There is no such thing as a mere scientist, or a merely scientific work. We have a myth that “science” and “scientists” operate objectively, but science does not operate, and we are not scientists. We are all operating as ideologues, with lofty ideals. Science is the slag we leave behind. Alchemists sought eternal youth and infinite gold, and their slag was chemistry. Astrologers sought prophetic insight from the stars, and their slag was astronomy. The Inquisition sought to eradicate witchcraft, and their slag was the realization that witchcraft was harmless (and fake).
The self-styled “scientist” picks up this slag to use it as a new weapon in his or her quest, but they are mere ideologues with a new weapon for use on their journey. They will leave more slag behind in their journey, and it continues.
We are wrong if we believe we can write a scientific book without injecting our own lofty political or spiritual ideals into it. These ideals sneak their way in at every opportunity:
– The stories we choose to highlight, the ones we have missed due to some filter we’ve adopted, and the ones we hide which might ruin the story we’re writing. There are infinite data points available to us, but we choose only the ones which confirm the story we are telling. Shark attacks can be interpreted in two different ways: a small list of attacks demonstrates that we should not fear sharks nor attack them; a long list of interviews of people fearing shark attacks demonstrates that we need to ensure that sharks are not attacking tourists.
– The interpretation of one event becoming another event, or the failure to notice the causality between these events. Things are happening constantly, and we can judge the causality in any number of ways. Video games are more violent than ever, and school shootings are on the rise, and so one story might draw a causal relationship between the two and raise awareness around video game violence; or, a series of stories about kids in recovery from trauma, who were able to vent their frustrations while playing video games during their most difficult moments, because without games they swear they would not have gotten through this most difficult part of their lives.
– The simple act of asking the audience to look in some direction. “Look at the state of soccer/football.” What do we look at? One can draw attention to the violence of “supporters” and demand the government do something; or one can draw attention to the lives of the supporters who have finally found meaning in their “extended families.”
Take a simple photo (below): Patty Hearst, the newspaper tycoon’s granddaughter, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, but after failing to escape she resigned to helping the group rob the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. What does this image mean, then? It depends on what we look at. We might say the SLA just wanted money. Or the SLA was a crock of sh*t and the leader just wanted to bang chicks. The SLA used Hearst to make a statement. The SLA is the work of satan. The SLA is a natural by-product of American imperialism. You can point to a million ways to interpret this image. All of them are lofty.
Can we analyze this image in a scientific way? Well, it’s made of pixels, the pixels are shades of black and white, it came from Wikipedia.org, it was shot by a security camera, the image was taken on April 15, 1974, the camera’s location was at 1 Jones St, San Francisco, CA 94102, the coordinates are… A scientific understanding of the photo is pointless. The meaning behind it is what is interesting and human, and lofty.
Combat is just as lofty, and just as unscientific. There is no “combat scientist”; there are only combat ideals: we must defend ourselves; we must try to talk our way through it; we will never lift a finger; we must protect our nation; we must fight off the imperialists; we must defend others from oppression; concealed carry is the best; open carry is the best; gun bans are the best; don’t question sensei; always question authority; leave and let be; silence is violence… As a combat teacher, you are not a scientist; you are an ideologue, just like your students and just like all the other teachers.
Some believe they are not ideologues at all; they “abhor” ideology and are eager to point out its abuses. They hate the ideology of the church, the government, the nuclear family, hippies. They believe that by reacting to ideology, they are overcoming ideology.
But at the core, they are just against things that have left permanent impressions on their lives: a mother withholding love, a father who left, a regular abuser, a bad bureaucrat, a criminal neighbor. And reaction is the most ideological of all. The reactionary spends his life obsessing over this. Does he know he was a victim of his father’s quest for respect? Questioning him might threaten his own quest for respect. Does the woman know that her mother used her in her quest for love? Questioning her might threaten her own quest for love. If we don’t question our past, these figures drift into the fog of memory, and the search becomes frantic; we try to hunt down our target in 360 degrees of fog. We become a nowhere man, with a nowhere-man ideology. The suicide notes of mass shooters and political assassins are so lofty because they are so foggy: “there is nothing, and my target has vanished, so now I will show the world what nothing looks like.”
Don’t let the target of your obsession sink into the mist: find it and interrogate it. Don’t loathe innocence; love the child you were, the one that the world failed, and innocence transforms from a curse into a treasure. You will never know exactly what kind of ideologue you are, but by interrogating the past, you will become non-reactive and more precise.
We can call ourselves scientists all we want, but we are people, and therefore we have lofty ideals, and we formulate a story as we go. We will leave this story behind as we go on. Others will take our story, pick it apart, reject this and accept that, and derive some truth from it. Science is this slag that we leave behind. Be non-reactive, and your slag will be good stuff, useful for building and crafting. Be reactive, and your slag will be depleated Uranium.
No alchemist died a wealthy man, no astrologer predicted his own death, no doomsdayer has seen the Second Coming. You might not achieve your lofty goal, in this life or the next, but you will have one; you have to have one, because you’re human. But how you face your past will determine whether you leave behind good slag or bad slag.