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Deconstructing the status quo

There’s more to that than we think we know.

Passing observations from NYC Climate Week,  but from the Natural Resources Defense Council power panel I attended at NRDC on Thursday, Reimagining Science for All of Us: From Vision to Design

Luminaries on the panel featured leadership of the Environmental Defense Fund, Working Group Vice Chair of the IPCC, and the Founder/CEO of Stand Up For Science. Serious people who say things such as, “The climate movement is deeply unserious about a serious subject.” Shared in the context of ignoring indigenous expertise on climate threats. Accomplished, committed people who have thought long about climate issues, unabashed about equity and justice. Enough? No. But they speak frankly about blowing past 1.5º C of warming. That’s more than something. The subject of the panel opened up criticism of scientists, the careful language, fidelity to being experts not activists though knowledge is not inherently neutral. Scientists need to get political. Many won’t like this; none of their universities will.

But back to the status quo. It needs to be unpacked. En bref, after WWII, the U.S. was full throttle. You saw Oppenheimer (You did see Oppenheimer. C’mon. at least pretend. To keep up.) After that, we could do anything. It was the pre-advent of big budget Hollywood filmmaking in the shape of scientific discovery. Research on a massive scale, Cecil B could only dream. An army of extras, except PhDs. Just throwing money at a lot of things. And we did. We went to space. Silly. But okay.

But it was so successful, no one ever had to think much about it. We celebrated Ted Williams, not Jonas Salk. Batting 400 vs. polio? What. Poli-what? Look at how he rounded the bases, hopping like that. Did Jonas Salk round the bases? Did Polio? Yikes – we have measles again. Polio on line 2. No Don Draper, no “It’s Toasted.” No one knew. Multiple diseases fell in the woods and… don’t say it.

Without a need, science never developed a political machinery. Sounds cynical but it needed one, from the outset [remember, we’re de-constructing]. It’s a form of hubris, yes. But it’s hubris of all of ours. Did we just expect to defeat disease and move on to golf courses? Don’t answer that.

There is a need to talk about science to people who never think about science. The pHarmA (whatever) nonsense brand names aren’t helping either. Stop it. Start it.

 

 

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Making Light

Jean Cocteau said, “Film will only become art when it’s materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”

Well, at least we know what direction we’re going.

As I’ve been recently reading about taste, and thinking about plays… here’s part of Andrey Tarkovsky’s journal from 1970:

Playwrights often overdo the clever line or turn as the curtain’s about to fall. It shows lack of taste, You don’t find it in good plays.

The strange thing is that when people come together in a community for the purpose, simply, of production, or for reasons of geography, they start to hate each other and do one another down. Because each one only loves himself. Community is an illusion, as a result of which sooner or later there will rise over the contoinents evil, deadly, mushroom clouds.

An agglomeration of people aiming at one thing – filling their stomachs – is doomed to destruction, decay, hostility.

‘Not by bread alone.’

Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable directing history, or else he does direct it, but by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is.

There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism – naked and cynical – is going to complete the destruction.

Despite the fact that god lives in every soul, that every soul has the capacity to accumulate what is eternal and good, as a mass people can do nothing but destroy. For they have come together not in the name of an ideal, but simply for the sake of a material notion.

Mankind has hurried to protect the body (perhaps on the strength of that natural and unconscious gesture which served as the beginning what is called progress) and has given no thought to protecting the soul.

And here, from January 12, 1972:

Yesterday Sizov dictated comments and criticisms of Solaris collected from various bodies – the cultural department of the Central Committee and the governing board.

I have mad a note of some thirty-three observations. Here they are. There are a great many of them, and if I were to comply with them (which is not actually possible) the whole basis of the film would be destroyed. In other words, it’s even more absurd than it was with Rublyov.

The comments go like this:

1. There ought to be a clearer image of the earth of the future. The film doesn’t make it clear what it’s going to be like (the future, that is).

2. There ought to be some landscapes of the planet of the future.

3. What form of society was the starting-point for Kelvin’s flight – Socialism, Communism or Capitalism?

4. Snaut ought not to speak of the inexpediency (?!) of studying space. It leads to a dead-end situation.

5. Cut out the concept of God. (?!)

6. The encephalograph ought to be run to the end.

7. Cut out the concept of Christianity. (?!)

8. The Conference: cut out the foreign executives.

9. The Finale.