Facts are a silly thing - if they are not part of a story

The culture of science has taken over our lives: what cannot be defined in a mathematical formula does not count. In the long battle between systematic science and human story, the scientific method wins. Arena Kazin suggests the intellectuals get rid of the feelings of inferiority and start telling a story

Erna Kazin, "Odysseus"

I will be clear first: there is no scientific validity to the claim that I will retire from this list. There is no way to disprove it, and anyway there is no way to prove it. Still, I will invite the readers to consider it - as if my claim was, at the very least, a good story. And here it is in a nutshell: these days we are witnessing a frontal attack by the culture of science on the culture of storytelling. "Science" threatens to silence the "story" and remove it from its central place in spiritual and social life. More than that: the more the culture of science succeeds in acquiring hearts - and more minds in the general public - the more the human spirit dwindles and the relationships between people deteriorate.

By the term "science culture" I mean mainly the popular discourse products of brain science, genetics, hormones; To the discourse patterns that develop in the media, in the public, about the scientific ways, the objective research ways, to know man and his work.

To a large extent, today's science culture fits the culture of the market and privatization. In the eyes of the general lay public, the scientists break down the human object into its components - this is the gene that colors the eyes, this is the hormone that produces the feeling of love - they are isolated, separated, labeled and marketed.

A society that embraces the culture of science in this way internalizes a crucial principle: man is not interesting as an inclusive, contradictory and enigmatic entity that exists and develops within social relationships, and also influences them, and may never surprise. In the culture of science, man is only interesting as a detailed being, influenced from within himself and deciphered.

Opposite the "culture of science" I propose to contrast the "culture of the story": and the reference is not only to what is produced by writers and journalists - the authors of the novels and novellas, the news and articles and the short stories - but to the world of plot spinners and those with imaginations of all kinds: the people of the arts, philosophy, psychology, religion , social criticism and morality; What is practiced in the academy for the conference under the name of the father: "Humanities".

The "story" culture is the world where the human spirit seeks to understand and describe, observe and clarify - similar to the culture of science - but it cannot be satisfied with that. In the story culture, the human spirit does not observe what supposedly exists in the world as an object for its investigation. In the culture of storytelling, the spirit strives to create, invent, imagine, shake and challenge.

The culture of storytelling is a culture that places the human ability to give meaning at the center. The culture of the story is a culture of conversation and speech. of mutual relations and of liberation. And no less important: in the storytelling culture, a place of respect is preserved for what is surprising and what is unknown.

Aquarium observation

"We live in an age of science and abundance", wrote Ezera Pound (an American poet and critic, one of the leaders of modern poetry, who lived between 1885-1972) at the beginning of his beautiful book "ABC of Reading", published in 1934. The book is a kind of guide for readers and writers, and its main point is a sharp criticism of the literature of his time. In an age of science and abundance, Pound stated, hard tools are needed to examine the art of storytelling and poetry.

According to Pound, the best way to evaluate high-quality literature - to separate the chaff from the chaff, to find the worthy in the crowd - is the way of contemporary scientists in the field of biology: close observation, first-hand, of the individual being studied, and constant comparison between it and other individuals of its kind .

The way in which Pound required the scientific method symbolizes the moments when the culture of the story suffered from feelings of inferiority towards the culture of science, and sought to use scientific principles to give itself validity (the term "humanities" - why the humanities? Why not the affairs of the spirit and its stories? - is a clear expression of the submissive perception this one).

"A man who is unable to understand the anecdote about 'Agassiz, the student and the fish' is not ripe for modern thought," Pound added, and briefly described the parable that is common in the English-speaking academy, about the student of zoology who asked to be admitted to an internship with Professor Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), the man who founded at Harvard University the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

As a kind of acceptance test, Agassiz asked the student to observe the fish kept in a jar and describe it. The student watched for a long time and offered a description of the fish. The professor was not pleased. Keep watching, he said. The student continued to look for ways to describe the fish - visible characteristics, its scientific names - and wrote a four-page essay. The professor asked him to continue observing. And so again and again, and on and on.
Three weeks later, according to Pound's version, the fish was already in a state of advanced decay, but the student had at least learned a thing or two about it from careful observation. In other versions of the story (usually told by the student, Samuel Shuder) they usually quote the professor, who stated the following lesson: "Facts are a stupid thing, until you put them in the context of a general law."

put everything on one principle

In the bestseller "Naked Soul - A Personal Scientific Journey to the Human Soul" (Yediot Ahronoth - Hamad Books, 2007) Ada Lampert writes: "Brain research, evolution and genetics are the three ways that science offers nowadays to understand man."

Compared to these ways of science, she puts psychology in detail and states that it is like a "defeated bull... The javelin of science was thrown by an educated hand, and the bull began to collapse to its end".

