A Writer's Odyssey

Is there an anti-science trend in our popular culture?  Are scientists portrayed as selfish, silly, and ignorant or uncaring of the consequences of their work in today’s techno-thrillers like Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park or Robin Cook’s Coma?  I think the answer is yes.  Science and scientists make convenient targets and have since Frankenstein.

We discussed this topic this week on my alumni list at Odyssey, and one response was that this kind of portrayal was part of an on-going war between Science and Religion.  This was my response:

I'm not sure there is a huge religious component to this issue.  The Catholic Church has supported science, post-Galileo, and many famous Jesuits were scientists.  Ditto for protestants like my ancestral Puritan ancestors, who were practical enough to think that God would shut down any experiments He didn't want made.  Where there has been conflict between science and religion, it has mostly been over the issue of evolution, and not all religions oppose that theory, anyway.  The Catholic Church and most mainstream Protestant movements support Darwin.  American fundamentalist opposition to science is an isolated phenomenon (unless you are living in the south or the heartland, of course...)

Rather, the anti-science trend in literature harks back to the Romantic Movement in Europe, to Jean Jacques Rousseau, who felt that natural humans and nature were superior to civilized and cultured humanity and to its artificial society.  This was in part a reaction to the rationalism of the 18th century Enlightenment, and the ornate, artificial, civilized structure of literature in the English Restoration period, reflected in the writings of people like Alexander Pope, who in turn were inspired by the classic writing of the Greeks and Romans.

Mary Shelley's _Frankenstein_ featuring the iconic Misguided Scientist puts her firmly in the camp of the English Romantics, with her husband Percy, her friend Lord Byron, and Coleridge.  The Romantics rejected the idea of progress and thought that too much knowledge led to folly.  A strain of Romanticism runs through fantasy in the works of Tolkien, who made an industrialist of Saruman.  Tolkien, of course, had direct experience of the evils of progress in military weapons in World Wars I and II.  His warnings were cautionary in much the same way that H.G. Wells warned of mankind's ability to destroy itself with the wrong kind of science. (Wells was famous for his statement that mankind was in a race between education and catastrophe, and he wasn't sure who would win.)

Later, the Golden Age of SF was quite rationalist, with scientists filling the roles of good guys and problem-solvers of a bright future.  But the Romantic counter-revolution of New Wave and Cyberpunk SF pushed back scientists to the role of dupes or villains.  Again, war (this time Vietnam) probably played a huge role in the writers' opposition to science and scientists who thought up destructive weapons systems which might just do us all in.

Jonathan Pirsig, in his _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ a classic of philosophic literature, discusses this recurrent conflict between the rational (which he calls the classical) and romantic modes of the human mind.  (I highly recommend the book if you haven't read it.)

Anyway, today it probably depends on your personal beliefs whether you think scientists do more good or more harm.  I'm just tired of the cliché of the Ignorant Scientist, who changes things because he's an innocent or perhaps venal, and thus lets out the genie out of the bottle.  Most scientists are far more aware of the implications of their research than the rest of us, and far more concerned that their work will be misused by policymakers or entrepreneurs.

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