Elitism and Pseudoscience in NASA/TREK

Within “NASA/TREK”, Constance Penley heaps harsh criticism on members of the ‘elitist’ scientific establishment. She believes scientific elites to be sadly removed from the public desire for scientific and technological knowledge, too wrapped up in their preconceived notions of mass culture to engage with the masses on productive or amicable terms. Her examples of scientific elitism, however, end up undermining her arguments about the public thirst for science: “popular science”, as Penley deploys the term, becomes a means of excusing the rampant scientific illiteracy that IS present in our society.

Penley spends much of the introduction castigating Carl Sagan for starting from the assumption that “most citizens are shamefully ignorant of scientific issues.” (5) Sagan criticizes popular science fiction shows, such as Star Trek and the X-Files, believing that these productions fool viewers into accepting pseudoscience by “eschewing the most elementary scientific facts.”(5) Penley then states that “Entertainment, for Sagan, is the opposite of enlightenment”: however, Sagan made a name for himself by producing a TV miniseries (Cosmos) and novel (Contact) that enjoyed widespread appeal. Sagan’s works became successful by marrying easily accessible narrative to scientifically sound theoretical underpinning: he, if anything, completely undermined any existing entertainment/enlightenment dichotomy, proving that science fiction can be fun without engaging in the radical misrepresentation of science as fact.

Penley remarks that “Penley does not seem to recognize that ‘precious facet’ as what he earlier called the natural appetite for science.” (7) ‘Science’, as we commonly understand it, involves a respect for empirical proof and logical structure: popular culture, as described in NASA/TREK, does not seem to be interested in science, but rather in the fantastical aura that some aspects of science have maintained. Sagan doesn’t deny that science and science fiction possess a socially significant magnetism: he objects to situations where the fancies of science fiction help to deceive in matters where truth and clarity are essential.

We live in an age where scientific and technological literacy is a crucial part of becoming an informed and productive citizen. The mitigation of global climate change and implementation of alternative energy infrastructures, stem cell research and HIV prevention: these movements, among others, are essential to the continued well-being of our people and planet, but have been delayed and undermined by the irresponsible decisions of electorates and officials that are woefully scientifically ignorant. Heaping lavish praise on pseudoscience implicitly encourages society to retreat within politically and socially neutered fantasy, rather than critically engaging with the realities of science and its effect upon the world. Sagan is clearly deeply concerned with the potential danger of widespread scientific ignorance. This concern is not the result of latent elitism, but of the desire for widespread scientific literacy, or “popular science” in its original sense.

"'Consider I have been speculating . . .'"

Among the issues we discussed last week were Darko Suvin’s notion of genre as a matter of “family resemblance,” not to be answered with a strict definition, as well as the peculiar insistence of readers on the internal consistency of “reality” within fiction. Though these hardly seem related, in reviewing The Time Machine’s framework I began to consider the possibility they might be, insofar as both play on a reader’s inarticulable standards for fiction, gleaned from prior experience. Before the ending proves the entire narrative to be a bait-and-switch as egregious as Inception (which faded to black as a cliffhanger, only for the soundtrack to settle things), the story very cleverly deploys a Victorian reader’s loosely defined sense of science fiction as a genre in order to cast doubt on its own status as fiction. “‘Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I have hatched this fiction’,” the internal narrator allows us to include (before the external one, like Christopher Nolan, insists on a final answer), recognizing that his work of reportage is indistinguishable in tone and purpose from invention. “‘Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere stroke of art to enhance its interest’,” he adds, discovering the problem of realism. (111)

I’d like to do so here in order to enhance not only to enhance its interest, but to develop an understanding of science and science fiction as related practices just before their modern incarnations. I got this sense immediately from the novel, but in a manner better justified by recourse to another course, in the history of biology—since Alexandra has already demonstrated the insight other material might bring to bear on our own. For the homosocial, domestic male discourse with which the novel opens reminded me of nothing so much as the environment in which science was practiced through the 19^th century, among private (without yet becoming truly academic) clubs like the Royal Society, or simply within the home of a wealthy, curious gentleman. The Time Traveler is skilled (or dandyish) enough to furnish his home with furniture of his own design, which is reflective, and even formative, of an environment open to the spirit of intellectual inquiry: “Our chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner atmosphere when thought runs gracefully free of the trammels of precision”; fittingly, insofar as those trammels would not be finally applied until the Fordist application of industrialization to the practice of science (1).

In the very same setting, of course, storytelling would have been equally at home, as the more skeptical members of his audience remind us at the novel’s end. Yet I think that, in one of the more self-conscious moments of the novel—and one that so far most clearly articulates the thesis of this course—the equation of science and science fiction is claimed to be a consequence not merely of its practice in the homes of Victorian gentlemen, but its essential reliance on narrative as such. “‘Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph wires, of the Parcels Deliver Company, and postal orders and the like? . . . And even of what we knew, how much could he make his untravelled friend either apprehend or believe?’” (51-52) Here he addresses anthropology, though only by way of a peculiar self-othering inversion. But were we to generalize the point to all systems perceptible only to those with a privileged perspective that nevertheless must derive value from their representation to others (which would describe not only the relation between the scientist, his field of study, and the populace, but also of the critic, “high” literature and the same—if not the critic, “low” literature and the academy), the lesson becomes of greater import to a greater number. And science fiction begins to look like the best training in such impossible acts of speech.