The Bret Dudl Quandary
David Daniels on May 28th 2010
The Quandary of Science
The Bret Dudl Quandary By Tony Brussat.
The experience of liminality is the realm of the artist. However, all of us can play, and all of us can experience the liminal - subjunctive, would-be, could-be states of mind. The artist is just the one who has made a vocation of doing so. The artist is the one who has practiced it as a craft, and it is our habit to defer to his or her expertise. But we should be wary of leaving the realms of creative expression to professionals, just as we must be leary of abandoning politics to politicians.
When asked by the anthropologist Victor Turner to reveal the meanings of their symbols and rituals, different members of the Ndembu tribe gave different answers. None of them knew the “right” answer because there was no right answer, just as there is no right answer to “the meaning of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”
So, is there a meaning to a primitive ritual, such as a rain dance or a coming of age ceremony? We know that if the ritual helps, it is good and it gets repeated - and another seemingly irrational tradition is born! But is it an attempt to control a crisis, or to cope with it, to survive it.
In general, people don’t use symbols to try to explain the mysteries of nature but to express their feelings about them. If the anthropologists of the19th century had understood this, ritual might today be better understood.
But the early anthropologists were intoxicated with science’s successes at harnessing and controlling the forces of nature. No wonder the primitive tribes they observed appeared to be irrational: the anthropologists mis-perceived their rituals as childish, irrational attempts to control nature.
Science is a precise and careful response to the difficulties and wonders that life and existence present to us. But its ability to control nature is just a fortunate and imperfect by-product of its main purpose. Science is a ritual, too, and like magic and religion, it is first and foremost an expressive outlet for human angst. Like all rituals, science is just the way a particular group expresses itself amid the circumstances and crises of the world.
I don’t know if most scientists think of their craft as expressive, but perhaps it might be valuable if they did. An Einstein or a Curie or a Newton comes at their work from a different perspective than most of his or her colleagues - such minds as theirs have an understanding that does not quite square with the science of the day.
The motivation behind genius is created by imperfections in the order of things. They have an intimation, a sense, an intuition of something beyond the known traditions of their discipline. Such curious souls are compelled to devote their lives to the expression of something ineffable. That some geniuses happen to choose science as their vocation is just our good fortune.
It is for the same reason that an artist lives for his art - art is a vision that neither the artist nor anybody else can explain, but which none-the-less demands expression lest life seem unlived. And the patriot, too, who risks all for liberty and natural right, is another who expresses a yearning for the ideal.
Science, as it is often practiced today, does try to control nature. But for all its successes, our clean world is proving all too toxic, and our human violence is undiminished. This is what comes of our mistaking the primary purpose of a ritual.
Filed in Bret Dudl Quandary | Comments Off