I graduated High School in 1974 with some vague notion of what to expect in life, some 37 years later … this is an essay about unfulfilled expectations.

Truth and Certainty in 1974

We strive for truth. We like truth. We talk about the truth of things often and at length. We prefer the comfort of certainty and we are decidedly uncomfortable with uncertainty. We do not appreciate being told an untruth. We have been taught to believe certainty is truth and uncertainty is untruth, a lie or a truth yet to be revealed which makes us uncertain in the moment. Who is ‘we’? We are those in the era of Modernity, which has been all about truth and certainty, the triumph of rationalism.

But we confuse truth for certainty.

It seems that we would prefer certainty, the idea that something ‘is’ all the time in every circumstance the same. The subject is predictable, quantifiable and reproducible if it is turned into an object. There is comfort in that. Of course, what I am speaking of here is what my generation of the nineteen-sixties and seventies learned in science and math class – the scientific method and inductive reasoning. It was all so very tight and comfortable: Avogadro’s number, Mandeleev’s periodic table, Pauling’s chemical bonding, Bohr’s electron shells, Einstein’s E=MC2, Linnaean species classification, Descartes’ coordinate system, Euclidean geometry, Galileo’s acceleration, Kepler’s elliptical orbits, Boyle’s law, Newton’s mathematics and physics, Faraday’s electromagnetism, Watson and Crick’s double helix, DNA and genetics were all so easily understood and accepted. It all made sense; it was logical, sequential and certainly made the natural universe, the physical world around us, understandable. The hardest thing we had to do was memorize the exact formula, phrase or definition so that we could reproduce them on demand any where at any time. They were our constants in life and were defined to us as scientific facts, axioms or truths in our world and for all time.

We learned through our science teachers, who never shared their doubts, a collective and universal philosophy that all things could be studied systematically and that answers could be found eventually to everything that was in our universe to understand. Mathematics teachers and their courses taught us the rigorous logic of numbers, orders of operation, how to take apparent randomness and make a logic out of it. This helped us to discover that there was no randomness. We thanked the great philosophical minds of the Enlightenment who objectified the natural philosophies, put them under our control and through slow and methodical manipulation created the beginnings of what we now know as science. This demystified much of the mystery of the human philosophies, too. Religion had many holes in it with the geocentric Aristotelian based notions of our physical world and so became distrusted as more and more of these holes were turned into scientific discoveries – new logical verifiable truths. Authority came under attack and has never entirely recovered to this day. No longer could mystics hold sway over us, moral authority was condemned and we were made free.

Or were we?

Science, we were told, explained our lives as certainly as the earth traveled around the sun, as we, too, lived and died like the sun. It was comforting, they said, for us to know that we were not ruled by fantastic tales in ancient books. And it was equally comforting to know that walking on water was impossible, that making water into wine was highly unlikely, laughable in fact, and that we could no longer be controlled by such ideas. With the loss of supernatural explanations for the unknowable we subsequently became masters of our own destiny and have need only of believing in the rationalism of science to get through the day. God had to be seen in a new light as a new dogma called scientific rationalism became the new path to salvation. The numbers of people attending churches plummeted as people walked away to the freedom of rationalism, a different old dogma.

Science and math classes made everything sound exciting and within our grasp of knowing. And it was easy to get a good mark in school for the correct process and the correct answer was all that was required. Discussions of whether ideas were right of wrong died away, deductive reasoning was abandoned. It didn’t matter. The scientific method and inductive reasoning now held sway. Fact now mattered. Memorization, the lowest order of thinking, was de rigueur and class was fun as we dissected live frogs and blew up stuff in the lab. By extension we believed that all things could be dissected, the parts studied and, therefore, the whole knowable. And we were told that it was ultimately democratic in that we could all know this, it was in all the published works to be found and so no one could have dominion over us unless we chose it to be so. There was solace in that and hauntingly similar to old time religion as science became THE WAY and canon to modern life. All one had to do was believe, and how could one not? Science was all about fact and a fact was a fact. After all you’d be called a lunatic at worst and a silly eccentric at best if you refused to believe in fact. We knew where science stood and you knew were we stood. Most reassuring to be so sure. This degree of certainty, this truth, however, did not extend to all subjects.

The human sciences were a conundrum. Because of the tag ‘sciences’ we thought they would be like all the other sciences, the natural sciences, we were also learning. You know, the fun stuff! In English Literature class (boo hiss) we sought certainty, the truth, as we were finding it in those other classes. Instead, to our great dismay, we were often asked our opinion of what we thought the author or the story was on about, or what it meant to us. We were perplexed. What did it matter what we thought? Isn’t there an expert about such things who would tell us the answer, the facts, we had to know? Stunned to the core and not knowing how to even begin to respond to such a question, we did as we did in science class. We flipped the pages of our books and to our consternation and horror only found endless pages of the same thing, words! In our science textbooks we found in each chapter a brief explanation of the topic, examples of the topic, facts and figures, pictures, diagrams and charts related to the topic and then a set of questions about the topic – a thousand clues to an answer. There were practice questions to make sure one got the right answer and the answers were in the back of the book. In fact there was a lot you could hang your hat on when you opened a science or math textbook, or when being asked a question by the math or science teacher. But this was decidedly not true in English Lit class.

No, those English Lit texts were texts of poetry: one poem after another after another, for a whole book, hundreds of pages and no questions and no answers to practice with. There were no charts or diagrams to illustrate what we had to know. In effect there was no truth and therefore no certainty. This was a most unsettling feeling. We’d have to read the poems one at a time, line by line, seemingly endlessly discussing them and surmising and guessing what they could possibly mean to us, or society. Well, didn’t the author have that? Didn’t he or she know what they were writing about and why? If what was wanted was to know what the poem meant why ask us? Ask the authors! ‘How would I know?’ was a common refrain from the students. The authors, the experts, the inventors and authorities in the other texts in the other classes seemed to know exactly what they were about and told us everything we needed to know, why not these books of poems?

