science & the 20th century

(from 2009)

as the 20th century opened, science both lost its claim to ontological certainty and got its hands on culture via the economic infrastructure that it bequeathed- industry, mechanization, electricity, controlled thermodynamic explosions.  science got its chance at writing the rules of social structure but lost it's ability to claim ultimate knowledge of an objective, understandable reality.

because of this ontological failure, the 20th century was a frantic gasp at the irrational, the exciting, the whatever, the outre, the weird, as the western psyche found itself on the wrong end of a dream, a scientific dream that erupted out of the last great confused synthesis of magic, classicism, religious turbulence- the renaissance.  the scientific dream bloomed in the 17th century, maturing into a novel worldview with its own grand dream of social cures, the salvation of life through technology, the end of manual labor and the beginning of living like kings, all its own and having a delicious century of its own where it dominated all thought and knew with all certainty that it only lacked a decimal point of information and all would be perfectly explained, forever.   in the 19th century they told young people not to go into physics- it was all over, all the questions were done and certainty was a few minro equations away.  the scientific dream was almost acheived of a material, solid, and above all objective external reality that wouldn't do funny things and slip away from you and confound your rational categories and be subject to subjectivity.

but the scientific discoveries that launched the 20th century brought all back to the square one mysterium tremendum with, first, the acceptance that there are no objective vantage points by which to measure phenomena, no privileged place where you could make absolute statements about the acceleration or direction of any object, and second (and far worse) that democritus' dream of indivisible building blocks of solid stuff came crashing down with the acceptance that the particles that build molecules and make up light and everything that we can observe are both there and not there, not solid at all, here and somewhere else, the coincidencia apositorum, the union of opposites that the scientific mind reels from.  the fundamental things of reality, as it turned out, are not even capable of taking on a concrete existence without a subject to make a measurement.  now we get it, or i should say that we get it again, for we're not the first, simply that all models of reality are not models of real reality but only models of the instruments that observe them and the minds that observe the observations.  

It is implicit in the materialist mind that if the unknowable is called 'dark energy' instead of 'god', that all the witch-huntery and con-artistry and inquisitions and all manner of crazy cult behavior would just fade out in light of reason.  but these things continue, in different guises.  no new values or understandings or ethics have come out of the western enterprise since its inception, though most people in the western world from the netherlands to the old empire to the 50 states are materialists, at least in their day to day lives and basic perspective on reality.  we're still unhappy, addicted to terribly destructive drugs and lifestyle habits.  the glory of the century of electronic reform did much for our backs which could rest from the plow but did little for our waistlines, blood pressure, mental health; in fact its been made worse but the century of mass media- we've all been chasing the easy life as glorified in mass media advertizing which presented us with a gleaming, edited, make-up, graphic dreamland with a soundtrack- the 20th century advertizement- 30 seconds of pure, scripted bliss with a logo at the end.  this form created the lifestyle of the 20th century which began in a frantic party and an unbridled joy in the novelty of it all and ended in tastelessness, unhealthy living, and an ungodly needless waste of paper plates, plastic everything.