[Newspoetry] Two Cultures Thematics

[Donald L Emerick]

US$1 million Templeton prize for scientist-turned-priest  
  
New York (ENI). John C. Polkinghorne, a mathematical physicist
who amazed his scientific colleagues more than 20 years ago by
becoming an Anglican priest, has won the 2002 Templeton Prize,
one of the world's most prestigious awards in the field of
religion. Long associated with the University of Cambridge,
Polkinghorne, aged 71, is a leading figure in attempting to
bridge the worlds of science and religion. "I am a passionate
believer in the unity of knowledge," Polkinghorne told ENI in an
interview prior to today's announcement of the award.
[761 words, ENI-02-0077]
ENI Online - www.eni.ch
Ecumenical News International, Geneva Switzerland  
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Long ago, Lord CP Snow delivered
some influential thoughts,
representative of the normal ruling thought
that calls itself, in some ruling circles,
by another name, modern thought.

He titled his famous lectures Two Cultures,
indexing thereby Science and Religion.
Science, as you know (or believe),
is protean of whatever is modern,
in thinking those things to be thought.
Science is thus a variable component of a social order.

Against these variations of foreground melody,
there plays a longer, stronger harmony,
changing only gradually but rarely,
one has to live centuries to see such changes.
This background noise calls itself by special terms,
for it has a proper name, and proper self in its aim.
It calls itself, variously, by the terms of religion,
and allies itself with the symbol of rigidity, God.
Religion is thus a fixed component of a social order.

Of a world of essences, analytic division speaks.
And, any essence seems to be either/or,
one or the other, for it could never be both,
if it has the sure possibility of being either.
But, when science speaks for itself,
and not to its other, religion,
then qualities are measurable,
according to the current state of science.
Measurable qualities may be connected
to one another, according to the order
of their systematic differences,
as what happens when a change occurs.

Religion happens when nothing changes.
(Proverb: Nothing is new under the sun...)

So, taken analytically, religion and science
might seem to be two different quite cultures.

This conclusive result made no sense to me,
as an a priori artifact,
even when this alleged division of culture
into two components buttresses itself
by the showing of many facts
on how these two components differ.

I mean, rationally speaking,
one does not expect that
gold will behave like hydrogen.
One may thus believe, structurally,
that the more stable elements are not
at all so dissimilar from vaporous ones,
that they all behave alike,
each according to its own construction,
even they those constitutions differ
in their particular peculiarities.

I was more interested in the grosser fact
that both science and religion belonged
to a single entity, to one functioning culture,
to a system, taken to cover all that in it dwell.

And, I also noticed that many cultures
throughout history practiced
a separation of the state
into several paired primary subcultures,
church and science,
public and private,
and so on,
as its belief and knowledge components.

What is science?
It is any procedure that will prove a belief is true
or that some belief is less worthy than another.
What is church?
It is any tradition: a handing out or down or away
of what is already alleged to be true, ancestrally,
as a matter of its pedigree, its mere (re)citation.
It is any statement that says no proof is needed,
because one has been supplied already, by God,
or by someone alleged to be in a chain of command,
that ultimately runs back to an alleged God-source.

Apart from the worlds of such essences, though,
these paired components belong to one another,
intimately, necessarily,
and do not occur as truly separable things,
as processes purely unto themselves, ideally.

So, science (fashionable religion),
religion (proper religion) and the state,
seem to be woven together in one cloth.

The state has its own objectives,
which have nothing to do with science or religion.
The state is an entity that wants to persist
as long as it serves the ruling interests
of those who own and operate it,
for their own benefit, enjoyment, amusement.
A state which did not want to survive would fail.

Now, the analytics of modern society
do not want you to personify anything,
as I have just personified the state.
As long ago as Socrates,
the person of Science inveighed against
another mechanism of social change,
the one that calls itself poetry or music
(although Socrates would have allowed
the marches and anthems of military music
to survive because they promote
and perpetuate the order of the state).

