{ still waiting for science }

Below is a brief correspondence between myself and a friend. I have decided to post it in an attempt to clarify what I was attempting to communicate in the previous post.

Quoting Katy:

So I gave a quick look to your thoughts on CSI (I'm in between recording grades and getting my lecture notes together)-- very interesting! My initial question would be, how does this affect (if at all) the (often hostile) relationship between "hard" science, social sciences, and liberal arts-- which is admittedly an entirely other article? (I've tended to feel more of an antagonism between the latter two than anything else.) And what role does science play in determining the legitimacy of not only artistic modes of thought, but how we think about "the everyday"? (It seemed that you were getting at this, but I think I'm moving more in a criticism of scientism sort of direction, a la Neil Postman's Technopoly and such, and additionally into its monopolization of all realms of thinking, especially where global capitalism is a reality both fostered by encouraging of such a take-over).

Katy

*****

Reply:

Katy,

Thanks for the read and criticisms! Your antagonism is definitely justifiable, and its really what I first intended to write that peice with (frustrated, as I was, with the presumptive claim that we have to "wait on science"). But as I was writing, the piece just kind of started going another direction, and after about 2050 words, I really didn't feel like taking on the task of defining "art" and "science" to the degree I felt that it might take to really flesh out that antagonism.

You're suspicion of science "determining the legitimacy of not only artistic modes of thought, but how we think about 'the everyday'" is rightly raised, especially as the one character does not seem willing to assess the truth of ANY kind of claim until "science" shows up. There is an authority we tend to give to scientific claims that becomes totalitarian, it "has the last word."

On the other hand, one thing that was kind of an undercurrent in my post was that science's "last word" is sometimes artificial (represented in the show by the two characters using the label "mob," and thus were not entirely holding out for whatever science may provide) and/or misplaced (seeing that the conversation was about motive, how would science affirm that the act was racially motivated?).

There is also the curious fact that their and our "waiting for science" is answered in the end only by Greg's "art." Of the two ways to read this, I chose to take to it that "art" is often all we can come by, and that that's sufficient, and actually a better understanding of what science, in itself, is. So, by that reading, "art" incorperates "science." The other reading would be that Greg's "art" is subsumed under the label "science," such that science is the broader, more encompassing category.

The dilemma is that "art" has the final word on a show that presents itself as all about science and its sovereignty. But is there really a dilemma? I mean, CSI is a "show" after all, and as such, is an art-form itself. What the writers, producers, and actors do is art, not science.

I am not saying that the other reading is unfounded, and the episode definitely holds that possibility and prompts such a discussion as this. But by my reading, the episode holds a strong possibility of a different, "counter-cultural," reading.

I know this hasn't fully answered your question, which is more of a cultural criticism than I was going for, though your questions and their answers are likely needed (because I think they're right) as a reason why my reading of CSI might matter. Thanks!

-Thomas

{ waiting for science }

“We got to wait for the science, don’t we?”

This is a line from the popular TV sitcom, CSI. Here’s a bit more of the context:

WARRICK: You working that case where some mob beat up an Indian cab driver for hitting a kid?
SARA: Cabbie didn't actually hit the kid. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
WARRICK: You think it was racially motivated?
SARA: Yeah, I do. White mob, white kid, dark-skinned cabbie -- I don't like the math.
WARRICK: Yeah. We got to wait for the science, don't we?
SARA: I'm trying.
WARRICK: That's the job. Good luck.

The “white mob” was a group of burly white bikers who, after witnessing the “dark-skinned cabbie” run-over the “white kid,” proceeded to violently pummel (and subsequently kill) the cabbie, whom, they thought, was trying to get back in his car to flee the scene. After 30 minutes of pseudo-psychology and flawless causal connections, we learn that the “white kid” had already been fatally stabbed by another character (his step-father) and had stumbled out into the street half-dazed and half-dead. The “dark-skinned cabbie” was unfortunately “at the wrong place at the wrong time,” and had not noticed the kid fall exhausted in the middle of the road. Finally, what the “white mob” perceived as an attempted escape turned out to be the cab driver’s attempt to radio in the accident on his dashboard walkie.

