The amount of knowledge accumulated by mankind is increasing, and humanity still does not part with its prejudices, and often prefers convenient ignorance to knowledge. Why is that? And should it be otherwise?
I don’t know, as a reader, but I must confess that, having flown a lot and being quite able to pronounce a certain set of words about lift, etc., I don’t understand why this contraption weighing about 150 tons does not fall … And, with clever Speaking of genetically modified products, I can’t imagine the structure of a gene. It was easier for the ancient Greeks to imagine that the world consists of atoms, but it was not yet necessary to dislocate the brains in order to imagine the filling of the atom and the combination of atoms into molecules …
“Knowledge is power”, and one can justifiably be proud of the achievements of science, which has so changed our lives. But does it change life itself or its conditions? How is it that with all the successes of science people continue to believe in pseudoscience, prejudices and superstitions, live in parallel with science, very often not intersecting with it in their actions, or even contrary to it? The great physicist, in response to the student’s bewilderment at the sight of a horseshoe over his door: «Professor, do you really believe in such nonsense ?!» said, «Of course I don’t believe, but they say it helps even those who don’t believe.»
For science, the spiritualization of the cosmos is a naive relic. But psychological data show that the vast majority of people, not excluding scientists with their scientific picture of the world, act in life as if they were in an ancient, living cosmos that responds to human actions.
One of the recent studies by psychologists is devoted to what they call resistance to science, which manifests itself in the contrast of scientific progress with ignorance, prejudice and other «charms» of everyday life. Its authors say that the orientation of an adult in life, like that of a child or our very distant ancestors, is aimed at achieving practical goals and, above all, at building relationships. The figure of relationships is fundamentally simple — people do something for something. Transferring this to the world leads to the belief that everything in the world was created by someone for some purpose: “After all, if the stars are lit, does it mean that someone needs it? So — someone wants them to be? and a cow — to give milk, rain — to water the plants, the sun — to shine ..
The child knows that the brain is needed to solve problems, but try to explain to him that he is also needed for love for his mother … Preschool children were asked what would happen if the boy’s brain was transplanted into a piglet. It turned out that a very smart piglet with piglet knowledge and desires would come out. What about adults? Neurobiology, with its constituent neurophysiology, neurochemistry, and other «neuro», reveals the brain mechanisms of the spiritual. But when her methods began to be used in the examination of criminals, lawyers began to insist that since something was wrong in the brain, then the person was not guilty of the crime: it was, they say, the brain that forced him. How are lawyers different from children, in whose mind body and soul, brain and mind are separate things?
- neurons of spirituality
Children, like our ancestors, navigate in the world they discover, which is initially incomprehensible to them, and today we have so much knowledge … But who can grasp all this knowledge? The volumes known to science are enormous — they cannot be rammed into my poor head alone. I want to check, I want proof, but you can’t get it yourself and you perceive information in a childish way — not according to their validity, fidelity, etc., but according to the authority of the source of information and the degree of trust in it. In this regard, the attitude towards the pre-election speeches of politicians is interesting: I will support promises from the repertoire of another party, if they are heard in the speech of a candidate from my own.
Well, what if I even know very, very, very much how, say, a strong player of the Connoisseurs Club makes me smarter in real life or falls under the definition of erudition by Ambroise Bierce: “… this is dust shaken out of books into an empty skull”?
So, let a hundred flowers of ignorance bloom? But let’s leave the word «ignorance» to science snobs and remember the words of one of the characters in «A Wolf Among Wolves» by Hans Fallada that a smart person is not the one who knows how pasta is made, why planes fly, etc. but the one who knows how to live with people.