Love Calls Us to the Things of This World 6 comments

By Brian Volck

“Love makes language exact, because one loves only what one knows.” —Wendell Berry

I distrust capitalized, abstract proper nouns. Unqualified, words like “Media,” “Progress,” or “Spirituality” are too flabby and porous to do good work, masking assumptions and begging more questions than they answer. One reason I still practice pediatrics is that, in caring for real bodies, my wayward mind is tethered to the concrete messiness of life on this planet, the one habitable place we know.

Perhaps for that reason, a recent National Public Radio puff piece on Spore, a new computer game from Will Wright, designer of The Sims, prickled the hair on the back of my neck. In Spore, the player starts with a one-celled organism in primordial seas of an imagined world. The “organism” must eat other organisms—and not be eaten in turn—in order to win points. “The points,” the NPR report explains, “can be used to buy new features for their creatures: a new mouth, a nicer nose, faster fins and, in later stages, faster legs, a bigger brain.” Tierny Thys, a marine biologist consulting on the project, “says the game isn't really a true mirror of nature, but... believes it may help young people get interested in science.”

I wonder what Stephen Jay Gould, the gifted writer and one of the paleontologists behind the theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” would say about Spore’s premise that evolution is gradually progressive and guided by an intelligent designer, but this is, after all, a virtual world with imaginary organisms, fashioned from electrons and pixels, not mud and breath. But for Wright—and presumably his potential customers, described by NPR as “3 million…waiting for their chance to evolve, mate and eventually conquer the universe”—Spore’s attraction lies in goals, not origins. The report continues:

Spore gets even bigger. A creature evolves into a species that develops a civilization that can be warlike or, as Wright explains, religious.

“We're going to go over to our neighbors here and try to convert them,” he says, demonstrating. “Now, it's going to be a little hard because they're fairly happy, which is their best defense against religious conversion.”

Depending on how a creature has evolved—whether through dominance or cooperation—will determine what kind of cities a player builds during the civilization phase. Eventually, a player's civilization can conquer space.

A dozen questions beg for answers. What does the adjective “religious” mean here? Is Wright’s “religion” an alternative to warfare or its immoral equivalent? Does “religious” activity take some form beyond proselytizing? What concerns me more urgently, though, is the apparent goal of the game, namely “conquest.” And therein lies an ambiguity at the heart of one more capitalized abstraction: “Science.”

Its idealizers—from philosophers like Karl Popper to celebrities like Alan Alda—make Science into something like idealized Buddhism: a relentless struggle against illusion and falsehood, a disinterested contemplation of the real. There is, in fact, a profound sense of awe, wonder and sometimes palpable affection in much descriptive science, but science has never limited itself to description.

Since the eighteenth century at the latest, science has more often engaged in the conquest and control of nature rather than its contemplation, and has granted us, in the last century alone, the mixed blessings of insulin and Zyklon B, refrigeration and ozone holes, personal computers and tons of nuclear waste with a half life in the hundreds of millions of years.

Francis Bacon, (the philosopher and author, not the painter) is usually named as intellectual whipping boy for the evils of extractive science, but for all his faults, Bacon understood that any quest for knowledge “to relieve the human condition” must be tempered by larger loves, which for him were Christian charity and the worship of God. Such “superstitions,” of course, don’t carry much weight among twenty-first century transhumanists and the like.

Armchair philosophers sometimes defend the purity of “Science” by distinguishing it from technology or applied science, a move resembling hip America’s affection for the idea of soccer, but not the game itself. Separate scientists from tools and applications, and what’s left? A feeble enterprise, a succession of conjectures.

When applied, science sometimes delivers but always—always—graces humanity with unexpected consequences. Nothing infuriates my literature and medicine students as much as Wendell Berry’s observation that “medicine is an exact science until applied,” and nothing they learn in their four years of medical school is more urgent and more true.

This is where art, the love of the beautiful in the created world, and the care with which the artist takes in exactitude are of immense help. I’m going out on a limb here to make a sweeping, and likely flawed, statement: art worthy of its name, even fantasy and so-called abstract art, always wrestles with particularity and limits; anything less is pandering or propaganda. Artists and writers of the human scale know creation is beyond human control and require no more evidence than the fact of human grief.

There would be no grief if there were no love. Love suffers from more silly abstractions than any word in the language, but love in practice, in contrast to its countless romanticized counterfeits, has a particular object, both known and inexhaustibly mysterious, miraculous and—on this side of the grave at least—inevitably flawed. The feeling of love does not make an artist, but the difficult practice of love can’t help but discipline both artists and scientists, calling us to the things of this world and the unrelievable human condition in this wildness we call creation.