Lampert insists that clinical psychology claims to be the science of the mind, but "it is more like the gospel of the false prophets." According to Dida, "Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung and their students arose at the beginning of the 20th century and swept the entire century after them, in the Iztala of the messiahs of the soul. From the armchair, flipping through various and odd books, from observing the patients, as well as from false reports about patients, as well as manipulations of denial and deception and robbery of patients, they created in the scriptures and the oral Torah ridiculous card structures, which explain to the ignorant, to the peoples of the lands, to the innocent, to the suffering, to the mystics, What is a soul?

Lampert writes in her successful book that psychology is the "big bluff" of the 20th century and is unable to understand the soul and help it in its distress. "The most effective mental help is the one that comes from central nervous system drugs," she states. She adds that she is a "proud reductionist" and brings up in her book about a miracle exactly this: the scientific tendency (as it is perceived by the general public) to make a reduction for every process and every relationship and whole, and to give a so-called objective importance to this reduction.

In another bestseller, "The Female Brain" (Mater Publishing), neuropsychiatrist Luann Brisendein states without hesitation: "We found that the effects of hormones on a woman's brain are so great that it can be said that they create a woman's reality. Hormones can shape a woman's values ​​and desires and determine for her, day in and day out, what is important."

According to Brisendein, the psychoanalytic story is disproven, and similarly the stories of socialization, the political struggles, the feminist social change, the relations between the sexes are disproved. Everything that happens to a woman - and also to a man - in their world is an expression of hormonal activity in their mind.

The bestsellers "Emotional Intelligence" and "Social Intelligence - The New Science of Human Relations", by Daniel Goleman, are another example of how the culture of science is spread and assimilated in society. In both, readers go through a crash course in brain science to internalize concepts and apply them in the way they observe human relationships. Even in these books, the presentation of the scientific thesis comes together with the elimination of the psychological, sociological, and cultural criticism theses.

The popular books I listed above demonstrate the new discourse that is being assimilated into general society. This is the discourse of reduction, decomposition and labeling. The culture of science that these books represent, disseminate and assimilate adores "research" and "discovery" and abhors "criticism", "process" and "change".

People who internalize the principles of this culture stop being interested in the general picture, and in trying to grasp its complexity as much as possible, and settle for the narrow prism of labeling, cause and effect. The people of the culture of science are suspicious of the tellers of the stories wherever they are - writers, essayists, cultural critics, clerics, mystics - and underestimate their products, which cannot be measured.

The culture of science, which gradually extends to all areas of society, encourages, for example, the diagnosis of the medical establishment and the medicine of industry and prefers them over the mental process, the search, the conversation, the help, the social criticism.

In the culture of science, for example, a phenomenon of "attention deficit disorder" is "discovered" in schools, and a drug called "Ritalin" is produced for those with it. The story culture, in this case, will prefer to turn a critical eye towards the education system. Learning what in the classroom - in the rush, in the teaching tools, in the teaching methods - makes it difficult for the students to concentrate. What do they need to reach their potential? To what extent was the opportunity taken away from the students to move in space, to discover their different tendencies. To what extent does the system seek to silence the attention and concentration disorder, to the extent that it exists, to establish order, that peace prevail, and how much this benefits the children and how much it harms their freedom.

More than that: in the culture of the story, the question will be asked to what extent the diagnosis "attention and concentration disorder" is an ideological expression of another super story, hidden from view, according to which a person needs a high ability of attention and concentration in order to function effectively, as an economic entity in society, and does not need the freedom to rebel, to go out, to look for.

It is difficult to exaggerate the consequences of this trend on the human soul and human society. A huge variety of questions and searches for a way out of using the culture of science. What does man need? What is fair and what is cruel? What kind of life do we want to live, what kind of relationships with other people and with the environment do we want to have? A vast range of experiences and cognitive possibilities fades away.

After hundreds of years in which human society was dominated by the stories of the Bible and the New Testament, the stories (theories) of psychology and Marxism, of nationalism and individualism - the narrative voice in human society is being silenced. The ability to tell a story - to look for injustices and correct them, to delight in beauty, to give meaning to suffering, to organize society, to leave room for surprise - is gradually losing its dignity and its central place in society. What remains is a flat and utilitarian consciousness, which determines being in its image.

The lesson of Professor Agassiz - "Facts are a stupid thing, if they are not presented in the context of a general law", I will propose to rephrase: facts are a stupid thing (not to say rude, cruel), if they are not presented in a story. Facts are at most empty vessels, if they are not talked about and questions are asked about them and they are tried to give them meaning, and this meaning is debated and we recognize the freedom of man to influence and shape it.

Erna Kazin is a journalist and writer, and edits "Kaat", a series for journalistic literature, published by the United Kibbutz. Writes cultural criticism in the contexts of consumption, gender and environment. The full article was published in issue number 4 of the magazine "Odysseus"