Spring

When you boil away the fat by walking thousands of feet and looking around and around, the question Galileo was asking in his prison cell when the pope locked him up for a new fact (that offended God?!?!?) boils down to simply this: How can smart people convince dumb people that brains are not spleens?

Or: Why do dumb guys lock up smart guys for new ideas?

Obviously, this is no fun for the smart guys.

But how much fun is this for the dumb guys?

Are they too dumb to have fun? ‘Cause it’s way more fun to have new idea than it is to kill a new idea.

Not that “dumb” and “smart” are the best ways to frame it. Let’s say curious. The curious love a good question. What’s the antonym of curious? Whatever it is, they want to kill a good question. Open doors are the enemy of closed-mindedness.

Not that you can kill it. The good ideas springs from inevitability, the eternal springs of the bright blue future, and you foil it at your peril.

Springs. What all your feet oughta be bouncing around on. Spring forth. It’s amazing. Whatever it is.

Lies in Art can emerge as new truths.

Lies in Science are eventually found, and they cost the liar.

Lies in Politics are not always found, and they cost lives.

Questions in art are what art is.

Questions in science mother new science.

Questions in politics, we need more of them.

The three feet of Art, Science and Politics can dance together.

But mostly, they don’t.

It’s better when they do: Everyone is happier, lives longer, and dies richer.

How do you get there from here?

That’s a good question. Thank you!

For starters, let’s start with questions, not conclusions.

And tell your feet to start walking.

Both of them twice.

While you’re looking. Around and around.

Science. Politics. Art.

Galileo scientifically figured out that the earth is not the center of the universe. He got really excited! This was great new information! But the Catholic Church, the de facto government, not only failed to celebrate this scientific revelation, but all the church panjandrums forgot revelations completely and instead got real pouty that some mere scientist would refute the word of God and say the earth is not the center of the universe. Oy, the heresy! So they arrested one of the greatest scientists of the century, and threw him in the slammer.

Wouldn’t it be funny if a modern government got upset by some facts?

If Galileo were here today, his heresy would be stating the obvious.

Galileo would ask questions no one wants to ask too loudly . . .

“Modern people have democracy. How long do modern people vote against their best interests?”

“They doubt science? Yet they love the military? Do they not know that the military is built on science? That without scientific exploration, we would not have self-navigating bombs? And radar? And radar-evading jets? And it’s not just the military that science enables. Science enables the highways you all drive every day, and pure science promulgated the prototype of the internet, on which you all also drive every day. All because of science. And you disparage science? For this larval level of stupidity I came back here? After being jailed by the pope for doing science?”

“Frances Bacon was knighted. He was knighted? For what does a scientist need a tin suit and a sword? And for what I was I jailed?”

How does the genius scientist convince small-minded power mongers to please just let me keep on stretching the boundaries of human knowledge?

This doesn’t exactly bring us to art, but one must wonder . . . if small minded power brokers have so much trouble with the truths of science—which confers lavish benefits of human life—how do they tolerate art? Because art is even weirder: while it shares with science urges to stretch the boundaries of human experience, unlike science art produces permanently useless objects whose only distinction from the ordinary materials of which they are made is the way they look. And yet, every society around the world values art. The forms vary widely. The apparent uselessness binds.

Science. Politics. Art. It’s like having three feet that you keep looking at. Twice. You want them to dance . . .

Obviously, this brings us to the Founding Fathers.

They wanted people to bounce off their shoulders. They argued about how to pack that punch, and spawn that bounce. And spawn they did, with over three hundred million great-great-great grandchildren bouncing around. Even if they were not all that great. Some turned out really great! Some didn’t! But the whole enterprise still bounces like crazy.

It didn’t have to. It wasn’t guaranteed. We could have been like Brazil for the past three centuries. Nothing against Brazil, but as far as an idea with some bounce in the political realm, well, the United States has been as bouncy as it gets these past coupla centuries

The Founding Fathers’ idea was not ultimately an idea. It was an impulse, and the quest was how to fashion an idea to support the impulse to spawn max bounce.

And here is the kernel of our miraculous national inception: The rich guys gave their power away. That’s what happened. The rich guys who could have formed an oligarchy club, they gave their power away. Never happened before, not in any history I’ve ever read.

Yes, artists look at their feet a lot more than twice. Artists look at their feet until their feet meld with the substrate; until their feet melt into color fields shimmering on other color fields so the absolute delineations of what are feet vs. what are not feet crumble under the mighty scrutiny of which the human brain is capable given time + desire + cogency + direct perception, which are the very same rotors that serve science.

What unites science and art is the fundamental impulse that what’s been done is not yet done: as much as we are grateful for the shoulders of the giants on which we stand, we are not content to merely stand on those shoulders. We want to leap from them. And we want our shoulders to become trampolines from which others bounce.

Obviously, this brings us to Charles Sanders Pierce, probably the most extremely underappreciated American since way before the beatniks.

 A contemporary of the robber barons, with whom he shared nothing, especially wealth, he plunged feet first into new ground in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and pure science. You know, the invisible stuff politicians sneeze at.

In the 1870s, Pierce speculated that this new-fangled electricity thing could be used to send tiny blips over the electrical wires, in little coded packs of impulses. Like little digits. Digits of coded information. Purely theoretical. Of no use whatsoever. The barons were building railroads, and you could carry stuff around on them. Pierce was building a vast super highway in his mind, and you couldn’t carry anything on it. It was of no value whatsoever . . .

. . . Until about a hundred years later, when the U.S. government (Department of Defense) applied Pierce’s vision in a particular way, and the prototype of the internet came into being. You could carry a lot of imaginary stuff on it. And the government made it. Out of a theory, and some wires, and some electricity.

Sounds like a fairy tale: Destitute genius imagines something that only the government has the imagination to actually create. We all live happily ever after. In our new shoes. Two shoes. Looking at both twice.

Who knew that looking at your own feet twice would expose the crevasse between science and politics?

I didn’t. But there it is, plain as laces, and ya gotta relish the process: writing is not an act of teaching. It’s a way, a path, a practice of learning.

Which brings us again to science, the greatest engine of information ever.

And—that said—well, science and politics are not exactly opposites. It’s not that simple. Politics has been called the art of the possible. In that context, science could be called the art of expanding the possible.

Sometimes, the art of the possible and the unimagined possibilities of the possible reach across the crevasse and find common ground where none existed before.

 Feet on the ground, moving to new ground.

If you want to know where you are, just look at your feet twice.

This reminds me of Science, and Science—given the current climate—reminds me of its opposite: Politics.

Yup, looking at your own feet twice is the raw material of Science, because it is an immediate, elemental, fundamental, empirical way to figure out where you are. It has proven effective in all twenty-four zones and in both hemispheres as a reliable index of physical location.

This practice can spool out into a sense of wonder (I’m standing here? Now?) which is what drives us to polish pure fact outa the cosmic blur.

“Science is what we have learned about how not to fool ourselves about the way the world is. Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” - Richard Feynman

So, yes, we have followed our feet into Science, the greatest engine of information in human history.

We’ll get to the politics part when we get to the politics part. Let’s first savor the wonder that finds facts.

So let’s take some steps and stand by:

We want to know where we are,  so we’re gonna just look at our feet twice.