Art and Science

“Art and Science”

I’m worried about science. Ever since I wrote my screed the other day (on this blog) on the grand “virus” pseudo-explanation for the bee die-out, my normal worry-level about what is happening to science has reached a kind of fever pitch. I’m an English-teacher now, but I grew up as a science and math geek. (Yes, like every science kid, I have a “blow up the place” story—my pals Freddy, Warren, and I took out a wall of their garage with a particularly elegant chemistry experiment one afternoon). If you come into my house on any random day, you are likely to find me reading an article in Science or watching some geeky science-show on tv. So when I say I’m worried about science, I mean that from the pov of a science-lover. I’m worried that the Rush-to-Scientific-Explanation turns science into alchemy. Bogus. Hyperbolic. Ultimately false or, at least, misleading. Next step, comes discrediting, disbelief. For every scientist making some unsubstantiated godlike pronouncement about the “evolutionary cause of this or that,” there’s another school district banning evolution from its textbooks as ungodly. I'm not suggesting causality (that bad science leads to fundamentalism) only two sides of a cultural coin.

Dan Levitin, in my fav book of the moment (This Is Your Brain On Music), writes “What artists and scientists have in common is the ability to live in an open-ended state of interpretation and reinterpretation of the products of our work.” Dream on! So much science now is funded in a way that makes it necessary to move from experiment and interpretation to pronouncement. So you’re not studying one genetic mutation in mice; you are curing prostate cancer. (A few missing steps, well, no matter . . .) Partly, this is a matter of the rapidity of scientific change in the last three decades. Because of vast computational capacities and speeds, we’ve sequenced the genome and know more about neural networks and many other things than we ever have before. But that then puts pressure on all science to be speedy. Snap! Snap! Snap! You’re not doing an experiment—interpretation and reinterpretation, like art—you are solving, curing, creating, explaining everything. Less art than religion. That’s interesting, because it is the humanities that used to be the explanatory cure-all. Now, humanists have become far more specific, localized, cautious, careful. Not so many Grand Theories. We take into account regional, ethnic, racial, gender, religious, national, and other differences when we make theories. Micro histories. Circumspection. And we are cautious about our generalizations, put them out there for dialogue and critique, interpretation and reinterpretation. Rarely do humanistic theories make NY Times headlines. There’s not a category “Humanities” in the NY Times, and the weekly Book Review gets slimmer every week. Hmmm, considering what’s happening to science, now that it has the status of Media Darling, maybe that’s a good thing. The Humanities may be the indy-film, alt-rock, small press, Slow Food alternative to this generation’s version of multimedia, multimedia, corporate BIG SCIENCE. The science-gal part of me weeps. (Excuse me while I go drown my sorrows by playing with my chemistry set . . .)