Thor's Day: What’s Your Story? What’s Your Landscape?

By Bob Boldt

In Barry Lopez’s essay “Landscape and Narrative” from the collection Crossing Open Ground, he states that the purpose of storytelling is

to achieve harmony between the two [interior and exterior] landscapes, to use all the elements of story – syntax, mood, figures of speech – in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the land in the individual’s interior.” The truth in stories, then, “reveals itself most fully, not in dogma, but in the paradox, irony, and contradictions that distinguish compelling narratives – beyond this there are only failures of imagination: reductionism in science; fundamentalism in religion; fascism in politics.

    Lopez is referring here primarily to the rich tradition of indigenous storytellers. The same description could be applied to the latest short story in a popular periodical or your child’s bedtime story. I find this description quite compelling both as a lover of the art of storytelling and as a student of the history of science. Science, like storytelling, also seeks to harmonize the interior landscape (Rationalism) with the exterior landscape (Empiricism).
    A recent concern for the survival of science as an authentic pursuit has come to my attention. There are several existential threats posed to science, not by fundamentalist religious communities, but by liberal, technocratic, and political forces, many operating within science itself.
    Leó_Szilárd has been characterized by at least one commentator as a “modern Prometheus.” He was involved in a frustrated attempt to halt the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He believed that technology and even pure science itself, divorced from moral choices, was capable of monstrous atrocities.

    I recently viewed a shocking documentary, The World According to Monsanto, which details how science in the hands of one particular capitalist corporation has released a toxic tsunami of chemical products that threatens not only the health of humanity but the very future of agriculture itself.
    Since Fukushima, we have been witness to a powerful public relations blitz conducted by the nuclear industry to make the worse appear the better cause by advancing the dubious assertion that nuclear power is both safe and effective in solving the problems of our energy future.
    Special mention must be made concerning the influence of corporations on science through essentially buying up science departments at every major educational institution doing basic research. This pernicious influence makes it increasingly difficult for any researcher to conduct unbiased work or publish findings his corporate Big Brother finds discomforting. This influence threatens not only the very foundation of scientific enquiry but our very lives and safety. In addition to the funding of science departments by corporations, there is also the wide distribution of military contracts for the development of all manner of overt and covert weapons of death. This one/two punch by the military-industrial complex threatens to destroy higher education and disqualify even science itself as an authentic intellectual and academic enterprise.

    People think I am some kind of a firebrand to use such inflammatory rhetoric as “fascism” and “imperialism” in referring to our government. I’m not a firebrand as much as an anachronism who still clings to the accurate use of words, such as the original word “fascism” – the way the man who coined the term first used it. You will no longer find this definition it in US dictionaries. Mussolini said that fascism is the joining together of the two great forces of government and business. Il Duce said it might be better referred to as “corporatism.” If anyone has a more benign characterization of our present form of government in America today, I would like to hear it.
    Too often in our modern age we have seen science becoming more and more at the heart of our problems, not of our solutions. It is hard to argue against the advancement of scientific knowledge. We are told that science should be value free. Technology, or the application of science, cannot be value free. We can and should argue for making technology conform to ethical and moral limits. Citizens and scientists have a responsibility to be informed moral agents in the world. Science should only be applied to benefit humanity and ecology, not the dark dreams and desires of fascist capitalists and imperialist warmongers.
    Just because we can develop the immense power within the atom does not mean that we must use that power for energy or defense. Just because we can genetically modify plants and animals (including human animals) for food and social engineering does not mean we must. Possessing greater understanding of the intricate workings of the human brain and nervous system does not mean we now have the license to use this knowledge for the development of more sophisticated forms of torture or even to control human behavior. Does our ability to develop, in the words of the Pentagon propagandists, a “stronger leaner” scientifically and technically advanced military force mean that we should not question the development and application of that force to advance a brutal American imperialism?
    It seems paradoxical to me that the farther science advances the less able we seem to be to find solutions to the existential problems we face today. We now find ourselves alienated in the maze of an ever more complex society and in a growing dis-harmony between the interior and exterior landscapes. Man-made global warming, population control, child development and education, nutrition and disease, happiness, true economics (the sustainable relationship of humans to the planet and not the stratospheric acceleration of our hallucinatory money madness) – these are all issues over which the input of scientists and technocrats often seems to be irrelevant, impotent, or harmful.

