In the scientific world, a naïve animal is simply one that is yet to be exposed to an experiment. There is, I think, a place to stand that is not innocence as in foolishness, but neither a retreat to cynicism or weariness. Naïvety as unfamiliarity with the path out of the forest. Yet to be tested. As yet unhabituated to the maze.

Putting aside the complications here (is the animal in the maze even an image that we feel is conscionable?), there is still a little double act to be performed, as always when there are multiple routes to failure. Of course ‘Late Capitalism’ discourse is frustrating, because it too often (despite the idea of ‘lateness’) asserts an inescapable subversion of all things into power; the hopelessness of all efforts to escape. Scientific discourse is too often confident that new technology will not be subverted to the benefit of those in power (technology itself may be value neutral, but the way it will be applied is not).

Ok, so I’m just repeating Snow’s imaginary dinner party chatter:

The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and thought to the existential moment.

What else do I have to offer? Consider Teilhard de Chardin diagnosing Christianity’s 20th century illness:

Fundamentally, the Church never understood, as we understand it, the fine pride of man, nor the sacred passion for enquiry, which are the two basic elements of modern thought… A world completely dominated by the Church - as the Church has shown herself to be from the Renaissance until our own day - and were such a domination humanly possible - would have acquired increased capabilities from the point of view of sensibility and charity; but it would have lost all power to attack and penetrate the real: a warning would have been posted along the whole front line telling the enquiring mind that everything had already been found.

He posits, for a future mysticism, a kind of ascendance of scientific energy, subordinate only to the universe and blending into a transcendent spirit, with Christ-the-spirit leading the way. Sure. What’s key - what I think he gets right here - is the reason for the confusion of morality in the face of scientific progress. If there was anyone to ask why, if they sought to reduce suffering, they invented factory farming, it is the scientists. But they won’t be able to tell us, because they have relied on the simple energy of discovery, clinging vociferously to the real.

So yes, I share your unspoken unwillingness to be smug and ridicule enlightenment values and I share your confusion about what is happening that leads my fellows towards programming drones and factory farming. Maybe it’s counter-intuitive but it seems something beyond a commitment to knowledge is needed, in the same way that one must do more than think oneself a good actor in order to become one. I think of this as being the role of ritual: a way of bringing culture into the light and elevating the parts of it that we value. Not the prize giving that we so overvalue in the sciences, which has made our collective progression into a trivial, individualist contest.

I’ve struggled to think of myself as an outsider or a weirdo or any renegade figure in the past - my path seems to run through too many offices and too close to the conventional - but I’ve tried to keep some part of myself separate, innocent of the culture that twists earnest work into hopeless dead ends or worse.

It’s the value of these letters and the little sociological stories. Is cultured naïvety too oxymoronic?