Are our inner selves being destroyed?

In reading about time last week, I encountered the work of Alan Lightman, astrophysicist and author of EINSTEIN'S DREAMS, for whom time remains a mystery, even after he explored most concepts of time.    This was a refreshing view to encounter, but Lightman is well known for bridging the gap between the scientific world he inhabits and the world of the soul and imagination, which he explores in some of his books.

In a recent article, Lightman laments the loss of slowness and silence, of reflection and solitude in a culture that has suddenly become electronic and invasive. He compares the situation today, in which many young people prefer smart phones to actual conversations, to global warming as a dire predicament with no easy solution.

If we lose the ability to be alone with a book or in nature without external stimulation, we will lose our "ability to know who we are and what is important to us."  He is concerned about being "relentlessly driven by the speed, noise and artificial urgency of the wired world."

Lightman, who teaches both science and humanities at MIT, is one of those truly enlightened people who see the larger picture and are able to ask the major questions about the meaning of life.   This very ability is being challenged on college campuses, and has been,  as more and more faculty vote to downgrade the humanities in favor of the technoscientific fields.

A professor of medical ethics at my alma mater, St. Louis University, Dr. Jeffrey Bishop, writes to protest his university's decision to follow the path of Notre Dame and countless other leading schools in revising the core curriculum so that it allows students to avoid courses in literature, philosophy, and foreign language.  "Every university is being pushed in this direction," he writes, "because this is where the money is."

Noting that our university in St. Louis is a Jesuit school, Bishop says a Catholic university should be ideally poised to maintain and cultivate the humanities and take the lead in keeping a solid, balanced core curriculum. It is hard to imagine a graduate of a Jesuit college who has not studied history, literature, and philosophy, who has not been exposed to the perennial questions about enduring values and ideas.  Instead of thinking about great ideas and the mysteries of reality, as Lightman does, too many universities  pander to the trendy technoscientific curriculum that is turning out more specialized graduates who seem destined to fill their slot in the global machine that robs us of interiority.

I am grateful to Drs. Bishop and Lightman for combining a respect for the values of science with seeing the urgent need to explore the more mysterious realm of the inner life.

The scientist as mystic

The novelist David Foster Wallace is quoted as saying, in everyday life, "there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships."  Most of the things we worship, he continues, eat us alive.

He means our ego, our power, our possessions or beauty or intellect; if we put these at the center of our lives, we feel ultimately unsatisfied. We are not the center of the universe, after all, if we look at the Big Picture. People have often thought over the centuries that the natural world belonged to us; we are now beginning to see that we belong to it.

This insight is part of a revealing excerpt from Alan Lightman's book about the scientist as mystic: "Searching for Stars on the Island in Maine."
I am indebted to Maria Popova's recent Brain Pickings newsletter for the excerpt.

The supposed wall of separation between science and religion or spirituality has long been crumbling as more and more scientists embrace mystery and the infinite and actually say, as Lightman does, that "the infinite is not just a lot more of the finite."  He would agree with Carl Sagan, who long ago stated, "The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."

Lightman, without espousing religion and while remaining an experimental scientist, goes further by saying that nature "tempts us to believe in the supernatural," that we have a natural human longing for absolutes in a world of relative, changeable things.  For this MIT scientist, humanist and writer, the link between science and religion is embedded deep in human nature itself.

In a world of impermanence and imperfection, Lightman, while remaining committed to his work in natural science, also sees the power of the unchangeable, the eternal, the sacred.  He sees these Absolutes--immortality, the soul, even God--as enduring concepts that can anchor and guide us through our temporary lives. He writes lyrically of his transcendent experience one night on the ocean.

Lightman is one of many thinkers who can be at home in both worlds: that of reason and experimentation and that of the unprovable, but nevertheless real, realm of the spirit. I think of the Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who is remembered today more as a mystic than as a paleontologist. And reading his dense (translated) prose is a challenge in a way that reading Lightman is not.