A Thousand Years of How

Consider a moment the last 1000 years. The changing of the calendar to the new Millennium over a decade plus ago brought a long view to that span. Without question it was the birth of modern science that separated those previous seven-millennium changes. Writing, philosophy and metal had already had a long lineage by 1000 A.D. but start of the scientific revolution still sat 500 years away. The spark I give to Copernicus and the heliocentric paradigm shift that forced a rational mind to accept a new center. In the preceding revolution our place in space and time would get smaller and smaller as our knowledge of the universe around us got larger and larger.

Yes we should acknowledge the logic revolution by the ancient Greeks. But remember that was work on a Tabula Rasa, the thoughts shifted the world’s intellectual expansion because they were the first tremors of their kind. To claim them as the greatest thinkers of humanities arc is to replace the word pioneer with the word deity. Plato and Socrates were profound thinkers but had the advantage of the minimal constraint on what the world was made of and what governed it observable motions.

When the human evolution of collective thought turned to science to asking how instead of why, the tenements of observation, measurement and prediction produced a bedrock of discovery; the fundamentals of the physical world started to unfold. From Copernicus came Kepler and Galileo and suddenly dialectics became just another tool in the box of physical sciences. Yes, argue your point but show your evidence. Reason wins the day when reason is based on the observed and measured.

What mankind discovered in the beginnings of the age of enlightenment reviled that religion was no match to science in understanding the how. Indeed the providence of how IS the domain of science. This went far to discredit religion in the day, especially when religious authorities fought so hard to suppress discovery of such evidence against their dogma. My argument is that religion filled a void until we could fill it by discovery. It was inevitable that the mind of man would take Occam’s razor to the observable world and find better answers. This is the where evidence takes you. One can explain dogma as a cultural need where uncertainty broadens in the absence of evidence.

This is in no way closed the gap between thinking how from the thinking why. Galileo himself understood that the human mind required a higher authority to parse purpose. Only those drunk on discovery thought for a moment that reason could replace God. We weren’t finding out his secrets, merely finding out his methods. The secrets of purpose remains in his domain, it is an answer that would require all the facts of the before and after with emphasis on the after. How seems possible, why seems forever unsolved and therefore always up for debate.

Science produced its own dogmas as well, ones as dangerous as any originated from caliphate or Pope. But it is just as dangerous to assign faith in reason as the cause of Nazi eugenics or Soviet “scientific socialist” as to lay the crusades on the church. How an empire gets its citizens to risk life for expansion of power and influence should not be confused with why. Draw boundaries anywhere and those inside them will long for more land, water or resources. It is our way. These desires are played out in global trade in the new century; in the past its’ methods involved horses and swords.

The last 1000 years have seen the explosion of human knowledge but not neccessiarly understanding. Knowledge is not the same as faith nor is it a threat to it. But finding out how we got here seems both our intellcutal destiny as well as an important step in trying to understand our maker and define some purpose to it. If one is willing not to separate the two then its possible there is a logical leap of faith to take. Perhaps the how is part and parcel to the why. 

Twitting Away the News

“The Twitterization of politics,” says Commentary editor-in-chief John Podhoretz, “really is leading people to overreact.”

Technological advancement is rife with unintended consequences. An advancement in computer-driven social networks has shifted the sand under the news foundation.

During a tornado outbreak in Dallas/Fort Worth in the spring of 2011 a spotter comment was posted in a chat room run by the National Weather Service (NWS) in Fort Worth that went around the world. The is a “closed” room, the NWS office decides who gets in. most of the people in the room that were emergency responders and meteorologist for local media, airlines and utilities. There was also a network of weather spotters and ham radio operators in the room; it was from this source the phrase “wedge tornado” in an urban area went viral  Provided instant credence because of its source, area media reacted immediately to the ground report. As it was twitted by local media it was picked up by national news organizations and spread at a exponential pace for at least an hour. It was sensational, timely (there had already been a slew of confirmed tornadoes in the previous few hours) and suggested a “high-impact” event.  

The Twitter post was also untrue, a mistaken interpretation of a rain shaft and strong winds. Unfortunately the social media stream is a wave propagating out in all directions in a world where distance is irrelevant. The posts eventual correction lacked the sensation to create the same reach and span. 

