Will science ever truly make us happy? Will we ever have scientifically happy families?
Or will science give us the ultimate in orgasmic pleasure? Another drug perhaps? Or perhaps you can borrow Roxxxy the sex robot, the newly released first ever sex doll with artificial intelligence.
In a world of half truths , we are convinced more is better, luscious lips are sexy and desirability is measured by your bra size.
However, science is by nature a collection of facts, and science is founded on a philosophy of falsifying ideas. Ideas once current can easily be dismissed. But in the hand of a few publicists, these ideas can gain a social foothold that lasts far longer than the credibility of the research.
This particularly true in the health and supplement industries.
On the other hand many ideas are challenged for political reasons more than science. Benjamin Spock’s was criticized vehemently by people who decried his anti Vietnam War stance.However, I once heard him on a recorded interview promote the idea of non violent discipline in a far less adamant fashion than many social reconstructionists today who oppose a light smack.
When studying residential care, I remember watching a film under the watchful eye of a psychologist about how to help people with intellectual disabilities.
Ironically every few minutes we were advised we don’t do this anymore, or this idea has changed.
Anyone who has seen the Minnie Driver film, Circle of Friends, will know of the research of Margaret Mead.
The film has as a theme the idea that while a man will pursue, it is the girls duty to fight off the male. The girls in the film see the idea, put forward by a priest, as unfair. Then delight at hearing of the Pacific Islander youth left to unbridled un restricted passion without guilt and religious hang-ups.
Mead introduced to the world an incredible range of ideas about cultures and traditions in the pacific. This is why many describe her as the most influential social science researcher of the twentieth century.
Australian anthropologist Derek Freeman, in The Fateful Hoaxing Of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis Of Her Samoan Research, criticized Meads research. He claimed Mead made her observations from just a few talks with two friendly young women, who wanted to tell interesting stories to the young traveler.
Freeman claimed Tau Island men refused to marry women who were not virgins, contrary to Meads account.
Perhaps, today the idea of a woman, not much older than the girls she interviewed, going alone and living with Samoan natives would be challenged as difficult to verify scientifically.
However, Meads youthful enthusiasm inspired public imagination and her book, published when she was 27, rocketed her to stardom, fame or notoriety, depending on your point of view.
She was certainly courageous.
Like Spock, Mead spoke out publically about nuclear weapons and racial injustice.
“No society has ever yet been able to handle the temptations of technology to mastery, to waste, to exuberance, to exploration and exploitation” said Mead. “We have to learn to cherish this earth and cherish it as something that’s fragile.”
So will we, in our scientific age, succumb to the lure of losing our soul to progress? Or have we already?
“We have to use our scientific knowledge to correct the dangers that have come from science and technology,” said Mead.
However, research is a costly affair. The FDA has scaled back its laboratories and the billions of dollars in research seek’s financial reward.
We seek ways to design our bodies to whatever shape fashionista’s dictate is in for the moment.
We chase a diet because it appears to be validated – and is still promoted after the science is disproved.
Or we go the other way and try to so mechanistically disprove everything that we throw the baby out with the bathwater and forget that having a good life does not require a science degree.
As plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz demonstrated in Psycho-Cybernetics, getting a face lift won’t help if the person you are inside remains the same. EVen if we develop the perfect happiness drug, we have millennia of cultural influence have infiltrated our unconscious mind.
Beauty is not skin deep. It comes from within. A beautiful person has a beautiful soul. A beautiful relationship experiences a beautiful union that shines for others to see.
While science discovers why we do what we do, and the mechanism within our brains. No doubt a drug will mimic the neural chemistry and offer us another fix. Another pharmacological souless mechanitic distraction from our soul that will deny us the power of the deeper joy that comes from making our own world a deeply satisfying home?
I must take responsibility for how I build my own world.
Rather than chase the latest technologically inspired quick fix, I must find the love, purpose in passion that is mine alone, and share it to build this world a better place.
