Progress, reality and reason

08 November 2011 - 12:25 By Bruce Gorton
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Image: Bruce Gorton

It is often fashionable to paint science as a dogmatic belief system in which we trust blindly – all the way until finally the scientists create dinosaurs and we all end up hoping a T Rex eats the velocaraptor frog hybrid before it eats us.

This speaks to our overall negative impression of humanity – the idea that if you give us the capacity to destroy everything we will.

This is why pessimism and brutality taken to such cartoonish extremes that we expect the road runner to “meep meep” in the middle of it, tends to be billed as realistic.

We have had the technology to destroy the world since the end of World War Two. We haven’t done it yet. We have the technology to create super-plagues that could wipe out all of humanity, and we use that technology to find cures.

We are at a point of our history where we are capable of realising our worst nightmares, yet more often than not the nearest we come to such a realisation is in movies or video games. In the real world we are more about realising our dreams.

There is a basic tendency for us to see progress in negative terms; we have so long been beholden to the views of the romantics that we forget that romance is by its nature deceptive.

And we tend to downgrade things that are to our own glory. Consider evolution – creationists love to make the false claim that it says we came from monkeys. Actually we came from a common ancestor with the monkey, monkeys are thoroughly modern species, and what do people have against monkeys anyway? It isn’t like politicians fling any less poop.

But there is also the idea of decay inherent in the idea of sneering at humble origins – the idea that if we came from monkeys we are somehow lesser. It is odd that creationism is such an American concept considering that “From humble origins” is how the American dream starts.

Instead creationists would have us going the exact opposite way – a fallen creation rather than a risen species. Why? Because it is somehow appealing to us to accentuate the negative – we outline ourselves in black.

Dystopia isn’t really any more realistic than utopia though – because life is ultimately pleasurable. Through experience we don’t just learn the mean, low nasty things. We learn that the world is better than we expected, we learn not simply how we did things wrong but also how to do them right.

And we have a whole world of people out there willing to help us refine our abilities. This is part of the scientific method, the quest to be less wrong, and the quest to improve our understanding of reality which won’t end in our destruction, because that understanding doesn’t show reality as second rate.

The world we exist in is one of constant wonder, why would we want to destroy it?

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