The social network explosion has a potential to draw too many of us to the shallowest end of the pool of television news. Social media rewards the sensational. It provides instant comment for a treasured metric - the production of a response. It moves faster and is more public than overnight ratings, a near instant gratification that can seen, tracked and quantified. Suddenly the TV news presentation becomes an interactive video game. There is a new measurement of journalistic success: can it incite the pushing of “like” buttons and re-tweets? Can it reverberate through social media (all in a mere fraction of the time of the [now redefined] news cycle)? The desire for an affirmation fix can skew the news judgement toward emotional stories most likely to produce emotional response. The deeper water, the noble pursuit of truth and the moral core of journalism can be distracted by vigorous splashing in the shallow water.  

The seductive idea that emotional response is a good metric to judge news value is to forget that crazy person you dated briefly in collage. He/she excelled in pushing you around the sharp edges of of jealousy and desire. Do you remember how exhausting all that was? Good relationships shouldn't create big drama, if might make for a good segment for a daytime talk show, such theatre is usually a sign that a relationship ISN’T working. Would you ever have a news director say the same of a news story? 

These are dangerous times for news integrity. It is a certain irony that the free enterprise system in a two-party democracy (one would argue in its current state a plutocracy-funded “party of the incumbent”) has produced the equivalent of state-run television that serves a political purpose. There is a media business model now that takes the complexity of governance and renders it a shallow blood sport in a culture war. 

 Instead of serving a political party with emotional hooks news would serve reasoned debate.  News should serve knowledge for knowledge’s sake, try to ignore the fact that facts have become politicized. How will it be possible to have reasoned debate unless we embrace reason as a better response to fear and parsing the complex. 

To evolve toward this betterment requires a rebuke to the momentum of a celebrity culture that cultivates emotional response. A response that has found a linked-in feedback mechanism for instant gratification the social media provides. It is the newest echo chamber but does ringing its bell produce a hollow sound?

Getting Personal in Science verse Religion

It is not a war of science against religion. It a war within ourselves. 

Literature is old, science is new. Cuneiform on clay started 5,500 years ago, modern science didn’t show until 3,000 years later.  

Though the infancy of empirical investigations was birthed in Greek times, its rebellious adolescence that was the Scientific Revolution started around 1550 (above: a painting of Copernicus). It wasn’t long before those who ruled the providence of the established literature (at the time almost all of it religious) saw this new way of thinking as a threat to their social dominion. Knowledge started to burst out from everywhere colliding with the controlled explanations of the day. 

And so began the uneasy space between the new and the tradition and the two natural states juxtaposed in man.  One fueled by a hard-wired curiosity and ambition wired in our brain and the other from a soul that savors tradition and comforts in order and the predictable. A soul helps find our way teamed with a mind that helps us wander away from it. 

Science has continued to be the driving force in what expands our species. Science and its cousin of implication (and joined at the hip) technology constantly stirs the culture pot. It jostles around our sense of order brewing new possibilities and unintended consequences.  Culture moves forward but continues linked with what doesn’t change. The readings of Homer reveal a literary truth; our knowledge might expand but our emotions stay grounded in our core.  Culture is about humanity anchoring best we can on a world that spins. Science makes the spin faster. 

So lets talk about Science. It is at war with our religion only in the same way change and new information is at war with our traditions. Science is not a set of facts but a process. It is profoundly a human endeavor full of discarded assumptions and sudden turns. It is littered with wrong ideas. But wrong isn’t the right word. It’s simply a new idea replaced by a better one, an evolution breeding better answers. Knowledge rests no where but stays suspended on a thousand hands in a steady flux of breadth.  Yet it is a thin fabric; only a momentary understanding in words and numbers. “Everything known is only some kind of approximation” said Richard Feyman. The library stacks are just a scaffolding of understanding built around a real world, a facade of words and theorms. Understanding can only pierce so deep. Culture helps us go deeper while science heads in every direction like universe expansion itself. Faith and belief roots us into an understanding and a place, science follows evidence and takes us everywhere. It is a difficult thing to be in two places at once.  

The clash between religion and science is a phrase that externalizes the inherent clash within ourselves. We have been gifted an inquiring brain, it has built this world and taken us into space. Our understanding expands on what happened before we arrived and what will transpire in the future. Our knowledge fixes our place among the moving stars but doesn’t explain why they are there. Science is good about the how but the why remains just out of its reach. 

Science is a process and knowledge a moving target...but the soul is a thing. We are part wired to wonder why and part wired to believe. Life forces us to find balance in the place between, unable to ignore either. Culture helps define our beauty and help explain who we are but the core of every world religion rests in an individual soul.  Religion and science are not at war. It is just a phrase that embodies our humanity. Part of us wants to wander the stars, part of us want to stay rooted to the ground. We are both at the same time. Both of these things as the world spins around a fixed star.