"Our life is frittered away by detail... Simplify, simplify!" -- Henry David Thoreau
It is clear that Science alone will not win the battle against the current crusaders. In a recent Science Friday interview Chris Mooney (author of "The Republican war against science" Yale Class of 1999) made it very clear that the republican fundamentalists inside the beltway have great Rove tools to oppose any result that is against their core mission of power, greed and masked virtue. Mr. Mooney is a sharp inquisitive thinker hopefully his alma mater home of -hum- Skull and Bones will give us more alumni like him and less like others, here are some highlights:
1) Ignore then label, lie and repeat. Any results that are not what you want to hear call it fuzzy math, fuzzy science, bad science, old data and incomplete. Then make sure you cover all media outlets with the same talking points, do it several times a day. Then sit back and watch your myth ascend to the heavens. It helps if you own a newspaper or a TV Channel.
2) Science in court or "the jury is still out". You can always find a good looking fellow that thinks evolution is a hoax or that global warming is a commie plot. Start an Exploratory Congressional Panel and Give this bio-stitute witness a microphone and equal time. Make sure you say "opinions are divided on this issue" even if its 99.99% in favor and one nut job against. (As a small aside this is one of the things that I hate about Public Radio, at a time where all we should be hearing when we dial in is "Stop the War" and "Bring our troops home" NPR gives us embedded repots and views from both sides, WTF? How many NPR members support the war? Who pays for membership? Then again they do take money from Wal-Mart...)
3) Paralysis through analysis. When the evidence is irrefutable say "we don't want to rush into things, let's start a committee". Again, make sure you invite all the experts, ask open ended questions and recommend another panel to start a subcommittee in the most obscure thing you can find - a scientific straw man if you want... Make sure you give money to scientists to further their studies in these remote fields and ask them to report back quarterly. If this fails, start a small grants program, make it really hard to both access the funds and choose programs that will not succeed - then say "We tried really hard". If you really have to compromise as a last resort you can use the words "Pilot Study" and "lack of replicability".
So what will stop the crusaders?(*) Who can science ally with to launch a new renaissance? I propose that the arts have a crucial role to play. Here's a small example, a few years ago the Hubble Telescope was scheduled to burn on re-entry. Ushered by an incredible photo series of distant galaxies the public reacted against the telescope's decommissioning and forced NASA to rethink its strategy and consider a manned mission to save it.
Even though Hubble's destiny is still uncertain, my point remains: pretty photos sell better that long complicated astronomical concepts. I am sure that if we were to compare the readership of Stephen Hawking's latest book "A briefer history of time" and those who have seen a Hubble photo it would be 10,000 to 1. (on a similar note I remember reading about Ansel Adams and how his photography spearheaded the protection of Yosemite.)
I recently found a great lecture entitled "The ocean, the bird and the scholar" by Helen Vendler (Harvard, Class of 1960), she suggests we should forget about philosophy and history as the focus of a classical education and instead place the arts smack in the middle:
For every person who has read a Platonic dialogue, there are probably ten who have seen a Greek marble in a museum, or if not a Greek marble, at least a Roman copy, or if not a Roman copy, at least a photograph. Around the arts there exist, in orbit, the commentaries on art produced by scholars: musicology and music criticism, art history and art criticism, literary and linguistic studies. At the periphery we might set the other humanistic disciplines--philosophy, history, the study of religion.
I have always advocated for laying out the big picture first. Science will not do this, the Arts will. No need to explain astronomy, first show me a photo of Saturn, then tell me a nice story about Saturn (more on storytelling here) then maybe share some of the highlights of your data - but mostly I want the soundbyte and I want it to be simple enough for a 5 year old to understand.
Sure the ivory tower can continue to generate - and should continue to generate - hard science in peer reviewed journals but the translation into simple, intelligent, to the point one pagers is painfully missing. The extension component of academia is critical, here is where the arts can come to the rescue, by allowing academia to synthesize its message into critical artwork for change. Simplify, simplify.
(*) In June 1098 the crusaders waged a tremendous battle at Antioch fueled in part by the "miraculous" appearance of the Holy Lance. A simple object that boosted the troops morale. Do remember that on May 1st 2003 we also saw a miraculous banner that read "mission accomplished". Propaganda is not what I am talking about, I am more interested in the development of positive icons that can inspire and educate people such as the Ark of Hope.
