Message in the Bottle

 
Man did not lose his self in the modern age but rather became incommunicado,
being able neither to speak for himself or be spoken to.
-Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle

 

Growing up in the latter days of the 20^th century, I was steeped in the scientific mindset.  I probably did my first science project at about eight years old.  In my particular experience there was never a war between science and religion, one of the adults in the church, with whom I had a close relationship, was a retired DuPont chemist.  He was both a man of faith and science, those things seemed entirely compatible.  The first time I encountered anti-science was in the “debate” about creation versus evolution.  For some reason, there seemed to be people out there that insisted on re-litigating the Scopes Monkey trial from 1925.  It was now the 1980s, we had personal computers and Sony Walkmen, surely we weren’t seriously still having this conversation after 60 years?

               Well, as it turns out that was just the tip of the iceberg.  That so-called debate didn’t really have many real world consequences. Even the Scopes trial itself was sort of staged for headlines.  After all, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan duking out the legal ramifications of the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy, that’s what people did for fun before television right?  I will tell you though that I always felt that the nature of the beast was a little more sinister. There was something rotting away at the core of our “modern” world.  Walker Percy claims to identify that rotting thing at the center of Modernity in The Message in the Bottle; it is the truth that science does indeed have a weakness.  The weakness is that science cannot tell you anything about an individual, only about how that individual relates to other individuals.

               We know what we know about oxygen atoms, water molecules, DNA strands, Bonobo monkeys, human societies, planets, stars, galaxies, and anything else you can name because they are a type of thing that can be studied and described based on how they compare to another thing. The more tests and comparisons we do, the more we are able to do, and the more we can know.  The things we know actually start at a middle level of observation, and extend downwards and upwards.  We knew quite a bit about water long before we knew about hydrogen and oxygen.  We knew that there was a sun in the sky long before we understood that it was a massive ball of nuclear fusion that our planet as well as others were orbiting around.  We saw the stars and figured that they were probably something very different than our sun, because they look so very different.  The point is that we must learn, at some point, what comparisons are valid and which are not, and that knowledge cannot be gained in isolation.  When COVID hit us we had a bit of a running start because we had seen Corona viruses before and indeed we knew rather a lot about viruses in general.  It wasn’t a case of something like an alien infection as Michael Crichton imagined in The Andromeda Strain.  It was a type of virus that we had some knowledge about, and therefore a starting point.  That’s the strength of science.

               Percy’s critique of modernity, and he passed away in 1990, so he did not live to see how accurate and prophetic he actually was, is that it simultaneously puts it’s faith in science, and cultivates an almost psychotic brand of individualism. Descartes famous, “I think, therefore I am,” focuses too narrowly on the first person singular, it doesn’t allow for our collective connections as humans, it puts our identity solely on “I,” rather than allowing for a fuller vision of what humanity really is. Science, which is intrinsically concerned with relationships, comparisons, and building knowledge upon knowledge, cannot “speak” to an individual human being, only to humanity. This fact creates a seeming paradox, which Percy expands into several pages of questions that all share the theme of: why are we so miserable? Individualism is not, a priori, a bad thing, but it has toxic components that can and should be mitigated by things like community and religious devotion.  Humans are at their best when they recognize and cultivate their connections with one another and with all of creation.  We’re the only species that can, because we’re the only species (that we know of) that has created the requisite language to describe that connection.

               We have described it again and again and again in all different languages and in all different cultural contexts, and yet it is still very possible to remain in what Percy called “a cocoon of dead silence,” where you do not seek communion with anything beyond yourself.  Technology has rapidly given us the terrible capability to indulge this tendency, and even given us some pale imitations of connection.  There are real and valuable ways to connect using technology, I mean Zoom has been a lifeline in a lot of ways, but you know it’s really not the same.  It’s sort of like Methadone that they give to heroin addicts, it staves off the detox, but it doesn’t give them the high.  You see it in the way that people you know to be good people will say mean things on social media, re-post conspiracy theories and generally make you wonder if they have lost their minds. They are stuck in their cocoons and they aren’t getting the connection, accountability and general feedback that they need to see the truth.  Science can’t seem to break that cocoon because the cocoon was designed to resist it; facts that attempt to drill in can be dulled by the simplest assertion of individualism: I get to choose/decide/act how I want.

               So church, here’s the point, and I do actually have a point: the scientific approach to the world needs us.  They don’t know it, and they honestly can’t admit it because any scientist who uses God to support or confirm their hypothesis is a bad scientist.  What’s more they may not trust us because of things like the Scopes trial, but here’s the thing, we have something that counteracts the psychotic individualism of the cocoon of dead silence: a connection to the Being at the center of all things.  I’ve told you before about Richard Rohr’s observation of the etymology of the word religion: the Latin root is ligio, which means to bind together.  Religion is by nature the practice of a relationship.  In the midst of the horrific and tragic rampage of us against them that took place in the 1930s in Germany, Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote a book called Life Together, which held forth the idea that community and communion in Christ was the only thing that would stem the bloody tides that were rising in the world.

               Walker Percy’s theory about the paradox of why we’re so miserable when we have little reason to be is that we are missing a coherent context in which to create meaning.  The scientific legacy of the enlightenment gave us a lot of good things, but it also saddled us with this legacy of isolated individualism. For us to be relevant to the world as it is now, we cannot reject the good characteristics of the previous age. We certainly can’t turn back the clock to some previous age either.  What I think we can and should do is offer people connection to a community.  We can use both traditional and technological means, we can embrace the things that science shows us, and even welcome the process of change and adaptation, we can welcome diversity rather than living in fear of the other, we can allow the Spirit of God to move among us and bind us together.  That is the key piece, the connection to something that is greater than our individual self that puts us back in communication with the universe and with each other.