Science is a religion, Education is a rite. 

24 August 2001

Part 1 

Today, science is a new religion. If you say that the sun will go red giant in five billion years, people will say that “it’s no problem, science will save us.” They have faith that science will build spaceships and that humans will be living somewhere else on that day. They don’t say that God will come and take us away. They say that science will save us. If you warn that HIV will kill tens of millions, people say that we’ll find a cure, that it won’t happen to me. Science will save us.

No longer do we pray for the supernatural to deliver us from evil. We pray for the fruits of the acts of men. Men have conquered nature, and walked on the moon. We are now our own gods.

Science is the worship of the knowledge of Man, and education is the ritual process through which people find salvation. We send our children to schools so that they can be sanctified, and if worthy, to become good citizens. The way that we can tell that they’re good citizens is that they can create value. They create capital.

But education doesn’t make angels. From the earliest years, attending school is our fall from grace. We leave our homes, where we are loved for our uniqueness, and go to school, where we are made into team players. Schools are designed to mass-produce citizens who enhance shareholder value. Twenty (or thirty, or two hundred) children are put into a room, resources are carefully metered out, and the outputs are measured. If the students’ results aren’t consistent with expectations, teachers and principals are fired.

We are attempting to mass-produce capitalists in order to build technology to save our genes.

Part 2

Happiness is wanting what you have.

 If you can't be happy where you are, it's a cinch you can't be happy where you ain't. – Samuel Johnson

Success is getting and achieving what you want. Happiness is wanting and being content with what you get. – William Maxwell

Recently, I was thinking about learning. Then I saw an article by Mark Lilla in the Summer 2001 issue of The Wilson Quarterly about “Ignorance and Bliss.” The article contrasted God and the Beasts based on the desire for, and the possession of, knowledge. Man is trapped between beast and god, unable to know everything, unable to know nothing.

I suddenly wondered if I could understand people by asking if their appetites for knowledge and choice, at a particular time or in general, were high. I imagined Curiosity as the appetite for knowledge, and Will as the appetite for choices. I was stricken with the notion that the people I think of as control freaks are not actually looking for control. Perhaps they are looking for choices. What is control but the opportunity to make a choice, either for ourselves or for others? So I got an appetite for choice and an appetite for knowledge, and I drew up a grid, like this.

I think that we all circumscribe the center as our appetites wax and wane. There are some whose centers are in different places, I suspect. Thinking in this way helps me to understand people who are difficult. I can ask myself if they feel the need for more choice, or which appetite of theirs is not satisfied.  These aren’t really boxes, they’re more like countries, into which we wander over time, circling back from sated to starved, riding the cycles.

We can share choices like a plate of cookies. When I used to split a six pack with a guitar player, I got two.

The appetite for knowledge is different. A choice, when taken, is consumed. Learning does not consume the fact. People just stop learning when their appetites wane. It comes back sooner or later.