The Poet W.B.Yeats coined the phrase “Science is the opium of the suburbs”.
It was, of course, a parody of the phrase “Religion is the opium of the masses”, usually attributed to Marx (actually Marx stole it from Charles Kingsley), and far truer than the original ever was.
This week we have seen, in this very weblog, a fascinating example of just how that opium works. It was provided by a correspondent named Don Knotts who came in cursing and swearing and left like a gentleman. We have no wish to prolong the debate with Mr Knotts, or to criticise him personally; but he says he will no longer visit these pages (which are, after all, intended for femmekin), so we think it is reasonable to use his comments as an example of a tendency that extends far beyond Mr Knotts himself and gives us interesting food for reflection.
The essence of Mr Knotts’s argument [read it here], once he had stopped behaving like a drunk, was to paint a (very creditable) word-picture of the vastness of space and time, as indicated by astro-physics; the catastrophic (in earthly terms) nature of long-term cosmic events and the insignificance of our current earthly life when compared to the endless vistas of light years, the death of suns, the clash of galaxies and so forth.
His challenge was that if [we] were to take a telescope and look at the distant heavens the scales would fall from our eyes (to use a Biblical term that Mr Knotts would likely deprecate) and we should see the terrible folly of believing ourselves to be femmekin, or anything other than good suburban late-West-Tellurian cits.
The psychology of this assumption is remarkable. It is something like the way a Christian might expect worldly delusions to vanish in the face of the contemplation of Death, Heaven and Hell; but Mr Knotts, we gather, is an agnostic wedded to the “religion of science” and the comfortable, if rather anthropomorphic, idea that “science is on the side of everyday reality”.
He seems to frequent sites that spend much of their time tut-tutting (well, actually cuss-cussing) about how terrible and crazy are people who believe anything outside the cosy, suburban world of mundane materialism and vulgar cynicism, and how worrying it all is. Why it should worry them we don’t know, but it seems to be a sort of transposition of religious sentiment; a displacement of the heresy-hunting instinct, only this time not in the Name of God, but in the name of suburban dullness.
And somehow they believe (at least Mr Knotts does, and we are sure he is not alone) that they can call the very Heavens as witness to this religion of nothing-in-particular. Not the Heavens of traditional faith, of course (Darwin forbid!) but the Heavens of Professor Hawking.
He is perfectly sure that if we were really to look at those Heavens with a telescope, and ponder the mysteries of astro-physics, our belief that we are femmekin would vanish and we would see the Saving Light of Suburbia. We might even learn to use four-letter words like “real people”.
The idea simply cannot occur to such people that those same Heavens, whether or not we believe they are what the astro-physicists tell us they are (and we suspect that – on one level at least – they are, though we wouldn’t exactly bet the farm on it), dwarf the comfortable, cussing “realism” of the late-West-Telluri suburbs just as much as they dwarf anything else.
Oh no, the West-Telluri Suburbs are Reality, and Daddy Science is “on their side”.
Quite a touching faith, really.
