This story was originally written in Portuguese, and published to the website of Revista Questão de Ciência. It appears here with permission.
On March 11th, I participated in the Roda Viva program on TV Cultura, as a member of the panel invited to interview physicist Marcelo Gleiser, on account of the launch of the book “O Despertar do Universo Consciente”. The program can be watched in full online (note, it is in Portuguese). I will share my impressions and considerations about the book and the interview, since the format of the program is not suitable for a direct debate between interviewers and interviewees.
The book’s goal is to provoke a change in worldview in order to recover a “sacred” feeling for the biosphere, so that it can be preserved. One of the first problems that jumps out at us, however, is that history shows, since the beginning of Homo sapiens, that there is no possible consensus on what is “sacred”: people are crucified, women are burned and buildings are destroyed with airplanes, all in service to sacred ideas.
Even though the author does not want to give a religious or confessional meaning to the term “sacred”, using it to refer to a “secular sacredness”, the proposal seems, at the very least, naïve. It is like saying that to end wars all people need to do is love each other – it may be nice, but it is completely disconnected from reality.
Associating the veneration of the sacred with something necessarily good is not only a fallacy – just see that people are capable of identifying absurd passages in the Bible, showing that the sense of sacredness is socially constructed, and not imposed by a supernatural authority or the fruit of a superior feeling or intuition – but religious fervour is normally linked to something bad: when attachment to the “sacred” is placed above all else, buildings are knocked down by airplanes.
This does not mean that we should abandon responsible behaviour regarding food consumption, waste production, and respect for the environment, but society should be convinced through well-founded public policies supported by objective data – this is where scientists can act in a very positive way. Public policy cannot be made based on good feelings (“good” in what frame of reference?) or personal impressions.
In addition to being unnecessary, the introduction of the sacred for the salvation of the planet does not follow from the factual exposition made by Gleiser in the first part of the book. The scientific facts presented there are correct, but the general conclusion of the work does not follow from this first part – accepting the statement that the beauty of scientific discoveries is enough to support the sentimental manifesto that comes later will be a gesture of eventual goodwill on the part of the reader, not a logical conclusion constructed by the force of facts and arguments. The conclusion and the central thesis do not derive from the premises – “The Awakening of the Conscious Universe” is a sophisticated non sequitur : the scientific validity of the factual part does not pass, by osmosis, to the rest of the book.
The practice of using correct premises to create the impression that questionable speculations are well-founded is something that is commonly seen in pseudoscientific texts. The texts begin with something sophisticated, citing philosophers and scientists. The reader does not fully understand what the author wrote, but is left with the feeling that it is his own fault for not knowing complex concepts. Once dressed in scientific garb, the path is clear to say anything at all. This does not exactly apply to Gleiser’s book, but throughout his career the author has not stopped instigating an intersection between science and spirituality, which resulted in him winning the Templeton Prize.
Physicist Sean Carroll wrote on his blog that the Templeton Foundation’s goal is to blur the line between science and religion, making it seem as if the two are part of one grand design. This confusion may be interesting for religion, given the many attempts to teach creationism in schools, but science gains nothing from establishing this false equivalence.
Climatologist Michael Mann accuses Big Oil of pushing the responsibility for stopping global warming onto individuals and their “personal carbon footprints” while they continue to extract oil from the planet. This shift in focus is essentially what Gleiser’s book proposes: let’s foster good feelings among the people, and then the big structural problems that threaten the biosphere will go away on their own. In Mann’s words,
“If people start to think that stopping flying and eating meat is a more efficient way to combat climate change than pressuring governments to limit CO2 emissions from important sectors of the economy and invest in clean energy sources, that’s the shift strategy at work.”
It certainly won’t hurt to read “The Awakening of the Conscious Universe” in Tuscany, “drinking Brunello and eating wonderful prosciuttos“, but the manifesto is more like a magic solution, à la hippies trying to levitate the Pentagon to stop the Vietnam War, than a real proposal to be taken seriously.
