No subject

science may need saving at all. Not only does scientific research play a
huge economic role in modern society, science has become an ideology
that fills most of the roles occupied by religion in older civilizations
than ours. Scientific institutions have profited accordingly, expanding
into an immense network of universities, research institutes,
foundations, and publishers, subsidized by many billions a year in
government largesse.

Yet the same thing could have been said about the priesthoods of Jupiter
Optimus Maximus and his fellow gods in the glory days of the Roman
Empire, or the aristocratic priest- scribes of the Lowland Maya
city-states in the days before Tikal and Copán were swallowed by the
jungle. Civilizations direct huge resources to their intellectual
elites, because they can, and because the payoff in terms of each
civilization's values are well worth the expenditure. The downside is
that the intellectual heritage of each civilization becomes dependent
both on the subsidies that support them and on the ideological consensus
that makes those subsidies make sense. In the decline and fall of a
civilization, both the subsidies and the consensus are early casualties;
thereafter, the temples of Jupiter get torn apart to provide stones for
churches, and the intricate planetary almanacs compiled by Mayan
astrologers rot in the ruins of the temples where their authors once
contemplated the heavens.

Project the same process onto our own future and the vulnerabilities of
science are hard to miss. Imagine, for example, a world forty years from
now in which rates of annual production of oil, coal, and natural gas
have dropped so low that only countries that produce them can afford to
use them at all, and then only to meet critical needs. Half the
surviving population in the nations with remaining fossil fuels, and
ninety percent in the others, labors at subsistence agriculture, and
most of the remainder work in factories converting salvaged materials
into needed goods with hand tools. Worldwide, dozens of nations have
collapsed into violent anarchy, and whole populations are on the move as
sea level rises and rain belts shift. In America, the old canal network
is being reopened by men with shovels, as fuel shortages hit a rail
network that never recovered from its 20th-century dilapidation.
Meanwhile army units face guerrilla forces in the mountain West, while
refugees from starving Japan, packed into the hulks of abandoned
container ships, ride the currents en masse toward the west coast.

In such a world, what role will modern science have? Certain branches of
applied science, especially those applicable to energy and the military,
will get funding as long as anything still exists to fund them. Most
other applied fields will have to scrabble for scraps, though, while
pure research will go begging, because the resources to support them in
their current style won't exist. The facilities that make advanced
research possible will be boarded up when they haven't been looted for
raw materials.

Significant science could still be done in such a future. It bears
remembering, after all, that such epochal scientific discoveries as the
theory of natural selection and Mendelian genetics were made with
equipment would be considered hopelessly inadequate for a high school
science class today. The problem is that the entire mindset of today's
science militates against research on this scale. The transformation of
science from a pursuit of gifted amateurs to a profession supported by
government and corporate funds was complete most of a century ago; today
it would be hard to find many scientists who would be able to pursue
their research unassisted in a basement lab with homemade equipment, and
I'm by no means sure how many of them would be willing to do it without
pay, on their own time, after their day jobs.

Thus science faces the same predicament as other elements of today's
cultural heritage: it needs a constituency to carry it through the
process of decline and fall, or it risks vanishing entirely. James
Lovelock, one of the few scientists to glimpse this problem, has
suggested creating a single large book containing scientific discoveries
- "the scientific equivalent of the Bible", in his phrase - that can be
printed on durable materials and distributed widely in advance of the
crash. This begs a crucial question, though: when we talk about
preserving science, exactly what are we trying to save?

That word "science", after all, includes a great many things under its
umbrella. It's common to divide them by subject into disciplines such as
biology, physics, chemistry, and so on. In the present context, though,
another division has more value. We need to look separately at science
as product, science as profession, and science as process to make sense
of our predicament and craft a strategy for its survival.

Science as product is the sort of thing Lovelock is discussing: those
facts and theoretical models about the universe currently accepted as
true by the majority of scientists in the relevant fields. This is in
some ways the easiest part of science to save, since a single book
preserved in some dusty library could preserve a huge amount, the way
that Ptolemy's Almagest preserved nearly the whole body of Greek
mathematical astronomy intact. Just as the Almagest became a millstone
around the neck of later astronomers, though, science as product easily
fossilizes into dogma. By treating science wholly as product, Lovelock's
proposal risks reducing science to the rote repetition of doctrines
accepted on the basis of blind faith.

