I have been thinking about the period in my life when I went from being a science geek to being a broader thinker.
That transition occurred when I arrived at the University of Chicago. Before that I found my K-10 education so boring and irrelevant that I doodled and fantasized in class. Outside class I read science books and did science experiments.
Science for me had many of the qualities of magic. And it presented a very complete systematic approach to the world. Just like Marxism which is also appealing to teenagers. Science had that wonderful epistemic quality.
As I now think back on it, science was wonderful, didactic and had a comforting feel that I could explore the world by myself because it was laid out pretty much like railroad tracks in a straight methodical line.
When I got to University I was confronted with small classes of 20 other intelligent human beings where we discussed common ideas in the vast world of the humanities.
There is nothing about a discussion among intelligent beings that compares with the straight line of railroad track, didactic, methodical science. It is like comparing a great Sequoia to a small fennel bush. I never looked back on science as interesting and certainly not as exciting. I had gone from the dimly lit room of science into the bright sunshine of human interaction and open stimulus among exciting minds.
To this day I have had a general distaste for science. When people talk about global warming and the fiction of ‘scientific consensus’ as a source of discouragement for up-and-coming bright students, my first thought is: ‘if they are never exposed to conversation among intelligent people about the humanities they might be encouraged by science. But without that alternative of exciting stimulus the absurd idea of a global warming consensus and its hostility to data won’t be enough to turn them off to science.
I think the problem science has is that the Internet has the effect of being a modest form of conversation, stilted conversation, but conversation nevertheless. And conversation among peers about interesting subjects will totally swamp any interest in the didactic, straight line railroad of science.
My longtime readers know that I do not consider science to be important in our world. It is merely the application of hypothesis to the real world of technology. Technology is what creates modernity because it is entirely empirical. Science is the overlay of theory and hypothesis that we need to explain the stunning power and discoveries of technology.
Is this contrast between science and genuine conversation an original idea that belongs with my Phillips’ original ideas? I depend on my readers to tell me because I haven’t seen it anywhere else.