In the interest of pluralism and tolerance, it is often said by very well-intentioned people that religion and science can and should coexist peacefully. I suppose that it's not necessary for them to clash - at least, science need have no quibble with religion - but it turns out that in practice there are almost inevitable pitfalls. These come in two forms. From the science side, you have folks like Richard Dawkins who feel a need to proselytize against religion. When I was a 20 year old philosophy major who smoked like 72 blunts a day, I felt a similar need (which even then I suppressed since it was in poor taste). But guys like Dawkins just don't get over it. He's been a vocal atheist for years, penned numerous articles and books on the matter, and now gone so far as to buy bus-side advertisements. Seems pathological to me. In the end though I think guys like this are basically harmless. No one to whom religion is important is going to pay him any attention. Has even one person been "converted" by Dawkins' "science"? Doubtful. Mostly he preaches to the choir.
From the other side, we've got something a bit more insidious. Bear with me as I digress for a moment. Organized religions (especially Christianity) have been put in a bit of a bind over the past couple centuries. Despite the fanciful theories of some apologists (my college history of science professor, for one), it's hard to say with a straight face that the church has not been a consistent antagonist of science. Unfortunately for the Holy Father and his associates, science has marched right on, and our view of the world has become increasingly physicalist over the past 500 years. More significantly, that progress of knowledge has underpinned the enormous progress made in the real world over that same time. To the point that the church has been in a state of pretty steady retreat, alternately opposing and then accepting quite a litany of discoveries: the printing press; heliocentrism; the circulation of blood; and of course evolution. The links are mostly referring to the Catholic Church, since that was the most cohesive and the largest Christian institution until the past 200 year. The Protestant faiths have been to varying degrees more (e.g. Southern Baptists) or less (e.g. Unitarians) conservative in this respect. The example of evolution is perhaps the best example of this growing equivocation.
It was perhaps inevitable that the faiths would give this fight up in the end, and begin to co-opt and appropriate the science they once opposed. The examples of this are numerous, but one I saw recently has me particularly heated. The Catholic Church, you see, opposes all forms of birth control. This is as crazy as it sounds. They apparently know this, and know too that many of the faithful ignore it (but probably feel guilty about it anyway, which is really my core complaint about Christianity). I know a number of Catholics, and most of them are or have at one time or another been on birth control. It's the responsible thing to do if you have sex kids. Well anyway, the church (this is true of our evangelicals too) knows this, but also knows that aversion to abortion is quite a bit stronger. So the plan is this. Fake up some official documents saying that chemical contraceptives actually cause abortions, sprinkle in some references to scientific studies (but don't actually cite anything real), and voila! You have thousands of people avoiding a safe and effective contraceptive (Plan B) based on a lie.
Excuse me? What the fuck, wasn't Jesus pretty clear about lying?
I don't mean this to be an anti-religion diatribe. But it is exactly this sort of thing that gets in the way of the sort of peaceful coexistence of believers and non-believers that Obama spoke of at his inauguration. Do atheists do stupid things? Of course, see above. But do they do evil things (like spreading unequivocal lies that make life worse for people who look to them for guidance) in the name of their beliefs? Not that I know of. The Catholic Church and Southern Baptist Convention still do.
I'm sitting on a plane behind a drug rep from Pfizer, and watching over her shoulder with a mixture of fascination and horror. She's writing a "Practitioner Report." Here's a sample:
55082 (Stillwater)
Knowles (#24 potential, #88 actual)Continue with the increased attention and 'positive tension.' Celebrex sales still good but could be better. Befriend PAs, Keep up on Nap business.
Adrien (#10 potential, #21 actual) Way up since June, sky's the limit. Like's consistent but not too frequent contact. Continue with weekly call, schedule lunch in Feb. Celebrex down last couple months, keep after that.
How sick is this? She has a database that shows every physician and all the drugs they're prescribing, presented alongside alternatives (such as generics) and graphed over recent months/years. Something just feels so wrong about this to me. I know they're a business and they've gotta make money, but medicine should be about what's best for the patient. Why? Because everyone pays for drugs except the one making the decision (the "practitioner"). Publicly, the drug companies say that they're merely "educating" the physicians, but this little snooping shows the lie in that. Why rank physicians if you just want to make sure they know about the facts? The logic must be that their drugs are so good that the more you know the more you sell. Right.
I have an urge to publicize this. I have her name, and real names of the doctors. Does everyone know that they do this?
The world speaks in the most remarkable and surprising ways. I got on a plane this afternoon and started writing about authenticity. I hadn't gotten to it yet (before this thing happened), but what I had in mind was how much I've been stressing, more and more lately, about figuring out what I'm "supposed to do." This sense that life is slipping by and I'm wasting my time. But the insight that I wanted to write about was that this whole mentality is perhaps missing the point precisely. We are letting life slip by precisely when we live "forward," like this, when the future (the not-now) is more important than the now. Even when I am not planning for the future, still I am not in general living now. My time away from work feels so much like placeholders, like "something to do." I think I have been increasingly aware of this phenomenon in recent months, yet I don't know what do otherwise. The moments of living should be the rule rather than the exception, and yet they are unusual. I think back to a hike Kathleen and I took this summer out past Middleton. That was so great, but not because of the particular place or event, but because we were exploring. I look back on this and think, "I wish I could do that sort of this more often."
What I crave (what all of us crave), is creation or exploration (are there other things I'm missing?). I think we get paralyzed because both of these seem so big. I dream of a job where I can do one or the other, as though this is the only format in which such endeavors are satisfying. What I wanted to write about was this insistence that my job is the key to living authentically. That if and only if I can figure out the right direction for my entire life will I be living right, will I live authentically (as opposed to the superficiality in which I generally find myself). Many of us seem caught up in this. Even those I would consider very authentic, like Kathleen, struggle with this desire to integrate living and working, and this frustration when we can't have the whole thing (when the integration is not complete). But maybe that's the wrong approach. I'm going to say provisionally that it is definitely not the right approach. That instead we can just create and explore (or do whatever else is right for you) whenever and wherever we can. Nothing revolutionary here, I suppose, and yet who of us is doing this? No one I know.
So this is what I was thinking about, how to bring these things into my life. How in this new year I want to make my job just a job and do a lot more living in the rest of the space.
Resolution #7 - Create or explore something new every day.
And then I sit down next to this woman on the plane. She's reading a book full of pictures and essays and quotes, all with little "assignment" notes underneath. Like "Assignment 52: Take a flash picture underneath your bed" below a page of dust bunnies, long-lost socks, and annoyed felines. Fascinating stuff, and I'm so enthralled that she catches me looking over her shoulder (yes, I'm a classy guy, I know). Well it turns out she's an artist, and artists sort of have to appreciate voyeurism. So she's very nice about my awkwardness, and insists that I take the book for a while. The book is called Learning to Love You More," and there's a website too. They put up these "assignments" (or others submit them) on their website, and then visitors post their efforts. The book is a collection of these projects.
So I will try to do one of these a day (unless I stumble upon an independent option). I recommend that everyone do the same.
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