They'd rather have you think
that this construct (state) is just that,
a convention that has some utility,
like the idea of a universal corporation,
with all the legal powers of an entity,
and none of the personal responsibility,
and no liability for causing any harm.

The state is immune from lawsuit,
say the laws of the state,
unless the state should choose to permit
some small class of persons to sue the state,
for some small class of well-defined reasons.

By extension, of course,
the state's utility being so great
as a convenience to power power itself,
other corporate entities soon came into being.
It was an evolutionary development,
these legal fictions that formalized
holding great powers by virtual immunity.

Now, under any corporate form of government,
the person is essentially subject to tyranny.
This corporate tyranny has been
gradually increasing over the last century,
albeit imperceptibly to many.
Employees are said to have almost no rights
against any employing corporation,
as employees are alleged to be personally "free".
So, against the corporate culture,
there stands this other thing,
the leisure culture,
the cult of personality itself,
wherein a person is said to be "free".

Other words for "free" would be better.
A person is free to the extent that
no corporation may command
(or, less dramatically, implicate
a duty to obey by implied demand)
that the person labor to produce
something that the corporation wants.
Hence, a person would be idle when free
but productive when working as a slave.
Economists call these "slack" resources,
to contrast them with fully employed resources.
No slack resource constrains any system.

I have circled around,
in these brief notes,
the indigestions of social order,
which happens over or in time.
A short-run would be in time,
but a long run would be over time.

Now, I wanted to circle toward Heidegger,
whose notes on time and being I much read.
It occurred to me, as I was driving around
this morning, that H's analytic, many of notes,
reflect what I would call another social division,
one that is far older, culturally, though fading.

H and almost all philosophes
belong to one side of the social division,
which I shall label, conventionally,
"urban versus agrarian."
The idea of the growing thing,
which we find residually remembered,
sometimes, in some theories of education,
is that, while nature may be helped,
she always has her own way with things,
that nature takes her own sweet time
to achieve (if she were attributed purpose)
whatever it is that nature does.
Nature is almost always, then, free,
which means simply that she is free of man,
that she can not and ought not to be forced
to do unnatural things, unnaturally, untimely.
The idea of the urban thing,
the city folk way of life,
is that nature is an impediment,
an obstruction to the times,
a thing to be changed when
it seems to our momentary advantage.

So, H worries about a kind of time,
a phenomenological sense of time,
that largely reflects his prejudices,
themselves less critically examined,
that favors the order of urban,
the order of the corporate,
the order of the state,
the order of science.

Agrarians, as a matter of history,
are like losers are to victors.
They do not write histories,
which are always already
yet more tales of the city
and of its wondrous life,
of trials and tribulations,
of the relativity of value,
existential angst of being.

I fear these meandering notes
say nothing that needed to be said,
a concern of the urban, that,
to make a new difference,
while the old farmer does not care
about all these ideas out of season,
as long as crops will grow.

Spring is creeping around my door again,
Inviting me back out to the garden green,
where a kind of change happens again,
the same kind of change all over again.
Familiarity does not breed contempt,
It simply breeds more new generations
that look pretty much the same, thank God!
And there is where you always find God,
out in the dirt, in the soil, digging around,
even if you don't know He's the first farmer,
a tree farmer, like Tom Bombadil,
and will not die all the crops fail.

Urban folks never really need God,
unless they could graft him
onto something ornamental,
like a flowering bush or a flaming shrub,
or tame him and domesticate him,
make him useful and well-behaved,
reliable as a servant or a slave.

I don't much care for Urban Gods
even when those Gods disappear
in the anonymity of ordinary science,
in service to the power of the state.

I prefer a God,
(would that I could conjure one!),
who likes green growing things
taking their own sweet time to be.

I was going to talk about Polkinghorne,
following a Snow-blowing Science Order,
but it's as if it never happened, naturally.

Thanks for listening
Donald L Emerick