Short story books: one story after another. Sometimes with a few questions at the end that actually tested whether we had read the thing or not, and again asking us for our opinion. Well, we began to think, if they have to ask us for our opinion it must mean that these people didn’t know themselves! This then means they are weak and these subjects are weak compared to the math and science classes. And if they were stories of fiction, then what did it mean at all? Fiction is deliberate untruth, is it not? Its just fiction, isn’t that right?  Could mean anything to anyone and so it was pointless.

Then there was the novel, a big fat book written by someone supposedly important of whom we did not know. The Grapes of Wrath what kind of a title was that? Who’s this Steinbeck fellow and if his title was bad what good could the rest of the book possibly be? But worst of all were the plays. William who? Shakespeare? And he wrote when, and about what? With long forgotten strangely stilted English – thee, thou and methinks? Oh, and the ugly questions that followed; ‘What did you think he meant by that?’ ‘Do you think he was trying to make a social statement?’ ‘Why is Hamlet timeless?’ Or worst of all, ‘Do you think that this applies to today?’ “How would I know?” echoed repeatedly from the students.

Thoughtful, good, teachers asked questions like that and it wasn’t their fault. We eventually found out that each poem, story or play usually meant different things to different people. Really? And how did that work? That was most dissatisfying, particularly when in science or math class we either knew it or we didn’t and it was more a failure on our part of not studying well enough to answer the questions asked of us. But this being asked, in English class, what we ourselves thought was a tough proposition. “Hmm, I don’t know,” we’d reply to a question. And then slyly ask the teacher, “What do you think?” We clamored for the truth, for the teacher, an authority, to tell us the answer. We wanted to be definitive, certain and we didn’t want loose ends, or unknowns, or worse, fictions – these were tantamount to lies. There was no substance here, why should we bother to even try to learn this stuff. It was all so ‘unscientific’. Our marks suffered.

Some teachers fell for the ease of the scientific gambit, let us off the hook as it were, and objectified the work of literature as a thing, a definitive subject, and began to ask questions a scientist would ask, “How are the beginning, middle and end different?” “What is foreshadowing?” “How was the story constructed?” “Who is the protagonist and who the antagonist?” Parts were labeled, descriptive terms added and tight comprehension questions were asked in familiar multiple choice form that tested whether we could read and comprehend the words and could dissect the work. Everything became wonderfully quantifiable and accountable. Either you knew it or you didn’t and it could be shown in a list of marks and a final grade. Teachers asked fewer and fewer questions about whether we understood the work or not, or whether we could relate the work to our own live or to the lives of others. Less and less were thoughts and ideas asked of us. Opinion, they said, was freely allowed to everyone and could not be graded, verified or accounted for, as it was personal and just a feeling, a sense that could not be quantified and so safely ignored in terms of assessment. We felt better, didn’t talk about it much and our grades went up.

In Social Studies, that peculiar combination of geography, history, politics, economics and sociology, the same kind of scientific analysis was applied when we tried to understand what made human history what it was. Names, dates and places along with drill and skill made us memorize our Prime Ministers, the provinces and their capitols, as well as certain individuals who had been deemed important enough to make a note of and be celebrated. We studied the countries of the globe and new them as population totals, types of industries, GNP’s, social structure and political system, as well as major rivers, deserts and mountain ranges. We were not saddled with the moral or ethical questions of why people choose go to war, other than the clash of empire or megalomaniacal personalities. Calamitous events just happened and we had to know them as they either led to a nation’s creation or to its demise. That was reason enough to know them, I suppose. Key people, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin had to be known as well as Martin Luther, Gandhi and FDR as objects not subjects embedded in a world they had to interpret and deal with just like we did. We knew much of what happened, but very little of why. But that was all right, we knew how our systems worked, what we needed to do within them, and why it was as good as it was. After all, this was much ado about nothing, really.

Now, after all these years, it has become clear to me that science was the easy part of my education, but it prepared for me next to nothing for the rest of my future. Much of the higher level math I never used, most of the scientific facts were likewise never used except as trivia in answers to board game questions. Even when I did my Industrial Engineering courses, science and math were there, but we’re not the most important thing, communication was. The timeless stories of heroes with so human foibles like Achilles, Zeus and Heracles as well as the parables of Aesop were lost in favour of the harsh reality of modern great religious and political leaders and the rational reasons for their success and failure.

History, politics, economics, the poem, the play, the novel, and essay writing were the subjects I came to use everyday of my life. How to interact with people, people with different views and beliefs, their stories and how I reacted to them was the day to day activity of life. Where we all come from, what we believe, how we organize, what we interpret, our wants and desires all need to be addressed on a daily basis. All of these cannot be addressed by science as all defy logic and the drive for fact. Emotional responses, no matter how much the psychologists might disagree, are individual. Some more than others, to be sure, as group think does occur, but mass hysteria is the abandonment of the individual to the group, so it does start with the individual. Rationality of the sciences is lost. And, finally, opinion can indeed be evaluated! There is such a thing as a right or correct opinion as much as there is a wrong one, while most lie in the realm in between. Holding a poor or wrong opinion just because one can is a poor reason to do so.

In any case, my point is that science does not give us any hints what we can look forward to in our lives other than a very narrow band of certainty, which we claim as truth, that is completely surrounded by the unknowable future of human interpretation, action, interaction, wants, needs and desires often all in the thrall of that very human of traits and attribute – emotion. This has left us uncomprehendingly lost in our lives as the great expectations of fact have been supplanted by the reality of life that is far from logical, rational and scientific.