Making Science Accessible to All

On December 20^th, 1996, Dr. Carl Sagan passed away after having lived the life of a successful astronomer. Carl Sagan had become a celebrity because of his brilliant television series Cosmos.

Sagan made science accessible and comprehensible to all. I watched his television series Cosmos at the age of 16-17 years, and this opened my mind to science and to the universe in general. Later I read his books Broca’s Brain and the Dragons of Eden. Cosmos was not only about the stars, it also described life on earth and potential life on other planets. It talked about the history of science and of the great discoveries on earth and in the universe.

There is no nobler and more beautiful work than popularising science. Sagan could also raise enthusiasm with his audience. He testified from a certain spirituality of science, something that I still seem to live from today. What is this spirituality of science? It means that we can stand in awe for the cosmos and its beauty. This also includes the inherent beauty of the laws of the cosmos, so we can also stand in awe for science itself.

Sagan did not deny that the Cosmos could not become a threat someday, as the laws of nature can also lead to cataclysms and to the end of humankind. He didn’t deny the inherent timeliness of our presence and the vulnerability of humans on this planet and in the universe. In this space age, science and technology, including space travel, seem to become ordinary commodities. People tend to become cynical and indifferent.

We need more people like Carl Sagan to encourage young people to enter the world of science and to stand in awe for this “Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring”. These were the last words spoken by Sagan in his television series Cosmos, and these words have been resonating in my mind since 36 years now.

I refer to my science blogs among which SETI and Day of Wrath.

Absinthe

Absinthe is a police thriller by Guido Eekhaut. The scene is located in the Low Countries, in the cosmopolitan cities of Amsterdam and Leuven.

It is a story about Russian oligarchs, cold-blooded murderers, right-wing politicians and corrupt policemen, typical ingredients of a Saturday evening whodunit on television and I don't see why this story could not become the script for a television thriller. The plot is certainly solid enough to start with.

The main character Walter Eekhaut is the archetype of the stubborn policeman with unconventional methods (somewhat like Inspector Morse). The author sketches several parallel story lines in short chapters, picturing several individual colourful characters. He then brings these lines together in unexpected events that somehow ignite the story, so that you will not easily stop reading. It was a good idea of the writer to serve this story with a glass of Absinthe as this brings in real warmth and taste into the story.

To enjoy all finesses of the unexpected, the reader needs a certain understanding and feeling for rules and procedures that might be applicable in an international police context. Although the author educates his reader in this sense, the lay reader may miss the unexpected in the denouement and at this point the author might have been too demanding of his readership.

The hardcover edition I bought looks and feels very nice and I could not spot a single error in the text.

Slender Man is a book by the same author. You will find an equally good plot and a similar background view on society, but the narrating technique used in Slender Man is quite different.

The Pain of Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a 20th century war product. The central thought of postmodernism is that truth, goodness and beauty are only illusions, chased by ignorant people. Truth, goodness and beauty simply don’t exist. Every kind of veneration already carries the seed of self-destruction. This awkward idea got its power from the destructive forces of the Second World War. The War did not only destroy houses and people, it also destroyed ideas that were originally believed to be great. Postmodernism is, in a strange way, a cultivation of a permanent feeling of disappointment and many artists keep finding their inspiration in postmodernism.

An interesting question is whether postmodernism is still playing a role in today’s society and whether that role is still ‘constructive’, although a constructive postmodernism seems to constitute a “contradictio in terminis”, if not an oxymoron. In his book “History of Progress”, the Dutch author Rutger Bregman points out that postmodernism has not only been good at destroying our traditional beliefs, but also our belief in progress itself. And as “Belief creates the actual fact”, non-belief also destroys the actual fact, therefore non-belief in progress will also halt the actual progress in society.