****

Now, the “science” that Sara must wait for is what the detectives on the show need in order to prove a definitive connection between the brutal beating (and death) of the cab driver and the “dirty dozen” - that is, the “white mob.” This “science” is eventually provided by DNA, as is par for the course (except in reality where no “dark-skinned cabbie’s” family would ever be able to afford, nor would many courts provide, the type of legal litigation necessary to get such evidence in the court), as one character on the show, by way of what he calls “art,” displays a board matching DNA found on the victim to that of 6 members of the mob:

GREG: First, I processed Mr. Khandelwahl's (the "dark-skinned cabbie") clothing. Then I compared the DNA I lifted from said clothing to the DNA from the dirty dozen.
(GREG indicates the board covered with a sheet.)
GRISSOM: All I see is a sheet.
GREG: But what I do is art. And now, I'm ready to unveil it. Welcome to the new and improved match game.

This pair of exchanges seems to prompt two related sets of questions.

First, what does Sarah’s invocation of “math” reveal?

Second, in what ways need we “wait on science”? What might constitute such waiting and is such “waiting” typical of our experience?

Thirdly, is there a boundary that is transgressed here between “science” and “art,” seeing that it is Greg’s “art” that provides the “science” Sara has been trying to wait for? What is the connection between the two that would justify "art" as providing an answer for "science"?

And finally, what does all this say about the world of CSI, and thus, of our world? (CSI is not written, directed, produced, or acted out in a vacuum. Its ideas must come from people who live with us and the show itself must be intelligible to its audience. The world of CSI need not be an accurate representation of our world (though I think this is what it attempts to approximate) to shed light on our life together.)

****

In this episode, it seems that Sara has to “wait on science” to confirm her suspicion that the crime was racially motivated. That suspicion is based on, what she calls, “math” - the sum of relevant factors that make up the discernible equation. As noted before, those factors are “white mob” (the concept of, and hence, definition of a “mob" is a theme that gets developed throughout the episode), “white kid” (or victim - though this latter word is avoided as to not draw premature conclusions and thus limit the factor - although this doesn’t seem a concern in the labeling of the “mob”), and “dark-skinned cabbie.”

But unlike math, this equation is dependent on its context to make it troubling, and true. The equation, in itself, need not trouble Sara. However, her choice of predicates points to a context where the equation is troubling, a context where racial tensions matter.

I guess we can call this math; it seems such an expression is fairly colloquial. We say, “this doesn’t add up” or “the situations has gotten exponentially worse.” The implications of referring to this particular situation mathematically, however, are revealing. First, it assumes (or recognizes) a world where these factors matter and are relevant to each other (for example, it would not make any sense to us if Sara had replaced race with height measurements and was troubled).

That Sara describes the situation as math and that her coworker, Warrick, describes her job as “waiting for science,” also reveals that those disciplines are what Sara (and presumably the others on the show) uses to make sense of the world. "Math" and "science" are taken as the relevant signs, the relevant points that make up a specific picture of reality.

Now, when we say of that something “doesn’t add up,” we mean that, given the factors we think to be relevant and their relative relationships (i.e. causal), we do not know how to make sense of it, how to describe it, to communicate it. To “not like the math,” then, could either mean to not like the conclusion (that the crime was racially motivated) or, by my reading, it is to not like what makes up the world where these factors hold. To “not like the math” is to not like the world where such a conclusion makes sense. Sarah has already admitted that she thinks the crime was racially motivated, she need not vaguely allude to such a belief here after just having confessed it openly.

What then do we make of Warrick’s response that Sara (and himself) has to “wait on science”? I want to set aside the possibility that this is merely bad writing, such that Warrick means the science will determine the mob’s guilt or innocence - which is not being discussed here. The guilt is already implied (if not assumed) in the designation “mob.” I will digress briefly to defend this.

Later in this episode, a character named Grissom states: “Emerson once said ‘The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.’ The beast is up for murder.” And later: “The mob mentality ... relieves individuals from having to distinguish between right and wrong.”

The word “mob” is thus consistently used in a decidedly negative sense. However, in Grissom’s grip, Emerson’s “beast” looses almost all its teeth, being reduced here to a vicious, mindless organism - rather than Emerson’s understanding of a creature that has no (need of) a guiding morality, nor depth nor truth which it owes to itself to pursue, discover, and abide by.

The later commentary Grissom provides (that the “mob mentality relieves individuals from having to distinguish between right and wrong”) restores a bit more of Emerson’s bite, though, still being set in the context of Grissom’s earlier comment, no one but the “dirty dozen” stand accused of such “beastliness.” The episode’s title “Blood Lust” also gives a hint into how we are to interpret “mob.”

In sum, the designation “mob” seems to imply a group whose members have amalgamated themselves into a “beast” - understood here as an organism that does not think (at all), but obeys only its own passions, that is, it’s “blood lust," its irrational and overwhelming desire to destroy life.

