What is culture? A question that at first glance seems to be bigger than this essay, but a question that must be answered to place everything else into a form of context. The dictionary cannot help us here. We have all created our own terms and conditions for words, forged them into strange un-uniform shapes. What is culture to me (within the context of movements of learning)? Culture is a mindset. People call themselves artists, or musicians, or doctors, or lawyers, or philosophers, or skinheads. Or alternatively they call others scientists, or the poor, or the workers, or the fuckers dragging this country down. Culture is groups of people linked together through there own mindset or by the mindset of other people. Culture is why oxford Dons feel they should smoke pipes and actors that they should act Shakespeare. Culture is conforming to the model. Culture is finding a way of defining yourself in an orderless world.

But then how can an orderless world be a technological world? Surely technology brings us order; ordered computer layouts, ordered fax machines, genetically ordered crops, structured and on time railways....And here we see how the strange conceit is just that: conceit. Technology brings order and chaos. It solves and it breaks down and it makes new problems and it brings new light. But it is a factor that is here in our world. It is a dominant state that cannot by its very nature be overturned and reversed (unless it self destructs). So this is where we are. The technological age, where the industrialism of the past has been replaced by computers. The microchip has outshone the piston and all is well.

The conventional view is that science has brought us Here and for the moment I will take this convention as truth. Each day scientists are making new breakthroughs, each day science fiction and science fact merge so that the public, who have only the tabloids to guide their blind steps, see a strange world that is an exaggeration of recent scientific breakthroughs. There are robots powered by fish brains reaching out (like us all) for light sources. There are sheep clones dying young and cults in America crying out for human cloning (perhaps they want to bring back Hitler?) Assuming that people should know about the world they inhabit and about the things that may affect them, it would be ridiculous to claim that we ought not to be aware of where science is. Without this knowledge we may suddenly find ourselves in a world we cannot navigate rather than a world that is hard to navigate. Science is the map that forms the modern world and knowledge of it allows us to compute our grid references.

But in a world that is mapped by science is there a need for art? In the past when we had less knowledge we explained things in art. The world was a canvass and we painted onto it our imaginings to help us understand the whole picture. What need is there for art in a world that has been carefully printed out for us using the latest printing technology?

We have reached the point where we must re-evaluate our conventional views. If culture is a mindset, then artists and scientists are just words created to give us reference. In the days when we flicked paint at the world’s canvas, those who painted were both artist and scientist. The ancient Greeks were philosophers who reacted and tried to explain what they saw, when science held the answers they wrote them down, when art held the answers they did likewise. They had different conventions and different rules and for them there was no barrier between these disciplines, though they had many barriers never the less.

“Like poetry, science is a creative activity that engages the emotions as well as the intellect, and its best practitioners deserve to be called artists.”

(Robert H. March, Physics for Poets)

A scientist here claims that scientist are artists. We see that both disciplines involve the same attitudes. When people call scientists stuffy, over concerned with facts and unimaginative they imply that artists are in some way immune to these faults. I have only to think of the prose works of Thomas Hardy or the poetry of Gillian Clarke to see these flaws in works of art also. Both the artist and the scientist can favour form over meaning or vice versa. We see further contradiction in the segmentation of learning when we look at the way that History and Sociology (etc...) are called social sciences. The meeting of fact (conventionally science) and expression (conventionally art), they are ways of analysing the world around us.

In this respect art, science, social science, religion, politics all seem to have the same basic aim. All are looking to explain the world, both the exterior world and the interior world that is found within the human psyche. Each human being who works in any of these spheres of learning is searching for understanding and enlightenment, motivated by some mixture of the desire to bring light to the world and to bring light to themselves:

“The dream of a final theory inspires much of today’s work in high energy physics, and though we do not know what the final laws might be or how many years will pass before they are discovered, already in today’s theories we think we are beginning to catch glimpses of the outlines of a final theory.”