Science as profession is the system of trained personnel and
infrastructure that keeps today's science going. This dimension of
today's science is fatally vulnerable to the impacts of decline, for
reasons already discussed; the economic troubles, political chaos, and
desperate exigencies of an age of decline will shred the support system
for today's science in fairly short order. In a time when the
destructive legacies of technology may loom larger than its fading
benefits, too, the possibility of a violent popular backlash against
science cannot be dismissed out of hand

That leaves science as process: the scientific method, that elegantly
simple fusion of practical logic and applied mathematics that was
birthed in the 17th century and gave birth in turn to the modern world.
This is the dimension that arguably deserves saving ahead of anything
else, since it allows science to be done at all; ironically, it is also
the most vulnerable of the three, since few people except professional
scientists have any exposure to it. Lovelock's appalling dream of
scientific Holy Writ, to some extent, simply reflects current reality;
science as product has eclipsed science as process, so that people
outside the scientific profession are taught to accept scientific
doctrines on faith, rather than being encouraged to practice science
themselves. If today's professionalized science faces extinction over
the next century or so, there's a real possibility that it could take
the scientific method with it to the grave.

A number of eloquent voices have argued that this might not be a bad
thing. Such writers as Theodore Roszak and Lewis Mumford have pointed
out that the practical benefits of science must be weighed in the
balance against the dehumanizing effects of scientific reductionism and
the horrific results of technology run amok in the service of greed and
the lust for power. Others have argued that scientific thinking, with
its cult of objectivity and its rejection of human values, is
fundamentally antihuman and antilife, and the gifts it has given us are
analogous to the gewgaws Mephistopheles brought to Faust at the price of
the latter's soul.

These arguments make a strong case against the intellectual idolatry
that treats science as a surrogate religion or a key to ultimate truth.
I'm not convinced, though, that they make a case against the practice of
science on the much more modest basis to which it is better suited, and
on which it was carried on until quite recently: that of a set of very
effective mental tools for making sense of material reality. As the age
of cheap abundant energy comes to an end, and the reach of our sciences
and technologies scales back to fit the realities of life in a world of
strict ecological limits, the overblown fantasies that encouraged people
to make science carry the burden of their cravings for transcendence
are, I think, likely to give way sooner rather than later.

At the same time, the survival of the scientific method will be crucial
to the task of creating sustainable societies in the future ahead of us.
That process will be very hard to pursue without the touchstone of
quantitative measurement and experimental verification. Thus I suggest
that preserving the scientific method as a living tradition belongs
tolerably high on the priority list as the Long Descent begins around us.

How could this be done? With today's institutionalized science unlikely
to survive, at least two options present themselves. The first is that
other social forms better suited to withstand the rigors of an age of
decline might choose adopt the practice of scientific research. One
example is emerging just now in the movement I know best, the modern
Druid community. I don't think it's a secret to many people that Druids
care passionately about the environment, and are interested in learning
about nature; the Druid order I head, for example, requires participants
in its study program to learn about the natural history of the area in
which they live.

With that as foundation, we are building a framework for Druids to take
part in environmental sciences as active participants. It takes very
little in the way of hardware to identify pollinators visiting a
backyard garden, or to track turbidity and erosion along the banks of a
local stream; it takes very little more to turn the knowledge gained in
these ways to the work of ecological healing - providing nesting boxes
for orchard mason bees, seeding erosion-controlling plants, and many
other small steps with potentially huge consequences. A grasp of
scientific method will be crucial in this work, and if it proves
valuable to the survival of human communities and the ecosystems in
which they live - as I am convinced it will - the method will be handed
down to the future.

Now it's only fair to say that Druidry, as one small religious movement
among many, has no special privilege in this regard. Any other religious
tradition, or for that matter any nonreligious one with enough passion
and commitment to survive the coming troubles, could make a similar
choice, adopting some branch of science useful to its work. It's a tried
and true method - trace the survival of Greek logic by way of Christian
and Muslim religious traditions, or the parallel survival of Indian
logic in Hinduism and Buddhism, and you'll find a similar process at
work. I hope other groups rise to the challenge; in the meantime, we
Druids are doing what we can.

Yet scientists themselves might explore the possibility of creating new
social forms to keep science going as a living tradition once today's
lavishly funded institutions become tomorrow's boarded-up buildings and
another century's crumbling ruins. How those new forms might take shape,
and how they might best cope with the crises ahead of us, is anybody's
guess just now; my own background leads me to imagine something along
the lines of Freemasonry, say, or the occult lodges that kept
Renaissance esoteric traditions alive during the age of science, using
the keys of narrative, symbolism and ritual to turn dry philosophies
into unforgettable experiences; still, this is only one option among many.

The crucial point, it seems to me, is to recognize that no special
providence guards science, or for that matter any of the opulent
cultural heritage we enjoy nowadays. It has been said, and rightly, that
nothing seems so permanent as an empire on the verge of collapse, or so
invulnerable as an army on the eve of total defeat. Like the broken
statue of Ozymandias in Shelley's poem, a few fragments of today's
science might someday stand in an metaphorical wasteland once filled
with the cyclotrons and observatories of a vanished age. Our job, as I
see it, is to salvage what seems most likely to be of value to the
future while we still have the chance.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/06/saving-science.html#links


TO POST A COMMENT, OR TO READ COMMENTS POSTED BY OTHERS, please click
on the word "comment" highlighted at the end of the version of this
essay posted at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/