I woke twice before dawn. By the second time the stars had faded and light cracked the horizon. Venus had moved all the way across the sky, and now it too dimmed. I followed it until my eyes ached. I stared and stared until I couldn't even see the sky. But it was hopeless. Venus was gone. It shouldn't have been. Astronomers know the amount of light reflected by the planet, and we should be able to see it, even in broad daylight. Some Indians can. A few hundred years ago, sailors from our own civilization navigated by it, following its path as easily by day as they did by night. It is simply a skill that we have lost, and I have often wondered
why. Every human mind has the same latent capabilities, but for reasons that have always intrigued anthropologists different people develop them in different ways, and the distinctions, in effect, amount to unconscious cultural choices. In our society, for example, we now think nothing about driving at high speeds down expressways, a task that involves countless rapid, unconscious sensory responses and decisions which, to say the least, would have intimidated our great-grandfathers. Yet in acquiring such dexterity, we have forfeited other skills like the ability
to see Venus, to smell animals, to hear the weather change. Perhaps our biggest choice came four centuries ago when we began to breed scientists. Every society, including our own, is moved by a fundamental quest for unity; a struggle to create
order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the face of diversity, consistency in the face of anomaly. This vital urge to render coherent and intelligible models of the universe is at the root of all religion, philosophy, and, of course, science. What distinguishes scientific thinking from that of traditional cultures is the tendency to seek the shortest possible means to achieve total understanding of their world. We deliberately divide our world, our perceptions, and our confusion into however many particles are necessary to achieve understanding according to our rules of logic. We set things apart from each other, and then what we cannot explain we dismiss with euphemisms. For example, we could ask why a tree fell over in a storm and killed a pedestrian. The scientist might suggest that the trunk was rotten and the velocity of the wind was higher than usual. But when pressed to explain why it happened at the instant when that individual passed, we would undoubtedly hear words such as chance, coincidence, and fate; terms which, in and of themselves, are quite meaningless but which conveniently leave the issue open. Few laymen know or even care to know the principles that guide science; we accept the results on faith, and we simply defer to the accredited experts of the tradition. Yet we scientists
work under the constraints of our own illusions. We assume that somehow we shall be able to divide the universe into enough infinitesimally small pieces, that somehow even according to our own rules we shall be able to comprehend these, and critically we assume that these particles, though extracted from the whole, will render meaningful conclusions about the totality. Perhaps most dangerously, we assume that in doing this, in making this kind of choice, we sacrifice nothing.
But we do.
I can no longer see Venus.
Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Warner Books, 1985. 207-210.