Steven Weinberg, Dreams of a Final Theory)

All strands of learning appear to be ways of searching for a final theory: The final answer that will tell us why we are here and how we can act. Most people search on a smaller scale, trying to discover small truths. But each small truth will help to reach larger truths. The problem lies in the fact that all truth is subjective. Science has been proved wrong and then right and then wrong countless times. Philosophers have been heralded as great and then wrong and then great in equal measure. One day everyone has the Oedipal complex, the next day they don’t. One day all is predetermined, the next day it isn’t. The big bang and evolution disprove God and then God disproves them and then he created them. All is a tangle of subjective experiences. Each person searches for their truths but cannot convince everybody else of what truth they discover.

“A scientist, of course, is supposed to be looking for the truth about nature. But not all truths are equal. Some we call deep truths, and these are the ones that are also beautiful.

(Robert H. March, Physics for Poets)

The way we discover our truths, is then, affected by how we perceive the world. The ideas we find beautiful will be the ideas we will subscribe to. Each day we reorder our truths depending on what we find in the world. We argue our truths and listen to other people’s. Those of us who are able can evolve over time. My opinion (and therefore my truth) is; that it is necessary to form our truths with thought rather than take them as given by the convention and attitude of the time. In order to do this we must hear other people's. Debate will make us stronger.

“What then, is the meaning of scientific objectivity? It does not mean that a scientist must be cold and dispassionate. Science is a combat of ideas, and objectivity simply means to fight fair. A scientist may believe - passionately - in his or her own point of view. But contrary ideas must be given due consideration, not dismissed without mention. Embarrassing facts must be confronted not ignored.”

(Robert H. March, Physics for Poets

March’s opinion (and so his truth) matches mine. His statements can be applied to all areas of discovery and work equally well, a fair classical painter must give abstraction a chance, a fair philosopher must listen to all counter argument. But his statement goes even further as, if we abandon the conventional definitions, it can apply across cultures. So the debate between science and art, which people have continually seen there, becomes just a debate of different points of view within the same field - discovery. A fair artist must give science a chance, a fair scientist art.

This is all very good for scientists and artists, but what of people who do not belong to these disciplines. The average person seeking to learn about the world and discover their own truths is then presented with two different schools of truth. In order for them to reach their objective subjective truth they must listen to both sides. They must hear all points of view and decide for themself. They may also find more comfort than they expect, due to the concept of art and science as diametric opposition being a false one. Not all art contradicts science, not all science contradicts art and they often contain each other. This is of course due to the fact that our perceived definitions are not real ones.

In order to examine the initial question however we must impose once again these definitions (whilst remembering that they do not exist.) In a technological society science is of primary importance. However, people are still searching for truth. We use the technology we have created to delve into this truth. If we are searching for truth we must be open to all truths and so art is also important. It allows us to explore fields that science in its examination of what it sees and theorises about the world would leave out. Art allows us to explore the subconscious. To put the world we see into our personal contexts. It helps us find our personal truth.

However, increasingly the technological age does not encourage enlightenment. Or rather perhaps human beings are afraid of enlightenment. Most are happy to find a truth and settle for it. They are afraid to challenge what they know, as it will prove to them that they have no control and are lost in the map/canvass world. The question of whether we should know something of both art and science becomes even more pertinent here. We should know something of the world we inhabit, but most choose not to. It is not just that we should know about both art and science but that we should know about something. Most know very little of either and form their truths from what they are told and what they directly see. Both science and art allow for an exploration of the world. They both encourage implicitly thought and understanding, rather than stubborn conservatism and fear of what is difficult or different. The answer is yes to whether people must know about both of these things, but I would settle for people knowing about even one of them.

From a personal point of view I believe we need to go further than that. We shouldn’t just aim to know “something of each” but should actively seek to know everything of everything. We should seek to discover more than what we know of all fields so that we can compare them. We can seek out universal truths that run across disciplines and decide on where we stand; where they contradict each other or themselves. Our aim should be that of a renaissance. We must seek our final theories. Maybe each is subjective, but subjective knowledge is a better thing to settle for than no knowledge. Our aim should be to die still seeking out new ways of seeing this world which remains to us all lost. Perhaps if we run fast enough we may just catch a glimpse of it in the distance.

almost finished only one more part of this one left.

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