Dogma

Science and it’s ability to explain the world around us has always fascinated me. As a child I stared with awe at my science textbooks before the start of each year, excited about what I was going to learn that year. But as children, we internalise not just the facts but also the process, the narrative and the ideologies espoused. I have begun to realise the extremely overpowering and hegemonic nature of the paradigm that my “formal education” has not just imparted to me, but in a manner of speaking, propagandised. This morning, as I sat staring at a squirrel nibbling at specks of rice leftover on the wall of my balcony, I wondered what the squirrel must be thinking.

Is he (I noticed the testicles on the guy) wondering if this will be enough to satiate his hunger? Is he thinking of where he can go to for his next morsel? It is a uniquely human trait to anthropomorphise (of course) an experience by projecting our thoughts onto another object. 

But science has, through codified structures of knowledge generation, taught me that that kind of projection is “un-scientific” and unlikely to be true. And for the longest time, I simply accepted this as the way to generate knowledge for myself. Unless I disentangle a natural occurrence through the scientific process, it is anecdotal, individual, and hence somehow not as important or as insightful. 

Internal debates about science often bring me to a competing school of knowledge generation and its resultant acceptance (or otherwise) - religious dogma. Lately I have been unravelling for myself that science is no less dogmatic, no less religious, no less unrelenting in pushing through “facts” as truth. In a post-truth world where a tweet can kill hundreds of people, it suddenly becomes important to also look at what each of us considers true and why. Do we critically analyse the processes through which we understand what happens around us? Is that even necessary?

One could argue that such a question is moot since human society functions on hormones and complicated social constructs that do not lend themselves easily to critical analysis. That’s why we simply accept idiomatic expressions like, “It is what it is.” But unfortunately I often find myself predisposed to overtheorising the world around me, and inside me, not allowing things to remain as they are. 

Further, the discussion about what is true, what can be considered knowledge, and who is a knowledgeable person is especially relevant considering the kind of hot contestation we find ourselves engaged in much too often. Arriving at any kind of negotiated truce of what is the best thing to do, or what to accept and what to reject, or how we may co-occupy communal spaces without necessarily accepting natural selection as a filtering process for our ideas requires the kind of discussion that asks the question, “Really?”

Is it even relevant to ask the question, “is this true?” or does that remain a question relegated to philosophical discussions by vagabonds far removed from society high on adrenaline and dogma? In the time I took to write this confusing piece, that squirrel is long gone. Of course in the larger scheme of things nothing matters, but we are finite beings with finite lives. But that too is a borrowed idea that very few of us have actually experienced. I’ve just been told that the universe is a ginormous place and that I don’t matter - much less my ideas of what is true. I choose to stare that "fact" in the face and ask it, “Really?”