This said, Warrick’s choice of designation (“some mob”) reveals that the accused already stand condemned in his eyes. Moreover, the discussion between Sara and Warrick here is about motive, not guilt (“You think it was racially motivated?”).

Also revealing is Sara’s response to Warrick’s question about waiting. Is it because she recognizes that Warrick’s question is more of a statement (“We got to wait for the science,” such that the question at the end is more of a recognition of a state of affairs than a query into them) that Sara need not respond with an affirmation or denial, but can simply respond “I’m trying”? Both characters, it seems, view “waiting for science” as a somewhat lamentable, because difficult, situation.

What, then, does it mean to “wait for science”?

It seems here that Warrick’s statement about “waiting for science” invokes a sense of waiting for reality to confirm or disconfirm one's suspicions. It is waiting for whatever you take as reliable evidence about the world around you to come into contact, into communication, with your beliefs about the world.

"Waiting for science" is not skepticism, per se. We cannot avoid making claims about the world, we have accepted a certain picture, good or bad, of the world (our“math”); without which life together would be impossible. This "waiting" therefore, is a waiting for confirmation: is this math right? do I have the picture right? can I “go on” with this formula and its consequences?

Warrick’s response (to Sara’s “I’m trying”) that “that’s the job” is expandable, then, to “that’s life.” Life is about checking our “math” - our conception of how the world works - against tests and trials, against evidence.

The difficulty then, the difficulty that CSI avoids, is knowing what tests are reliable. In CSI and similar detective stories, there is always found evidence, always right and well-performed tests, and (almost) always bad guys (and girls) caught. The dots always connect in the end.

But that’s what shows do, there is a beginning, a middle, and an end - conflict and resolution. But in life, these things are (typically) only discernible in retrospect. We often do not know if our “science” is right, what “tests” matter, what should and should not alter our “math.” That is the difficulty of life, of living; we, like Sara, are left “trying.” And that is why we need to temper Warrick’s notion of “science” with something similar to Greg’s notion of “art.”

Near the end of the show comes the second exchange, wherein Greg states: "But what I do is art. And now, I'm ready to unveil it." At which point he turns and removes the sheet to show a board with the photos of the mob members and the cabbie's clothes, matching the DNA found on the clothes to the mob members those DNA samples match.

Why is this “art”? Though the board is a visual depiction and connection of the evidence, it seems no more “art” than a graphed asymptote. Greg seems to be simply presenting the “science” Sara and Warrick had been waiting on. So why “art”? Is Greg just overly pleased with his cut and paste techniques?

I want to suggest that Greg (and we as well) may consider his work "art” because it manifests a certain (re)presentation and (re)construction (as evidenced by the flashbacks spliced into Greg’s explanation) of reality.

That it is “DNA evidence” gives it a certain finality and certitude for most TV viewers (a finality and certitude they expect), though, by my understanding, the evidence Greg would have been able to pull would not have been that definitive at all. Even at the end of the presentation, Greg admits that he only has evidence for half the men convicted. There is still room for interpretation, still suspicions, still space to bring our math into question.

Art (re)presents and organizes the world in specific and purposeful ways, much like Greg's board) in order to communicate something about how we are to see our world, whether that be through Romanticism’s beauty or Post-modernism’s cultural critique. It asks us to question our own “math,” our own organization and conception of the world. It asks us to question the “math” presented in the art itself. It does not have as definitive a voice as science, nor should it claim to have such. (How definitive the voice of science is and how much weight we are to give to it is another question. Here I am merely intending to juxtapose the two, to demonstrate how they speak differently.)

It need be said that Greg's "art" is still a form of, or similar in purpose to, science. It speaks with the definitive voice the show needs to cadence. And, I think, the line between the two in our own world can be similarly blurry, possibly even more so. It may be that what while what passes for "art" on CSI is more "science," what is considered "science" in our world is more "art" than we usually (and comfortably) admit.

Maybe as we wait for whatever-may-end-up-constituting "science" to confirm or disconfirm our math, we should be looking to (as well as creating) art. Maybe waiting for science isn’t the job here so much as it is the inevitability, where we don’t yet know what to rightly call science. Maybe we need the humility to recognize of our world more as art. Maybe the best we can do is art. Maybe that’s what we’re called to do.

