Philadelphia's innovative Wilma Theater is currently running a successful and critically acclaimed version of Berthold Brecht's classic Galileo. As somebody who has made a living interpreting the writings of scientists and technologists for wider audiences, I can attest that the divide this play illuminates is great. We children of the "Space Race" might tend to dismiss this as a contemporary phenomenon, the product of a science illiterate, short attention span society. Galileo affirms that the enmity is both longstanding and near intractable. I did see and in fact participated in creating the video design for an ambitious experimental production of the play by the Villanova players about 18 years ago. My younger brother, who was doing masters work there at the time was cast as the Furious Monk. Little did we know that the slow mill of the Church in the guise of Pope JP II would grind out an apology three hundred years in the making, a scant three years later. But it didn’t take long for the spin doctors to recast Galileo’s falling out with the Church as one of the scientist’s personal hubris rather than of repression of scientific inquiry and freedom of thought. Galileo was censured, not because he was right, but because he had the temerity to insist that he was right. Right?
If you're casting about for modern Galileos though, you needn't look any further than the discipline of climatology. It makes you wonder what tools of intimidation the 21st Century Church of Capitalism used to compel the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scientists to tone down/remove some of their more dire, graphic and perhaps most compelling global warming projections from their recent report. I heard a little blurb about it on the BBC about a month ago, then stone cold silence since. I’d like to see what they left off the May 2007 report. Why isn’t the public clamoring for the unexpurgated version? Maybe they even know where the bees are.
Even Edge.com which I’ve subscribed to for about a year doesn't have a lot about the subject, but do check out neurobiologist William Calvin’s short take on this unreported story, a piece of which I quote here:
Our ancestors lived through a lot of these abrupt climate changes, and some humans will survive the next one. It's our civilization that likely won't, just because the whiplashes happen so quickly that warfare over plummeting resources leaves a downsized world where everyone hates their neighbors for good reason.
Disturbed by the immorality and injustice of our current military adventurism? Just you wait. The future wars for water and food will make our dirty little “oil war” an Audie Murphy cakewalk in comparison.
In exactly this vein, my 13 year old son and I watched Children of Men together, arguably one of the most brilliant films I’ve seen in a decade, a film which greater thinkers than I take as allegory for nature’s revenge for the assault of humans. My B said that he wished I hadn’t showed it to him, that it was the scariest film he’d ever seen and that he found it deeply disturbing. His response saddened me. I’ve never felt more ashamed for our generation, the first generation that knows the score and still chooses to ignore it. Kurt Vonnegut (RIP) said it even better:
"We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard ... and too damn cheap."
Is anything human going to be around in 300 years to issue a papal apologia for this generation’s collective crystal sphere orthodoxy? Will there be anybody to apologize to?
I recently had to write mini-bio video scripts for Apollo astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Young. Young, the modest mouse of the bunch, despite being punished for whistle blowing after the Challenger disaster, stumps tirelessly for NASA, for enhanced funding, because among other things he believes that when our ecosystem comes crashing down around our ears, that we’ll be looking to the rocket men and women to bail our asses outta here. He has continually stumped for NASA to "redo the risk statistics for civilization extinction events and get the word out on what we must do to save the human race over the short or long haul." He characterizes his vision as real science by the people, for the people.
Likely that future apologia will have to come long distance, from space stations or a terraformed Mars. To which my wise, beautiful boy queried, that if we screw this beautiful planet up, do we really deserve another chance? I was far too depressed to answer him but we are taking him and his brother out to Glacier National Park this summer while the glaciers are still there. We owe them at least that much and so much more.
There’s a damned good reason we muzzle our scientists. They’re far scarier than the most apocalyptic artists and writers. Add to which, they’re even harder to understand and just plain downers. And lord knows they’re bad for business. So it goes.
yours in words and ideas
-@v@-
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