Of human bondage: science and superstition.

Have you ever wondered why superstition and scientific knowledge increase and flourish together? Here we live in the most science-oriented, technologically saturated society in the history of the world, yet false beliefs, pseudofacts, and nonsensical stories proliferate. Think of how those well-educated members of the Heaven's Gate cult staked their lives on the unfounded belief that space denizens were arriving to take them away. Further evidence of the spread of credulity can be gathered by glancing through the tabloids in your local supermarket.

My explanation for the paradoxical growth of science and superstition is based on human psychology. Consider the mindset it takes to keep abreast of all the new information and theories generated by proliferating new scientific research projects. In every discipline stable certitudes are challenged by new findings and paradigms shift at a prodigious rate. Constant adjustments and mental revisioning are necessary to assimilate everchanging models of reality. For instance, what is the current take on the age and origin of Homo sapiens, the nature of quarks, or neutrinos? Other unsettling revisions of our understanding of the brain and body's functioning produce contradictory advice on maintaining health.

A scientifically literate person is forced to exercise a judicious open-mindedness to assess the claims and research evidence for the acceptance of new theories. Unfortunately, the tentative openness of an educated approach to knowledge can easily turn into popular gullibility. Many who eagerly accept the content of new scientific research have not assimilated the need for rational doubt and critical testing that characterize scientific methods of reasoning. So who knows, ask true believers, maybe we just haven't yet found the right way to prove UFO abductions? At this very moment aliens may move among us in disguise. Haven't we seen or heard about it on TV?

We could, no doubt, fill the pages of Commonweal by holding a contest for the most outrageous irrational idea recently encountered in the popular media. And to ensure an equal-opportunity search, we would have to have special categories for nonsensical academic ideas, the most inane New Age spirituality, or some excess of alternative medicine. To bring the hunt even closer to home, we should attend to some of the unnoticed magical elements we accept in our own middle-class professional lives. The marketing invasion of the household by technological marvels, courtesy of modern science, can also contribute to superstitious proclivities.

When I hear of how modern man (or persons) live in a demystified, dead, technological world emptied of the magical presence of spirits, I demur. Surely few aboriginal tribesmen (or tribespersons) could experience as many invisible powers and mysterious forces as I do. When I walk around my house, especially at night, I meet a thousand points of light. Many of these are giving off signals with green or red flashes - the microwave, the oven, the answering machine, the digital clocks, the curling iron, the radios, the computers (his and hers), the two printers, the two Xerox machines, the video players, the cellular phones - etc., etc. Many sounds pervade the atmosphere bringing other messages. The house is alive with the sound of music and other beckoning noise: bells ring, beepers beep, faxes ping, icemakers plunk, a multitude of hums, thumps, whirrings, and flushings produce hot and cold air, water and steam. In the kitchen, grinding, chopping, mixing, shredding, and whistling noises may rend the air.

Many of these sounds and lights start, stop, and change at the touch of little black oblong boxes or amulets lying around the house. Other medium-sized, boxlike devices can be aimed at people and proceed to focus light, ping, flash, and produce pictures that roll out into your hand. (If modern cameras steal your soul, they do it instantly.) Other slightly larger rectangular boxes are split in two and open up to produce illuminated blue screens upon which messages can be created or come from afar. Even bigger boxes and screens bring into the house moving, talking, colored pictures-summoned from out of the air. And these technological genies, djinns, and guardian spirits are all present in one seven-room apartment. Many more magical effects can be encountered outside in cars, planes, airports, office buildings, streets, stores, factories, and hospitals. God help you when you are subject to the ominous rites, lights, screens, and intravenous tubes found in hospitals.

Now wait a minute, say certain critics in my family circle unattuned to the magical properties of life. You shouldn't call these examples of modern scientific technology "magical" or say they encourage "superstition." After all, in contrast to primitive people, we rationally understand how all these things work.

"Oh," I reply, "do we really?" Maybe once we could confidently comprehend levers, bicycles, or even in my case the pedal sewing machine upon which I learned to sew, but how many people understand their own fax and computer systems, much less the viruses that can infect them? Everyone I know is regularly reduced to helplessness by the breakdown, malfunctioning, or bugs that damage the operations of the complex technology that surrounds us. As far as I can see, our high-tech lives produce a frustration level that leads to nagging annoyance and anxious dependence. Hours and hours are spent mastering new programs, decoding complex instructions, and diagnosing new problems. All devices must regularly be taken back to the store to be repaired or exchanged, and inevitably they must be updated and replaced. Expensive, expert consultants - the modern equivalents of shamans and medicine men - must be called in to deal with difficulty after difficulty. Grown men and women are reduced to tears and placating invocations or curses.

Let's face it. Even when indispensable and useful, these new tools of scientific control lead to new forms of bondage and helplessness. And in these conditions, superstition breeds. If we are not going to fall into mindless gullibility or retreat to a desert hermitage, we will have to develop new forms of reasoned critiques of scientific technology complete with appreciative detachment. And with this pious hope I will now save, revise, format, print, and fax this column off to the editors who wait for it in an office thirty miles away.