naiveté

on science and naiveté
by doctorzamalek
March 15, 2009

Readers of this blog know that I have nothing but contempt for the jaded cynics who still pass for the avant garde personality types in the humanities.

For deep down we are all naive. We all depend on food. We depend on the proper functioning of our cells and organs. We become very happy when the weather is nice, and very sad when things are not going well.

Somehow, the notion has caught on that animals and babies are naive, while adult humans have the proper aspiration of being sneering liquidators heaping scorn on everything while posing as above it all. “I’ve seen it all”… “Nothing surprises me anymore”…

Well, I haven’t seen it all. And almost everything that happens surprises me. A day without a surprise is a sad day for me.

Somehow, the notion caught on that the Enlightenment meant the extermination of gullible belief. This is at best a half-truth. Go ahead and exult as Medieval superstition is vaporized. But don’t forget all the truly bizarre new things in which we now believe– acidic double helices as the medium of heredity, a long marine ancestry for humans, quarks and electrons, black holes, drifting continental plates, ancient empires lost in the sand, cosmic rays striking your body and disintegrating a proton 2 or 3 times in the average lifespan. And every new science focuses on a new class of entities in which we most gullibly believe.

Animals and babies are charmed by many things, but at the end of the day they are mostly interested in eating those things. We adult humans like to outsource our sincerity to cute little babies and adorable fawns in the woods, but this is maybe a classic case of projection– for it is we adults who are the babes in the forest, fascinated by fires, the rising moon, and memories of vanished Rome.

ADDENDUM: Stated simply, my goal is to become as naive as possible. And as I see it, this has been the goal of the human mind all along. Critique is merely a temporary measure to discourage belief in what is not really believable.