skullface life: December 2005 Archives

Upon my father's recommendation, I have recently picked up C.P. Snow's essay "The Two Cultures," a mild-mannered examination of the growing chasm between scientific and literary intellectual communities. Despite the fact that Snow's evident bias towards the sciences betrays his claims of existing in the two spheres himself, and despite the unenlightened connections he makes between the Modernist movement's emphasis on alienation and the advent of 'imbecile expressions of non-social feeling," i.e. Nazism, (I find this very unfair considering the scientific community's involvement in say, the atomic bomb, etc), "The Two Cultures" raises some good points.

One, Literary intellectuals have inexplicably co-opted the term "intellectual" to refer only to them, as if there were no others. I will cede this point to Snow, for it is totally true. Literary intellectuals are also, historically, complete luddites about technology and mock the illiteracy of the scientific community without themselves even being able to recite the first law of thermodynamics. I will be the first to raise my hand and point to myself; I just figured out the keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste last week.

Two, If the two cultures cannot manage a way to communicate -- or at least respect -- one another, then the great findings of science and the great works of art will never get the discourse and celebration they deserve. Without a shared language, the great frameworks that intellectuals build onto the natural world on either side of the chasm will only serve to better whatever discipline they are part of, without adding to the whole. Totes.

This may be an illogical segue into this entry's featured internet finding, but bear with it. I just found out last night that there is a 24-hour online webcam on the South Pole. As an admitted member of the so-called world of literary intellectuals (or whatever), my only knowledge of the South Pole comes from a) Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and, b) the collected writings of Fridtjof Nansen. Because of these sources, I had long imagined the South Pole to be a giant crystalline castle full of hell of penguins, ice-forts, diamonds of ice, and sea birds still unafraid of the presence of men. Imagine my disappointment (sure, this is a running theme) when I looked at this webcam. You know what the South Pole looks like -- this unimaginable point, sought for centuries by explorers hungry to be the first to set foot there? It's like some weathervanes, a drab building, and like cars. Every once in a while a dude walks by. It is so ugly. It literally looks like the base camp at Mount Hood Ski Bowl.

Of course, I am talking in extremes. One pole of intellectual society is a world apart from the other; as the South Pole of my dreams has been squelched by the South Pole of reality. Snow writes, "that unscientific flavour [of literary people] is often, much more than we admit, on the point of turning anti-scientific. The feelings of one pole become the anti-feelings of the other." Granted, my hostility for the South Pole 24-hour webcam is unwarranted and is, precisely, the kind of anti-feeling Snow discusses.

However, what I mean to say is: it is not as if this new, ugly South Pole of scientific research has to negate my fantasies. They both exist, and mine can naively continue to be populated by diamond-coated polar creatures as the real one trudges along its ruined path. The important thing is that we all acknowledge the legitimacy of both conceptions -- that the real and the mythic are both acceptable expressions of the same concept. The lack of communication between the two worlds is probably rooted in an inability to see common ground. What better terrain than the Antarctic?

In one of the most important scenes of the original Godzilla movie, the old Professor character, a moral force throughout the film, becomes clearly upset about Godzilla's egg being sold to a corporation. Misunderstanding the older man's sadness, a cadet reporter asks the token girl character what the problem is. With all the forlorn sympathy in the world, the girl responds, "Oh, can't you see? The Professor is a Scientist." Her pithy statement completely elucidates to us, the viewership, that the ethical quandary faced by the Professor is deeply informed by his schooling in the objective and humanity-progessing discipline of Science. This is because Godzilla takes place in the 1960's, when these things still meant something.

Ever since queen and king times, human beings have been using taxonomy to enact their distance from and fear of the natural world into a discipline that we like to call "Science." I know the whole deal with "Science:" the Altruistic Pursuit of Knowledge, the Betterment of Dudekind, New Frontiers, Great Advances in Health. These things were definitely the case when we were still trying to figure out what shape our planet is, as well as in Isaac Newton-times -- they may even have been the case up until the early 1960's, in which people still believed that the moon came from a giant lava tide ripped from planet Earth.*

In modern times, however, something has gone awry. It seems that every news article I read in the Science section aims to outperform the last in terms of complete bullshit weirdness. A year or so ago, a friend of mine forwarded me an article about how Scientists had managed to get monkeys to send "telepathic" messages -- that is to say, had managed to transmit electromagnetic impulses from their brains -- over the internet, and into robotically reconstructed fake monkey hands across the country. This kind of news represents the confidence that Scientists have in the fact that we -- the laypeople -- have ceased to pay attention to their work. They're getting a kick out of the fact that once what they're doing bobs up in major newspapers, we are so complacent and out of touch that it completely freaks us out.

As much as I am in favor of tomfoolery in the Scientific community -- if I had an insane budget and fancy equipment, I'd be working towards simian telepathy, too -- it is our duty as enthusiasts of popular Science to remain vigilant. In the past, to be a scientist meant great moral and civic responsibility; now, however, this responsibility has befallen us. I present to you, friends, Universe, a blog for the Betterment of Dudekind.

*This is true.