Cultivating postmodernism, as seems to be the case now since 70 years, constitutes a certain risk of lethargy. Postmodernism has however the merit it makes us critical against all kinds of fanatic belief be it in religion or political systems. It somehow keeps us on a sane track, because all fanatic belief must be insane. A moderate degree of postmodernism is healthy as mainstream current in society, as long as we remain somehow open-minded whenever new ideas emerge.

I refer to my blog “A Sea of Change”. My blog “De donkere kamer van Damokles” covers roughly the same thoughts about postmodernism in Dutch.

Picture: Artwork “Totem” by Jan Fabre and University Library tower, Leuven. This blog is not inspired by recent press.

New Peace Carillon

In my home town Leuven, we celebrated the 100-year end of World War I today by inaugurating a new Peace Carillon in the church tower of the Park Abbey. You need to know three things to understand why this is so important.

First, my home town Leuven was particularly hit by the violence of World War I, when a large part of town was put to fire and a lot of civilians were killed. The inauguration of the new carillon was supported by the German town of Neuss from where some of the troops had originated and with which Leuven now established good relations.

You also need to know that Park Abbey is one of the best preserved original abbey sites of its kind in the Benelux and in Europe. And like with many historic places, its history is deeply interwoven with the lives and the hearts of many local people. And you need to know that carillons belong to the nicest and finest pieces of heritage Flanders has to offer.

What is amazing on this 11 November 2018, is the incredible mobilising force from the centennial celebrations of the armistice. Most people who walked through the rain today never went through a war in their lives. I guess we all realised that our togetherness today is the best way to make clear why we want peace in this world.

What They Don’t Teach At School .. Yet

When you read a title like this on a social web site, you can expect a truckload of cynical advice from people with bad experience and a bad character. This is obviously not the case here.

In fact, school should become less cynical, not more. School tells pupils how to behave, but doesn’t tell them what to do if others don’t behave. As such the strong guys are told that they should not bully the weak, but the weak guys are never told what they should do in case they are bullied. "Go to the teacher or headmaster", is a good advice from the point of view of the adults, but we remember quite well it didn’t work very well in the old days either. The issue is important, because school performance is in my honest opinion, more often affected by lack of a safe study climate than by a lack of intelligence. In her book Dreamers who do, Hilde Helsen mentions three basic skills all children should become familiar with at school:

•  They should teach all children the principles of non-violent communication. Non-violent meaning here: not based on humiliating arguments of power, but based on arguments of perceived behaviour. In the Bible, the fraternal admonition is recommended. You should talk "under four eyes", and if that doesn’t work, you should get one more witness. If that doesn’t work, go to old wise men. The strong should be confronted with their weakness, and the weak should be confronted with their strengths.
• All children should be taught some type of meditation: yoga, mindfulness or transcendental meditation. In the old days, we had prayer. It is now a lost type of meditation because we became too idle and too proud to believe we could need it.
• All children should recognise compassion as a universal human feeling and a universal human value. Compassion is neither an emotion to be ashamed of, nor an obligation that is imposed by one or the other religion.

I guess most schools do something implicitly in one or more of these topics. However, these remain side topics, being done in the margin, during a break. The way schools are organised, suggests these things are less important than the hard topics that determine whether you succeed or fail. I am convinced that you can raise the quality of education more by teaching these soft skills than by raising the bar for the hard topics. I refer to my earlier blogs: “The Importance of Being Gentle”, “Bullying, Indignation is Growing” and “About Meditation - die Schöne Kunst des Innehaltens”.

Political Paralysis by Polarisation

If you live in a prosperous country, you are probably unhappy. Partly because your salary is no longer increasing, but also because your society is divided over the question whether to share that prosperity with newcomers or not. In the US, you may be in favour of Trump or against Trump. In Britain, you may be in favour of the Brexit or not. In Sweden you may be in favour of the Swedish Democrats or not. In Germany, France, Belgium, there is a deep trench between traditional parties and the so-called ‘populist’ parties. Not a single country escapes and the entire political system gets polarised about the issue.

