Reports of Science's demise are premature. Science is not dead, but it is giving up its ghost. Say what?

The specter of Science is its fanatical absolutism. There is only one Truth and we are its possessors. Shades of Religion. There is only one world and it is physical, that is completely explicable on the terms of Physics.

Over the last generation, coming off of a high, scientists have learned the hard way that you just don't want to tangle with the human spirit -- not intellectually, not politically, not in any way. It is a losing battle fought by fools.

So the scientists have been learning how to keep their collective mouths shut, or at least muted, when it comes to confronting the contra-scientific trends in other segments of society. They are learning to tend to their own knitting, and to leave the metaphysics to the metaphysicians, whoever and wherever they may be. Thus do they avoid garnering the ire of the public.

Some of these lessons have also been taken to heart by a larger number of scientists that even they would like to admit. This is certainly my educated suspicion that comes from reading between many different lines. The scientists are very quietly rediscovering their own spirits, as is most of the modern world, and they are being very careful not to rock the boat in the process. The scientists are in an excellent position to realize how precarious is our present situation, like the soft-crabs that have just molted out of one world view that had become too small, but not yet grown a new one. Nonetheless, very few scientists are yet aware, I imagine, of the true extent of the changes that are just now beginning to take effect.

As a case in point, consider the John Mack affair at Harvard. I was fortunate to have played a small role in that episode, gaining some first hand knowledge. It is conceivable that historians might single out the 'Mack Attack' as the point of humanity's closest approach to the Eschaton. Had cooler heads not prevailed, that situation could have devolved into a circus. As it was, we got off with just a few magazine articles, as the Harvard Board of Overseers managed to restrain the more rabid members of the scientific community from inaugurating an inquisition against John Mack's abduction research. Ultimately it could have led to a showdown between modernists and post-modernists, reaching well beyond the ivied walls. That would have been an excitement that we can well afford to have missed.

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rev. 4/17/97