Science the middleman

There is a war being fought this very day. It has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe even millions, but casualties aren't just measured in terms of fatal wounds. There is a war being fought on Earth today, and it has the potential to tear this very world apart. And in this war, I am a combatant.

This is not a war to be fought on battlefields (though it sometimes occurs). It is a war that is being fought in the hearts and minds (both are of course metaphors for the brain) of the people, the skirmishes takes place during conversations and debates and the battles have their venues in courthouses and universities. Conflicts of this sort spans over continents and oceans and disputes can take place regardless of language or race. This is a war of ideas, and the boundaries of the factions are poorly defined.

The world is polarised. On one side stands the proud conservatives, included are the fundamentalists and the self-appointed defenders of traditions. Their leaders prize stability above all else while the followers are content to be obedient servants listening to masters in the hope of receiving ultimate rewards. If they had their way, they would set up a state of theocratic absolutism of the Middle Ages.

The superpower on the other side are the fervent liberals. Theirs is a group of enormous diversity, including the animal rights movements, environmental activists, anti-GM, organic and vegetarian practitioners, the New Age con-artists and their believers, the postmodernists, the anti-corporations, to mention a few. The ideas they mostly embrace is a oneness with nature, calling themselves spiritual while not fond of traditional organised religion. These almost equally mindless supposedly peace-loving Hippies sometime see it fit to use violence to achieve the motives, while their leaders cling on to unrealistic causes.

Trapped in the midst of the crossfire are the repositories of the Enlightenment, the passionate but practical scientists. Although hard at work to achieve progress, they are hindered by policies from cranky people on both sides. Nuts on the right try to block any work from being done to their imaginary souls while similar people on the left block work that however slightly affects their mystical nature, both sides have factions that are indifferent to using guns and bombs to destroy institutions of research, yet Science never retaliates. And how can it? The manpower supporting Science is a small minority of mostly intellectuals, which uphold the principles of the Enlightenment such as free speech, unrestrained questioning, the value of life, among many others.

The power of this third group comes not in numbers but in the method of Science itself, of which is the best and most successful tool that humanity has ever produced. Despite this, the group still struggles for survival, its small size means that funds have to come from elsewhere, a particularly dangerous proposition. The small size also causes the realisation of a flaw in democracy, especially in an uneducated public. Science is not run democratically, neither is it run autocratically, from a system of peer reviews and open criticism, an entirely new political system have arisen, one that might have great potential yet to come. Deep within the scientific community lies the breeding ground for true atheism, a cosmological framework of absolutely no spirituality. For it is here, deep within Science, that claims need evidence to be supported and hence the default position is always non-belief, and it is also here where the a believe in the spiritual is clearly seen to be dangerous.

As a new generation of scientists carry on the war that started in the 16th century, it plays its next political move carefully, for if either side wins Science would wither and a new Dark Age might return, one that have the possibility of entirely wiping out humanity.