Star Children

I attended a lecture by Lawrence Kraus the other day at the IHR. It is part of a faculty seminar that is exploring "origins." I'm not sure exactly what he had to add to the origins discussion other than to point out that we are "star children," (which I must say, was moving and poetic--we are all composed from the atoms of long-dead stars) but he did spark interesting discussion about the role of humanities in science. He said that he feels philosophy is pretty useless and should not have much of a role in universities and especially not in science.

This seems antithetical to the transdisciplinary mission of the IHR and the entire seminar. His hubristic point made over and over again at the objection of his fellow humans that science is a self correcting mechanism when done properly that will inevitably lead to "progress"completely misses the point that many humanists have tried to come to terms with: that there is no objective reality, because we all construct reality through our own subjective filters.

I would be inclined to call science a tool that humans can use to try to overcome our Burkean "terministic screens," but I am made very uncomfortable by the idea that somehow humans could ever see outside our selves enough to be truly "objective."

He was so absolutely confident in in age of the universe and the existence of dark matter and Einstein's General Relativity, when in fact I have read several articles recently from what I believe to be non-crackpot scientists that show the universe is perhaps more complicated than we can even conceive of, and all of our assumptions about these things may be wrong-headed.

Not to say that I believe I have a better idea of what is right than noted Cosmologist Lawrence Kraus. Not at all. I just mean to say that I have been given the impression that scientists--non-crackpot scientists, mind you--are still pushing boundaries and challenging assumptions, just like Einstein did. To think that we have arrived at some final truth about even a sliver of our universe is the height of arrogance.

But again, not to say that we can dismiss this all as being quite complicated and dust our hands of it (which is what I would like to do at times). That's just a band-aid that covers up the significant problem that theorists and rhetoricians have teasing out all the different stakeholders and knowledges and structures that make up communities. Even then, these communities exist in relation to other communities, on a horizontal and a vertical axis.

I've been re-reading Jeff Grabill's Writing Community Change to try to get an understanding for how a study that takes this complexity into account can happen. I'm still confused by it. He does an excellent job of showing what a bear a methodology that reflects the true complexity of the world would be like. He poses interesting and pertinent questions. But at the end of it, I still feel largely confused about what I could ever hope to do.

I don't think this is a failing in Grabill's work. He has some tactical suggestions for approaching planning and communication that illuminate the role of the individual as a concrete subject, rather than the abstract. It acknowledges revision, and advocates for "small steps." And, most appealing to me, he comes to the conclusion that non-experts must find ways of recognizing and wielding their own expertise. So what he has essentially done, I think, is point out that the world is complex, and solutions are at best always contextual and at worst ephemeral.

But perhaps I don't mean short-lived changes are the worst case senario. Perhaps I just mean that it is the hardest thing to accept. Therein lies the true challenge of adopting this sort of model. As I have seen in my non-profit management class, there exists a great drive to be as efficient as possible, and to seek out homogeneity. And, I think scientists, for all their struggles with deep problems and convoluted data, at the heart of their work, seek out universal answers that are here one minute and gone the next, because the answers are constructed by us, the star children: billions of years old and yet gone in the blink of an eye.