Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 5:55pm
Tuesday, November 9, 2004, 5:55pm
Through a long-ago fallen darkness, and for first time since March, I’ve worn gloves across the “1899” Summer Street Bridge – tonight with a stiff northwest wind in my face walking astride silent, shivering, and mostly unprepared fellow bridge-travelers.
According to the official keepers who study the heavens to determine such events, winter will not arrive for another six weeks in South Boston, or South Station, or along the ancient railroad beds of the Worcester Line. But unofficially wintertime has already arrived in the form of pedestrian misery.
Waiting for our departure aboard this evening train I find a welcoming oasis. With a relaxing whoosh of compressed air the 6:05pm Express completes its brake check, and less than five minutes later we are underway.
Just beyond this window to my right – for an instant – I sense an undefined shape drifting through dim artificial lighting and suddenly the idea of its basic form snaps into my thoughts. At that snapping point, just as I give the thing a name, I appreciate its simple existence – fluorescent tubes mounted end-to-end beneath concrete platform extensions.
Most often I see things for what they are – or should be – without another thought. Yet I am imprecise because no two things are exactly alike, nor does any one thing ever stay the same. And sometimes I mistake the evidence altogether, especially when data is sparse and my need for clarity immediate. Then one day I am confronted with the unknown and when this happens I meet a wall.
The Grand Canyon was once a grand notion until I saw this place for myself. The preponderance of evidence indicated a great chasm in northern Arizona. But only when I saw this place for myself could I absorb its monumental grandeur – and even then I still could not appreciate aspects that were truly new to me. I could only appreciate those aspects I expected to see. And so, to expand my knowledge, I hiked for hours and even over-flew the area in a small airplane to absorb a more direct sense of its enormity. I’m sure I barely scratched the surface. But at least I gave it a try.
There is an even greater canyon on Mars – Valles Marineris – and even though we have stored several thousand images of this place from various spacecraft cameras, no human has ever directly observed this rift valley from closer than roughly 35 million miles. There is good reason to believe that such a place exits, yet Valles Marineris is so monstrously huge that I have little feeling for its scale and I can study all the photos and simulations I want and I’ll never understand its utter magnitude unless I set foot in that place to scratch at its surface in puzzlement and wonder.
Reality and ideas about reality are two very different planes of existence because aligning ideas with experience is a gradual process subject to revision and clarification through added data and thought. Eventually the two are nearly indistinguishable, though mostly because of how I’ve given up the chase.
Often whole institutions settle into their collective world view like this, if for no other reason than the effort to adjust and the lack of impetus.
If I were a pope at the time of Galileo I would be predisposed to believe in a fixed set of ideas regarding the celestial sky and without effort I would automatically reject the new Copernican theory placing the Sun at the center of the planets. By inertia I would hold steadfastly to all official teachings – including the ancient Ptolemaic Universe since the very notion of an unsanctioned idea could be nothing less than heresy and lots of extra paperwork. For all the aggravation they are causing, I might even see those pesky Copernicans as more than mere heretics – perhaps even deserving a more rigorous confessional given how their Sun-centered sky is nothing less than a direct assault on the authority of the church and the stability of the status quo. And if there were any lingering doubts after exposure to considerable horrors, I could gently remind them of Giordano Bruno burned alive at the stake for suggesting a fathomless Universe with the Sun as just one star among thousands.
Alas, this is where my train of thought leads tonight as we pass through the Mass Pike crisscross with none of the usual side-to-side lurching. Perhaps the tracks have been repaired or maybe the rails are shrinking in the cold. Will our train hurtle off these rails some night when I am least prepared?
Yet I’m just yelling into that wall of the unknowable.
Faced with no way ahead I have two methods at hand to push aside uncertainty in my way – one way doctrinal and the other a theoretical. A doctrine accepts data supporting the doctrine and rejects data contravening it. A theory is tested by data and if contravened the theory is rejected and the data accepted. In one case the doctrine is supreme, and the other, data is supreme.
The choice then is between an authoritative top-down way of thinking of a pope versus the bottom-up thinking of a scientist. Top-down thinking starts with notions revealed by a higher power forming the immutable basis of all knowledge, whereas bottom-up thinking begins with the notion that we know almost nothing for certain about the Universe and build our knowledge on a foundation of reasoned assessment.
Top-down thinking focuses on existing knowledge accepted on faith. Bottom-up thinking uses faith as a temporary bridge over the chasms of the unknown in the hope of discovering what has not been seen and tested before.
Top-down thinking requires subservience to a higher authority and obedience to official teaching. Bottom-up thinking requires freedom to question and an honest thirst for unvarnished knowledge.
Top-down thinking adheres to rituals and the memorizing of ancient texts. Bottom up thinking establishes an evolving body of ideas and continues to explore and revise these in the face of the unknown.
Top-down thinking sees the world through absolutes that do not change. Bottom-up thinking presumes unending uncertainty and never expects an irrefutable conclusion.
Top-down thinking enforces the status quo. Bottom-up thinking seeks to overturn it wherever the evidence warrants.
Prior to the age of enlightened reason a great paradox could be experienced with just three humble bowls of water – one cold, one tolerably hot, one lukewarm. After soaking a hand in the cold water and the other in the hot bath, both hands are then placed in the lukewarm bowl. Is this water hot or cold? One hand offers one answer while the other hand offers the other – while both are clearly wrong. In an age of absolutes, this was an utter mystery ascribed to natural magic.
Yet curiously, even in this modern age we are still instructed to ignore what our hands and eyes tell us in favor of officialdom.
How can this be?
Didn’t the Age of Enlightenment begin centuries ago?
And yet each generation must fight the same old battle betwixt orthodoxy and reason by chipping away at absolutes sitting like fossilized mold against a petrified tree truck.
Deep down, though, I suspect that few individuals are absolutely committed to orthodoxy in every waking moment, since even Pope Urban VIII was at times predisposed to accept the teachings of Galileo – though never publicly.
In the end it was the pillars of pure orthodoxy – the keepers of church doctrine at the Vatican – who threatened Galileo with torture should he not recant his Copernican error, and who kept him thereafter under house arrest to prevent further mischief.