{ the ephemeral & the catastropic }

I woke up this morning on the couch of my friend's apartment to the sounds of Midlake's "Bandits," off their album The Trials Of Van Occupanther. And though I've heard the song several times before, it sounded so incredibly beautiful and...perfect this time. Despite my physical discomfort (see below), and the inconvenience of being awoken at 7 a.m., the song could not have sounded more amazing, more perfectly composed. I don't know if it was my own early morning stupor or a dream's residue that made that music seem so sonically serendipitous.

But the physical reflex that sent my hand lunging for the snooze button cut short any waking and sustained enjoyment I might have had, and, just like waking from a dream, the experience was soon relegated to the fickle archives of memory. And just like most dreams, even that vivid and profound experience slowly slipped into ephemerality.

Ephemeral. How perfect!

See, the reason I was on the couch and not in the bed that had been set aside for me was because the apartment had been without air conditioning for the past few days, and the living room was the only room with a fan. So I decided to set up camp there for the night. Six hours later, there I lay, early morning, my throat was sore and hot (as it had been to some degree for the past few days for some unexplained - because uninvestigated - reason), my body had that sticky-sweaty feel, and despite dropping temperatures and a ceiling fan, the room was still about 85 degrees. Those factors combined created, fairly accurately, the experience of having a fever. I say all this because of ephemeral's etymology. It's first documented use was in 1398 as a medical term denoting a fever lasting only a day. How fitting then, that my ephemeral experience was two-fold in such an etymologically accurate manner!

But I think the etymological roots of ephemeral still linger in our usage today, even if only existentially coincidental. For it seems that ephemeral experiences, such as my musical morning awakening, remain in our memory much like those memories forged during periods of serious illness, such as, especially in early medicine, a fever. When one returns to those experiences afterwards, there is a certain sense in which we remember them only as interruptions, and as such, the more temporal distance that grows between our current self and that memory, the more difficult it is to definitively conclude that that experience wasn't simply a dream, or something seen in a movie, or a childhood fantasy.

This might be different if we used "ephemeral" to describe events that, even though fleeting, were substantial and consequential. However, this is not our ordinary use of the word. What is ephemeral is usually taken to be fleeting because it is insubstantial, because it is not largely important. One might say that, in one sense, "catastrophic" is the opposite of ephemeral, for though both denote a event or thing that is only brief and momentary, the former has weight, has consequences.

If the grass of the field is ephemeral, the lightening that splits the oak is catastrophic. And when we look back at the field, it is easy to remember the lightening and to see its effects. We might have once built a swing from one of its limbs that was rendered useless when the tree was struck. Catastrophic events change our lives, they "overturn" (Gk. katastrephein) the familiar. But looking back at the field, at the grass, we may have vague memories of greener patches, but for the most part, whatever changes may have occurred need not effect the large scheme of things, need not effect our lives.

What then of a God who clothes this grass? Of a God who feeds the sparrow? Of a God who counts hairs? When the beauty of the fleeting, the ephemeral, is eternally sustained in the heart of God? When everything is held in the life of God? When dreams are eternally sustained and breathed and loved? When the ephemeral is catastrophic?

{ the shadow of casualty }

Casualty

Pronunciation: \ˈka-zhəl-tē, ˈkazh-wəl-, ˈka-zhə-wəl-\

Function: noun

Inflected Form(s): plural ca·su·al·ties

Date: 15th century

1 archaic : chance, fortune
2: serious or fatal accident : disaster
3 a: a military person lost through death, wounds, injury, sickness, internment, or capture or through being missing in action b: a person or thing injured, lost, or destroyed

****

How has this word - casualty - lost its shadow? - that evidence at our feet that what looms above has mass, has density, has reality. That shadow that swallows our own as whatever-it-is passes overhead. Maybe this is one reason why Plato's "forms" fell out of favor? Those looming perfects in which everything participated had no shadow, they never actually participated in the world. We could never stand beside them and judge our height against theirs by comparing the length of our shadows in the evening. They were said to somehow loom above us, but they never touched us, never did our shadows meet. (The mystery of the Incarnation.)

But "casualty," how can casualty not have a shadow? It's reality, its weight, its shadow is attested by every grieving mother, every nameless grave, every obituary. The word carries with it the sense of "victim," and often of death, of tragedy. So maybe the shadow is still there, maybe the word does cast a shadow. Maybe it's just that we have let our eyes adjust to the darkness. It's not an etymological mistake that the root of the word is "casual." And as our language has gently modified "casual" from a sense of chance to a sense of nonchalance or unconcern ("casual sex"), so too has "casualty" lost its vitality, its depth, its shadow, or rather, we have diluted our perception of it.

