“Everybody has an agenda. Except me.” These are Michael Crichton’s words found in the Author’s Message section of his book, State of Fear. I think this quote speaks to much of what we’ve been learning about thus far in Science in the Humanities. While this book is entirely fictional, it’s message is analogous to how our society operates. Everybody has an agenda. A fact’s funding, political association, religions connection etc…work independently or together to bring us understanding and internalization. When we use his words as an analytic optic, we may begin to read his book and see our world differently. As for my reading experience, I found myself giving particular weight to the science of Geology, as I am currently taking a geology course at our university. I began to approach geologic claims with blind confidence, and this form of reading brings with it potential danger. Of course Crichton’s work is a work of fiction; that said I believe it is important to pay attention to how we interpret, and what devices we use narrow and tighten that interpretation.
As far as seeing devices go, I believe examining things with the assumption that, “everybody has an agenda”, is itself, a seeing device; until we learn to see this way, we don’t. Take for example, the very beginning of the book, when introduces Charles Ling and Allan Peterson. Since I myself am currently taking an introduction to Geology course at our University, I found myself, when Crichton speaks of Geology, giving particular weight to the geologic picture he paints. When Crichton talks about the Cavitation generators, oceanic simulators etc, I took them to function exactly as he described. This may be due to my exposure to Geology, but it took away from my understanding that everybody has an agenda. It is easy to forget and, at times disregard. What we take as facts may be dangerous. And we must reminder ourselves that science and politics are married in a way that complicates our view of the world. This idea is rooted in Crichton’s book and he masterfully evolves this concept throughout his work.
Definitely a point worth note, this also bring into question the way we learn. When you read, say a physics textbook, some things have to be taken on faith, else it would take 50 years to do what we do in 4. Of course as we gain an understanding, with our blind faith, things tend to pop up that give validity to the claims and equations,but until we have actually seen or know how such a claim is proven, these validating things are simply a function of the paradigm we accepted from the start, and are then obviously logical as they were invented by the paradigm itself. So, as a function of human nature, the way we classify things, built upon our assumed knowledge, allows us to learn from the data and fit it into the paradigm in a way that makes sense and even gives validity to the paradigm.
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