Directory of Lost Causes (By Quentin S. Crisp)

On Science

Regular readers of this blog will probably be aware that I am not entirely enamoured of science. I think that science needs critics who are NOT religious fundamentalists. I hope that, in my small way, I can fulfil such a role. Science looks to me very much like a sociopathic form of autism that is able to organise itself into a culture the way that ants or termites do. But I have to sigh when I realise that even such an opinion is expressed in terms that have been made available to us by science. Science is in many ways the art of definition, and it seems to define our modern life in many ways. Perhaps for that reason, I feel a kind of duty to know a little about it - as well as a kind of morbid curiosity - and I read the journal The New Scientist whenever I have the time to do so.

Often, just looking at the cover of The New Scientist, or more accurately, reading the headlines of the stories within, is enough to send me into a black mood for the whole day. How to get rid of unwanted memories. Upgrade your brain to the new super-smart. These are not verbatim, but they are, in fact, the substance of some of the headlines. Reading such as these, I feel like they might as well be saying, "How to annihilate the few remaining traces of your humanity in three easy stages."



Is science all bad? People want to know that you're being fair and balanced. Very well - science is good in so far as it has helped us escape some of the tyrannies of religion, and in so far as it might help us to deal with global warming. However, science has its own tyrannies, and its squabbles with religion are really the squabbles of evil brothers - squabbles I would rather not take sides in. And as for global warming - I think we should remember that it is science that has created the problem in the first place, especially in its alliance with capitalism (yes, science is oh-so-impartial).

One of the latest headlines on the cover of The New Scientist is as follows:

"Vice Buster - one pill to stop you smoking, drinking and getting fat."

For some reason, when I read this headline, the following words popped into my head:

"One pill to rule them all and in the darkness bind them."

I am beginning to see science as the truest form of black magic. Newton himself was a practitioner of the dark arts.