Casualties are those lost by accident, victims of what is done casually. What, then, separates those lost in war and those who have casual sex - can we call them both "casualties"? Do we? Or, what of those who suffer because "casually" going about our own lives leads to their suffering - are they "casualties"? Or, maybe more revealing, what does it mean that ordinary, every-day attire, and sex with strangers both take on the same predicate? And from which sense of the word, if we are using them in two different senses at all, do we draw from when we say "casualty"?

How we use our words reveals our common life together. That we can communicate and understand one another reveals a common understanding, a communal acceptance of definitions, definitions that are always changing, but never arbitrarily. When we use one and the same word for Friday business attire and lives shattered by bullets and bombshells, it reveals either our disgust for the ordinary or an acceptance of the unacceptable, of the atrocious. Either the ordinary has become hideous, or the hideous has become ordinary. And, as the ordinary is the acceptable, I fear that it is the latter. I fear that our eyes and our tongues have learned all too well how to see and speak in and with darkness. We have, in a very frightening sense, become acclimated to our disorders, to our brokenness. Our language gives us away.

****

I have two friends who are married to each other, and are going through a very difficult time in that marriage. The difficulty, or difficulties, are not big, hot-topic issues like adultery or abuse. Rather, it's the small, ordinary things. It's those continual mistakes that have become par for the course. It is all the accidents that have come to constitute a character. Namely, the wife has become a casualty in the marriage, a victim to casualties - those ignorant and negligent acts of the husband. Now, though a casualty is a victim, the word seems to carry a sense that the pain or death inflicted was unintentional, it "just happened," it could not have been avoided. So, when I say she is a "casualty" I am not implying that she suffers any kind of physical or verbal abuse, I am merely saying that she suffers what could be understood as "just the way things are."

But there is the problem. She could be a casualty, I might be able to use that word. Can I? Can we? Do we? What do we say when...? That all depends, I guess, on what we take as casual, on what we understand to be more than casual, more than accidental. The moral problem begins with the words with which the moral problem is posed. Who and what are true casualties? What do we mean by casual?

I am not calling for a singular, all-encompassing definition, but for an examination of how we already use the word. Then, I hope, will we begin to see the shadow cast by "casualty." Then (and only then?) will the word again carry weight, density. Then will we understand the state we are in. My hope is that we will again be able to feel the chill when our own existence becomes entangled, and swallowed, in the shadow such a word does cast.

{ beneath the depths above us }

Today sits outside my window, waiting, slightly slouching beneath the weight of the humidity gradually setting in. The sunlight is muted, as it tends to be these early summer mornings when the earth is delivering fresh libations of dew and vapor. The alter, itself; the offering, it's life-blood. How simple that act of praise, written as it is into the grain of the world. But what an act of faith! The earth gives back to the sky the very gift which gives it life. The greenery, in joy, in fruition, gives it's very life--self-sacraficially--to the sky from whence that life first fell. There is no expectancy or certainty, on the earth's part, that that life will return. It gives wholly of itself, it relinquishes itself. In silence.

We call it the "water cycle" and bring it into our classrooms, containing it with diagrams on posters and textbooks. We domesticate it. Demystify it. But predictability need not supplant surprise or wonder - or emulation. But cycles are circles - and we all know there is no point where a circle begins, so how could we even begin to enter into a circle, this cycle of praise and blessing. Each point along the curve is only what must have been or what must be. Our lives, we tell ourselves, are different, need be different. Life, we tell ourselves, is about choice, free will, autonomy, space.

What a sad, sad lie.
What an easy, easy lie.
What a lonely, lonely lie

. . . when every touch, every word can move us to tears, to anger, to joy. Our bodies, our lives, our "selves" are always a thousand leagues beneath the beautiful and frightening ocean surface, touched, pressed, always. Our stars do not shine pure and straight but are refracted a thousand times by the depths above us, by those manifold lives around us that make up any singular life. Yes, we move, we walk, we choose to turn, but beneath the wieght of the depths above us, and within the movement of currents around us.

Currents, cycles, circles. Moving, turning, re-turning.

We are afraid to admit we are moved by currents, that we are always already within cycles. That we are moved, pressed, and without complete control. We are so afraid we will not be able breathe down here, underwater, in this the thickest of days when the humidity materializes on every flesh. When our bodies become the world's altar, when we are wrapped up with and within those summer day libations. When we are dragged into a cycle, a circle, a current of praise that ever presses and lifts us. When knowledge gives way to acknowledgment. When we feel the weight beneath the depths above us.