Bothered

My reading binge began in 2000 after I moved to Brookings, Oregon. The writing binge began about a year later. Somehow, I felt more relaxed there, not pressured as I had been for many years. In a short time, all those questions and interests I had repressed during my working life popped up. I was a great pleasure to read all those books on history and current events, as well as recent literature and much more. As it has turned out, I've been putting myself through college and graduate school once more during the last six years. My original desire was to profess something or other at the University. I guess I'm trying to recover a dream lost.

I have felt a need to find out about things at least since I was ten years old. I do not know why it is so, but so it is. I don't mean finding out about little things, such as what is under this rock or what's for dinner. I mean big things; things like how the universe began, how big is our world, what planets and stars and galaxies are made of, what we are made of, how living things came to be, how things work, how and why I think, and why do I have an I?. The sorts of things that interested me, that greatly piqued my curiosity, are fairly typical of those who end up somewhere in the sciences. I wanted to be a scientist before I was 12 years old.

My interests and career goal were not welcome in my home town. In fact, until Sputnik, my scientific interests were derided. I was treated badly by my peers, teachers and employers while I lived in my hometown. My High School humanities teachers made a great effort to divert my attention away from science and toward their world, and they succeeded. I think my eventual conversion to philosophy started in High School because I was forced to think about many social and political problems that most scientists avoid. The world of science and technology is impersonal or, at best, transcends the personal. It is a very different mode of relating to the world than the humanistic, liberal arts approach. That difference is usually expressed as the difference between calculation and feeling, or public and private. I guess I'm a schizy, because I can switch back and forth between those modes. In the scientific mode, people may as well be Kafkaesque insects. In my humanitarian mode, scientists may as well be alien ETs. I've never been able to reconcile them; they are just different. Most of my life has been a fluttering between one and the other. But I must stop this paragraph of rememberance, as my stomach feels heavy and upset. It's like eating too much of something unpleasant. I get depressed thinking about this.

Looking back, knowing what I know now, I am astonished and delighted that most of my youthful scientific questions have been answered within my lifetime. I guess I should not be astonished, surprised or even mildly brow-lifted, that most of our human problems remain unsolved. In fact, in many places and ways, the plight of humanity is worse than ever. There is a vast difference between what can be accomplished when passions are set aside and otherwise.

In the immediate post-war period and through the 1960s, there was an explosion of scientific invention and discovery and technological applications. I think World War II and the Cold War were the goad which made all that possible. In a single generation, people invented or applied the atom bomb, space rockets, television, penicillin, transistors and chips, computers, genetics, vaccines and much more. I nearly died of diphtheria when I was 8, saved only by 92 or 96 shots of expensive and still scarce penicillin. I still remember those shots administered by two nurses: one to hold me down while the other pushed the needle of a very large syringe into my butt. That hospital is entirely different today. People don't get diphtheria any more, and far more powerful antibiotics come at worst as large "horse pills." The world of my present existence is totally different from the world of my childhood. I am now kept alive by the many pills I take every day, very few of which existed fifty years ago. I have lived longer and healthier than I expected when I was 25 or so. (But that created another problem: how to pay for all of it?) I have no doubt that most people can live long and comfortable lives on account of the revolutionary science and technology developed in the last century.

Looking about the world, the fact is that most people do NOT now enjoy such a good life. The worst of it is in Africa. It is a relief that China and India are developing rapidly, offering the prospect that half the world's population will be lifted out of desperate poverty in the next generation or two. If, simultaneously, population growth can be stopped or reversed, there is good reason to believe more than three-quarters of the world's population will be able to lead decent, wholesome lives. From a scientific point of view, this is not only possible, but eminently doable. The difficulty arises in dong it.

Global climate change is a serious problem, but not one that stands in the way of a good life for most people. For the most part, ignorance and inability are not barriers to solving the climate problem. The causes of global climate change can be reduced and eliminated, provided there is a determination to do so. So, in this we are back to the same problem which has persisted throughout my lifetime: the unwillingness of some people to solve the problems before them. We know the reasons for this refusal; they are writ large before us every day.  MONEY. POWER. SEX. EGOMANIA. MEGALOMANIA.

In respect of the human condition, very little or nothing has changed since my childhood. It looks like my High School teachers were right in trying to direct my attention to the humanities. My reading of the literature suggests humanity certainly needs improvement. I believe I tried my hardest and best to be part of the solution. I hope my writing points in that direction. But, so far, improvement isn't happening, or it is only happening here and there, not everywhere.

Where all that has brought me, now an old man, is once again to Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. Was it worth the trouble? When I shift into my scientific persona, I see little of significance. I may as well have been a walrus. Chilled, I am driven into that warm, fuzzy humanist mode, where I hope that reaching out to others - now mostly through my writing - will elicit a response. But that does not happen. As Billy Pilgrim said, "So it goes ..."