    To return to Barry Lopez and his assertion of truth in stories and truth in paradox, I would like to quote to you from Jacob Bronowski from his 1973 BBC series The Ascent of Man. This is the most eloquent argument against scientific reductionism and political fascism I have ever heard.

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science – or outside of it – we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses: First, in the engineering sense – science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world. All knowledge – all information between human beings – can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It’s a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance – and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited. It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots’ belief that they have absolute certainty. It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality – this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge or error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.” We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people. –Jacob Bronowski from the “Knowledge or Certainty” episode of The Ascent of Man.

    The whole episode deals precisely with my topic and could serve as a valuable footnote. It is well worth watching in its entirety:


BBC Ascent of Man - 11 - Knowledge or Certainty by infinitradiant

A recent op-ed contributor to my local paper stated that the problem with science is that scientists’ theories are always being repudiated and being proven wrong. For him this was case closed as far as science possessing any possibility of validity. This is a critique I hear most frequently advanced by fundamentalist Christians: The work of man is always full of error. God’s word (the Bible) never is. Such a colossal, willful lack of understanding is nearly impossible to fathom and equally impossible to contradict (at least in the closed mind of the true believer.) This is not so much a struggle between frailty and faith as between doubt and dogma. In science you get props [proper respects] for doubt and proving yourself or a colleague wrong. In Religion, skepticism is, more often than not, heresy.

    For my own mental survival as well as my hope for a future, I would rather preach the paradoxes contained in the wonderful stories of Native Americans and the quote “errors” of science than the safety of a so-called faith in the Word of God. One of my heroes, the geneticist, zoologist, and winner of the 2009 Right Livelihood Award, David Suzuki, embraces both the Native American spiritual tradition and the discipline of the rigorous scientific method:

What has happened today is that we no longer see the world as it once was. Throughout human history our songs, our prayers, our rituals celebrated the fact that we are deeply embedded in the natural world and dependent on it. We constantly reaffirm that we had a responsibility to act the right way in order to keep nature as generous and as abundant as it had always been. That was the human understanding, because in nature everything is interconnected. Anything you do has consequences and therefore we have responsibilities. But today we live in a world where that sense has been shattered. When we shattered the world so we no longer see the interconnectedness of everything, I think that we suffer from the loss of place. We no longer belong anywhere. We are no longer a part of a larger community, which our biophilia, our need to affiliate with other species, dictates that we’ve got to be – we need to be in a community of other species. We no longer have that sense. What is the worst effect of our breaking that connection? It is the loss of place. And I think we suffer from that, spiritually and psychologically.” –David Suzuki

    For me, the answer lies not only in a re-tuning of our ear to the natural world, to the wisdom of native indigenous people, and to the voices of our own seers and prophets (like Barry Lopez and David Suzuki) who value the relationship of the deep spiritual bond between the interior landscape and the exterior landscape but also to a rededication to the true principles of science embodied in our evolutionary useful survival tools of curiosity, sustainability, cooperation, and love.

But we’re more than just biological creatures. We’re also social animals. And as social animals we have needs, which, if they’re not met, mean that we can’t live rich, full lives. And as I’ve looked over the scientific literature, the amazing thing I’ve found out – to be fully human, to have a rich opportunity, the one important social need we have is love. I mean that in the most scientifically profound way. If we look at the literature – of children who’ve grown up in Cambodia under the reign of terror, in Rwanda during that terrible genocide, in Bosnia, or in Romania, what you find is that children who are fed, clothed, and sheltered, but who are not held and kissed and told they’re loved are fundamentally crippled psychically and physically and they die far sooner than children who grew up with love. Love is a process, a reciprocal process between us and who is loving us. And in the process of loving and being loved we learn to empathize. We learn to care about others. We learn to be fully human. But we’re more than biological creatures and social animals. We’re also spiritual beings. And here’s something that a lot of scientists are very reluctant to talk about. But I don’t think that there’s any question that if we have a need today, it is a need for spirit. The dilemma we face is that we have assumed such a dominant position that we’re carrying the whole weight of the planet on our shoulders. What we need is a far greater sense of spirit in our connection with nature. We need to know that we emerged out of the natural world and remain embedded in it. And when we die and that terrible recognition hits us that we are mortal, we receive comfort in the fact that we will go back to nature that gave us birth. We need to know there are places on this planet that are not just opportunities, or commodities or resources, that there are sacred places. We need to have that sense, that understanding that there are special places that we go to. –David Suzuki

Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt