The Prometheus myth "explains" this titantic event in terms that simple people can understand and accept. The myth gives an emotional flavoring to the bald facts.

Much of today's emotion-charged, slightly irrational urge toward astrol­ogy and spiritualism is really a grop­ing for a new mythology, a mythol­ogy that can explain the modern world on an emotional, intuitive level to people who are frightened that they're too small and weak to cope with this universe.

Joseph Campbell's work has shown that there are at least four major functions that any mythology must accomplish.

First: a mythology must induce a feeling of awe and majesty in the people: what science-fictionists call "a sense of wonder."

Second: a mythology must define and uphold a system of the universe, a pattern of self-consistent ex­planation for the phenomena of the world around us. A modern mythol­ogy would have a ready-made sys­tem of the universe: the known and continuously-expanding body of knowledge that we call science.

Third: a mythology usually sup­ports the social establishment. For example what we today call ancient Greek mythology apparently origi­nated with the Achaean conquerors of the earlier Mycenaean civ­ilization. Zeus was a barbarian sky god who conquered the local god­desses of the Mycenaean cities. Many a lovely legend was started that way.

Fourth: a mythology serves as a crutch to help the individual mem­ber of the society through the emo­tional crises of life, such as the tran­sition from childhood into adult­hood, and the inevitability of death.

It just might be that this beloved thing we call science fiction, when it's at its very best, might serve some of these functions of a new mythol­ogy.

Certainly science fiction tries to in­duce a sense of wonder about the physical universe and man's own in­terior private universe of the mind. Science fiction depends heavily on known scientific understanding as the basic underpinning of a universal order.

Science fiction doesn't tend to sup­port a given political establishment, but does almost invariably back the social bent of western civilization: that is, the concept that the individ­ual man is worth more than the Or­ganization—whatever it may be—and that nothing is more important than human freedom.

Whether or not science fiction serves to help people through emo­tional crises is more difficult to tell. It's interesting that science fiction has a large readership among the young, the teen-agers who need to find their own individual place in the uni­verse. And how many of our stories about super-heroes and time travel and interstellar flights are really an attempt to deny the inevitability of death?

Nobody intends to certify science fiction as The New Mythology. That's not the intention of either the writers, or the readers. But the belea­guered scientists who are being chiv­vied by an unsympathetic, know-nothing public might come and sit around our campfire, at least. Maybe we can help each other.

THE EDITOR