Two cheers for science

Science has given us great leaps in understanding of our Universe. It has done this at the cost, not of "hacking things apart" as is commonly claimed, but of putting things together, eliminating qualitative differences. Consider: science has given us the ideas that

• Apples and oranges are both fruits.


• Apples and leaves are both parts of plants.


• Apples and people are both living things.


• Apples and rocks are both solid objects.


• Apples and oceans are both collections of atoms and molecules.


• Apples and white dwarf stars are both collections of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

More recently, it has also given us the theory that apples, light rays, and everything else in the Universe are nothing more than sets of complex folds in the fabric of spacetime.

This is all kind of depressing, considering that it tends to eliminate qualitative divisions we hold dear, like the human/animal boundary, the body/mind boundary, and the living-thing/inanimate-object boundary. But we can console ourselves that no one is going to start naming things, beings, and people using a system that results in statements like "Howdy, piece-of-folded-spacetime-number-48QJ5R! How's the old piece-of-folded-spacetime-number-56BM1D doing?" And the Universe makes it easier to preserve the illusion of difference by including a number of fairly sharp quantitative boundaries between things we like to think of as different.

Also, I would note that without science, environmental crises would be much harder to understand and resolve, though I grant that it would also be harder to get into them in the first place.

A note on politics

It's often claimed that conservatives are realists and liberals are idealists, but in fact, there are such things as a conservative idealist and a liberal realist. A right-wing idealist typically believes that free markets and trickle-down will eventually create a libertarian utopia in which everyone is rich. A left-wing "realist" typically believes that governments are just as bad as corporations and will probably always be so, because power corrupts; that anarchism would be nice but will never be achieved; and that in general, humanity as a whole is incapable of learning from its mistakes and will be perishing from the face of the Earth in short order. Whether any of this is really realistic, I don't know, but it's certainly not idealistic by any stretch.