My son is a cub scout. It’s pinewood derby time.
If you’re not familiar with scouting, maybe you need an explanation. The pinewood derby is an American tradition stretching back to the postwar period of the 1950s. Not long, far as traditions go, but it’s been embraced with sufficient fervor to rightfully be considered a stable of American life at this point. American family life at least. Every year thousands of young boys across the country work with their dads to carve small cars out of pinewood and race them down a track. The contest is usually tournament style and the winner of the final match-up gets the prize. Competition can be fierce (although, truth be told, only really between the dads) and there’ve been not a few scandals of people trying to cheat here and there to get an edge.
And cheat you can!
There are rules. Lots of rules. Your car can’t be longer than 7 inches. It can’t weigh more than 5 ounces. Standard derby axle must be used, as well as standard derby wheels. You can shape the car however you life for aerodynamic purposes, provided of course that it can still use all four wheels, which must be set some specified distance apart. Wheels cannot be altered in any way mind you, although you may lubricate them (with dry lubricant only). Naturally, no propulsion of any kind can be used. Your car must get its energy strictly from gravity. Everybody sets their car up at the top of the hill and, when the gate is dropped, it’s all down to physics.
Given these strict parameters, over time certain form factors have emerged which reliably outperform all the others. Very slim, for one. Less air molecules to push out of the way on the ride down. Also, you want the center of gravity as far back as you can get it without causing your car to pop a wheelie on fall off track. A whole science has been developed around pinewood racing actually, and I mean that quite literally. Some years back a couple of engineers whose sons were scouts went to the trouble of setting up a “Pinewood Derby Research Center” in their garages. They tested everything. Weight distribution. Axle polishing methods, Aerodynamics. Wheel spacing. You name it. They produced an entire literature of graphs and charts telling you exactly how to make your little pinewood car into a veritable lighting bolt on wheels. Of course, most paretns have neither the time nor the energy to look into all that research, so every competition is a little lopsided. Those that don’t have access to those papers, well… they don’t win. Those of us that do though?
We make some pretty fast cars.
This sort of thing we call Science.
Science works.
I often criticize “science” and “scientists”. Very often, actually. But, when I do, realize I am not criticizing this. The scientific method is great. Genius really. It works.
I simply also realize that science has its limits.
This is a truth our society is not set up to realize.
Most people, especially most academics, labor under the tremendously erroneous assumption that everything is as reducible to its component pieces as a car rolling down hill.
It isn’t.
As McKenna used to say, “Science may be defined as the discipline concerned with phenomena so simple they are invariant with time.”
He was right.
A ball (or a car) rolling down a hill falls down said hill the same way every single time. True! But relationships? Well relationships never fall down the same way twice. Given the same initial conditions a rocket will rise into the air in a predictable path, time after time, over and over again, presumably for eternity. Empires don’t do that though. Empires never rise predictably at all. Physical energy may be conserved but emotional energy certainly isn’t. A biologist may spend his whole career looking through a microscope at single celled organisms and then proceed to tell you that life is about nothing more than the propagation of genes. He will then have no answer for the man who gives his life to save a stranger. No answer, for example, for Jesus and his cross.
Living things aren’t reducible to mechanics. Especially living things as beautiful as you. That’s where Reason went wrong. Study botany all your life if you want (you should, it’s fascinating), you will never come up with an equation for elm. There will never be a postulate for ivy. Cars rolling down hill? Sure. Math equation that sucker all day long. An oak tree though? Impossible. The oak tree is too True to be reducible. It’s more real than any of Newton’s laws.
Moreover, the tree will listen to you. It will respond. Any gardener knows that plants can feel love. That if you speak to them kindly they will flourish but if you are harsh to them they will wither. Life is more than math equations. Try as you might, consciousness and soul will not be put in your conceptual box.
“Science” has been on a tear. Literally, tearing things is all it knows how to do. Atom comes from atomos, meaning “uncuttable”, for all science ever does is cut things apart and look at their insides. Funny how in biology class the study of life is reduced to the study of death. Cutting on corpses of frogs. Looking preserved worms. Fondling bones.
And so, in the name of his pursuit Science has cut up everything for the past hundred years or so. By ripping everything to pieces it has dared to claim that all has been understood. Your religious beliefs, they declared, were just so much fancy. Neurons misfiring in your brain, causing hallucinations and delusions. Love too was not real. Nothing but chemicals dancing around inside the head you know. Serotonin. Dopamine. You my friend are a push button thing! See? Just a little robot made of meat instead of metal. Even the idea of choice or free will is illusory. “It must be!” says the scientist. “It must be for all I can truly understand is billiard balls bouncing around and cars rolling down hill. Therefore that’s all the universe is allowed to be too! Protons and electrons just zipping about, bumping into each other in extremely predictable ways according to mechanistic formulas. That’s all there is. That’s what you are. Your brain and your body. Just balls. Ball rolling down hill.”
See passed this my friends. All this is nothing more than an attempt at control. A desire to feel safe. A desire to eliminate from the cosmos all that is unpredictable and therefore scary. Whatever cannot be understood must be redefined in terms of what can be.
And…
What can be is cars rolling down hill.
So, they tell you, that’s all you are. That’s all your brain is. That’s all your emotions are.
Just different particles.
Chemicals bumping around. Balls rolling down hill.
Yet Life remains defiant.
The efforts of the rationalists to compartmentalize, to make small, to reduce and redefine the world to fit inside the meager confines of their own heads has failed. Life doesn’t go for it. You don’t either. Animals do not in fact thrive under their artificial conditions and people do not in fact flourish beneath their fluorescent bulbs. No matter how many times they tell you you are nothing but a selfish gene Love remains within you. The irrational choice is still made. Self sacrifice still happens. Man still prays.
Science.
Ace for balls rolling downhill. Or cars. I’m using it right now to make a speed demon. I think we’re gonna win.
But anything more complicated?
Science simply isn’t the proper too for that. Not for anything alive. To understand what is living you need something different. Something like art. Something like poetry. Something like music. Trees will teach you this. Go talk to some.
You are not reducible to brain chemistry. You’re not an equation. Never for a moment listen to those trying to convince you that you are because you are a living man or woman and you can choose.
You are not trapped.
You can choose.
Trees: when I was a kid I desperately wanted to live in one. One afternoon I opened my bedroom window and pulled a tree branch inside. I got in trouble because the air conditioning was on, but for a little while I was nearly ecstatic, hanging out in my room with my tree friend. "Science": paraphrasing a wise blogger whose name I don't remember, "Scientists, by trying to torture the secrets from nature, have only succeeded at pissing in their own punch bowl." Yeah, a little crude, but spot on.