August 10th, 2004
I keep a book beside my bed always. Often, it is some sort of scientific or mathematical book because, apart from being interesting to me, the type of thinking I have to do induces me to sleep. No laugh-laugh chuckle-chuckle there; I suspect my brainwaves when studying something scientific or technical are about the same as my brainwaves when I am drifting off to sleep. So a good non-fiction book on, say, astronomy or particle physics or the history of Euler's Constant will ensure that my head is bobbing in no time.
Right now I am reading a Geology textbook. Fun stuff, actually, except that the scientist who wrote the book has these little flyouts containing personal messages in the margins that have little to do with science, and nothing at all to do with geology. From these "personal" messages, I can easily deduce that the author suffers from the same malady that affects most scientists--and most developers and other technical people in my own field (computer software).
First, they all hold the conviction that if only everyone else in the world were "as logical as" they, there wouldn't be so many problems ... maybe no problems at all. In the context of human behaviour, I hear them utter variants of these phrases all the time: "All you have to do is ..." or "It's just that simple ..." and always spoken with an attempt at ironic voicing (though it really just sounds ignorant and snotty).
You see, most of these logic freaks and science-worshippers are so out of touch with their own stinky little emotions that they cling to the concept that logic is the way to live and raise their children. Then, periodically, they discover they've said or done something inexplicably stupid, dangerous, or violent. And their children grow up and join the circus or steal cars in Surrey. (This, by the way, is a vicious circle, because then they feel like Life's Big Losers, so they adhere even harder to logic.)
Besides, what most logic-and-science groupies don't realise is that there is no such thing as Pure Logic. Every system in the world has its own innate logic to it, but there is no Mr. Spock-like cold and hard answer at the end of the logic rainbow. I've already gone on a bit about the imperfection in systems. Like here. And here. But the point I want to get at is that the so-called pure-logic these people envision the world needing to have is entirely based on their own highly subjective and emotional responses. The so-called "logic" they espouse is almost always an afterthought! A justification to try and explain why they did what they did. And always, the "logic" is as faulty as their emotional maturity. They probably think that there is a pure and incontrovertible logic at the base of everything. That there is no intellectual bottomless pit. And gawdamighty, they'll refuse to the last breath to admit that there isn't.
Trying to live one's life by a code of logic and science ... a creed ... a kind of faith that says, "All would be okay if only people could ..." is what they have to fall back on, to rely on (rather pathetically sometimes) because they never learned as children what emotional maturity is and how to have it for oneself. The next best thing is their science.
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Now, before I get a nasty email about this, my sources (both as exemplification and refutation of the religions of science and logic) are myself first, and practically everyone else I've ever known.