Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle was writing about fingerprints in his Sherlock Holmes stories long before Charles Darwin understood what they were, and before Scotland Yard used them as unique human identifiers.
Jules Verne was expounding on submarines 50 years before they really got going; he may have got it wrong about the Antarctic being all ice, as the North Pole was thought to be – but, still: what a thinker.
Science, as we know it, was not always as wonderfully empirical as we have come to think of it in modern times. Francis Bacon was thought of as a sorcerer and philosopher in his day, even if we see him now as one of the most rigorous scientists of his age. Leonardo de Vinci was a man of prodigious scientific talent – as well as being able to paint a bit. Even Isaac Newton was characterised by John Maynard Keynes, writing in 1946, as ‘...not the first of the age of reason... [but]... the last of the magicians...’
Today, we are still unsure about what are the building blocks of basic matter: I don’t mean just in terms of theoretical quantum particles; even the elements of the Periodic Table hold immense mysteries for us. A fierce debate rages under the surface of Chemistry about where the properties of an atom reside: for example, if Sodium is an explosive soft metal, and chlorine is a poisonous green gas, where does the poison and the explosions go when they combine to make sodium chloride, or household salt, as we prefer to call it?
This helps us to remember why Physics is still taught at MIT and Oxford under its original name: Natural Philosophy. If all of these sciences were so scientific, why would they need metaphysics to understand them?
The point is: there was a time when human creativity was not so compartmentalised into real and unreal, when imagination was lord of our mind, and not a mere vassal to observation.
We must take to heart the lessons Karl Popper taught us in his great works, not least in ‘The Logic of Scientific Discovery’: his ideas on the falsification of scientific theories informed us that it was impossible to prove a scientific theory conclusively right – only to prove it wrong. This was a major critique of empiricism and of the observationalist- inductivist account of science that had grown out of it. It also did Humanity a major service by killing off Positivism - the notion that if it cannot be observed, it need not be explained, and only the observable was worth considering – and seriously denting historicism, and thus freeing us from the inevitability of our own destiny.
We forget sometimes that modern science started as Scientism: it too was a theory, a theory that won out against Religion around the time of Darwin; if only because Scientism proved to be more nuanced, and thus less intellectually tyrannical.
In the 20th Century, we then seemed to fall upon Science with the same fervour with which we had earlier clung to Religion, and for the same reason: the search for truth and meaning in our lives and existence. And as before, we discovered that, if we don’t choose our gods, then our gods will be chosen for us.
Chesterton observed caustically: 'when men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.’ Well put; but we always had other choices open to us, rather than just the metaphysical ones of God or Science.
There is, for instance, the way of the Poets.
Romanticism had the same roots as Rationalism, for all that the former was a reaction to the latter: those roots were the search for truth. Rationalism found it in Metaphysics; Romanticism found it in beauty. In the End, Keats and Kant were fellow-travellers, because Romanticism and Rationalism had a common end, as well as a common enemy: fear of the infinite. ‘Death makes angels of us all and gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws’, as the Doors said; with poetry or metaphysics, we seek the truth to find meaning in the everyday, and to light up the infinite night of ignorance.
That, then, for me, is one purpose of science-fiction today: it puts our new rationalism, our modern religion, our age’s quest, into a poetic perspective. The metaphysicist nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting. Both are necessary for finding the truth; but the metaphysics of science is simply more accepted as The Truth than the poetry of science-fiction.
The modern world seems to have a weakness, almost a kind of addiction, for the metaphysical, as opposed to poetic, way of using its mind. And there’s an optimistic side of me that hopes we as individuals can break that addiction, be retrained to think like poets, and accept the fluxional nature of symbols and meaning.
There is another, simpler, and therefore, more elegant, reason why I read and watch science-fiction: as Kurt Vonnegut put it with more chutzpah than I could ever summon up:
‘I love you sons of bitches... You're the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.’
And that’s all, folks. I loved this semester’s CFG: Planet B-17 was our very own undiscovered country; it was a blast to explore it with you all. Thank you to my awesome teachers and my talented class-mates.
Let’s go out with a song:
