Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
enabled them to dismiss the age of Catholic hegemony as belonging to a
prior epoch that had now run its course.
Bacon appealed to an analogous notion of historical periodization in
order to affirm the idea that the new science was genuinely new and that
within it, as much as in the new Protestant epoch, the bride of Christ was
being purified in preparation for her wedding feast. Since the new empiri-
cism was the secular counterpart to the Bible-based theology of the reform-
ers, it also occasioned a new beginning. A multitude of biblical references
that were featured prominently in Bacon's writings kept this idea before
his readers, but this notion found its full-fledged dramatic enactment in
his
New Atlantis
(1627)—a fictional recapitulation of Christian history that
imagines the purified church of the future as one fundamentally devoted
to science.
The parallels that Bacon forged between Protestant conceptions of the
millennium and the scientific paradise envisioned in
New Atlantis
continue
to be found in the analogous connection that persists between modernism
(as an epochal construction especially) and science's widening dominance.
We have seen this already in the more perfect civilizations envisioned in
the science fiction narratives and historical documentaries I surveyed ear-
lier. The future hopes imagined by Bronowski and Sagan turn upon the
more wholesale commitment to science that they demand from their audi-
ences. Science is declared to represent the underlying principle of historical
renewal, and so to realize the aspirations of modernism, the world must
truly embrace and in fact fully universalize its principles. Conversely, the
apocalyptic forebodings that both programs invoke in their closing episodes
highlight the same idea. Both speakers believe that while the course of his-
tory leads inexorably toward scientific predominance, misguided choices
may yet interrupt this destiny. Clearly alluding to the rising counterculture
movement of the 1960s, Bronowski decries the “loss of nerve,” signaled by
popular inquiries into “Zen Buddhism . . . into falsely profound questions
. . . into extra-sensory perception and mystery,” that threaten to detour evo-
lution's course. These developments “do not lie along the line of what we
are able to know if we devote ourselves to it: to an understanding of man
himself,” and thus, while the “ascent of man will go on,” we cannot “assume
that it will go on carried by western civilization as we know it. We are being
weighed in the balance at this moment.”
65
Sagan ends
Cosmos
with the simi-
lar warning that any “turning away from the Cosmos” could spell doom.
Our destiny is “the universe or nothing,” and to choose nature is to choose