The cause of the polarisation is obviously: we don’t succeed well in integrating the newcomers. While the newcomers already have a social backlog and tend to live in ghettos, the original inhabitants work themselves to death to stay ahead of them. Two camps exist: those who believe there is no work/ integration possibility left for newcomers and those who believe that humanity needs to prevail. The press tends to reduce the problem to a problem of racism. At both sides of the trench through society, people accuse the other side of being immoral. 

People draw the wrong lesson from World War II. We see the War now as a fight between good and evil. That is because we can watch the 1930 - 1945 years with the eyes of someone who lives in 2018, knowing what happened after 1930. We believe we know what was an appropriate moral conduct in 1930, but we forget that the people of 1930 lived in an uncertain world, just like we do today. People of 1930 believed an appropriate moral conduct was to fight communism. Why ? Because communism was believed to be dangerous. Just like we think we know what is dangerous today. Some believe ethnic nationalism is dangerous and some believe the Islam is dangerous. Who is right? We can’t say, because this is a question about the future.

I believe therefore that the best moral conduct possible is to stop with this polarisation and admit that we don’t know what is dangerous. We can only say extremism is dangerous because it leads to violence. We should not be naive and tolerate anything from those who don’t behave properly. But we should plead for dialogue with the ones who seem to have an opinion that is different from ours. We should stop digging trenches and start taking more risks. It takes courage to do that. The real victims of this polarisation are the ones who live in precarious circumstances: the refugees including the trans-migrants and the original inhabitants of the poorer suburbs.

I refer to my Dutch blogs about polarisation and Christmas 2016.

Leaving Lazy Tasty Land

In this time of the year, we are all leaving our favourite vacation resort and returning back home. This could make us feel sad, as we face a new period of work, cold and darkness, also called wintertime. It could also make us feel sad for a totally different reason: the embarrassing feeling that maybe, we didn’t reach every destination we wanted, and maybe, even worse, we didn’t enjoy vacation time enough. In some cases, you might even raise the most prohibited of all questions: why didn’t we stay at home?

In the Middle Ages, vacation and travelling for vacation would have seemed a totally unreal activity. For most people, attending a fair at the occasion of a yearly holy day was the top of happiness. Everything beyond that belonged to the world of the dreams. The ultimate dream was the magic Land of Cockaigne, where no work needed to be done, and where food fell from the trees to eradicate all hunger. In Dutch this land was better known as “Lazy Tasty Land” (Luilekkerland). Having food and rest was considered enough to fulfil all desires; travelling would not have made any sense for the inhabitants of the Land of Cockaigne. Yet medieval people would consider today’s vacation resorts as lands of Cockaigne, as food and rest seem to be available there abundantly.

Every new year again, vacation time promises us a Land of Cockaigne, but does it also keep that promise? When we look back, we often notice that we can only enjoy vacation time in rare moments. What we do in reality is quite different from what the peasant, the soldier and the clerk are doing in Pieter Bruegel’s painting above. Let me give an overview: we burn fuel in traffic jams on the highway. We pay for using dirty lavatories, overloaded highways, scarce parking spaces and for all types of limited validity road vignettes. We get stressed from missing connections in railway stations and from unexpected strikes. We fill in forms for missing luggage and discuss visible and invisible scratches in recently hired cars. We get irritated from the selfie takers who didn't notice our intention to take that same shot. Let us thank God vacation time is almost over, and we can soon go home.

And then, amidst all the horrors of vacation, something unexpected happens. We discover a quiet place. We have a pleasant evening dinner with a glass of local wine. We take our best picture. We have an interesting chat with locals or with colleague-tourists. Then, and only then, we know why we came in the first place and why we may travel again next year. And we might recognise that travelling is a privilege, as it reveals that the magic of real places is no less than the magic of the Land of Cockaigne.

Picture 1: Land of Cockaigne by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. This is a freely licensed work, as explained in the Definition of Free Cultural Works.
Picture 2: Wim Lahaye, taken at Zadar, Croatia