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The Row Boat

"Had we but world enough, and time..." *

Mainstream Bokononism?

9/26/2006 18:03:33

Anybody who has seen the bizarre hordes that come out at a Star Trek convention has to at least have suspected that essences of religiosity occur outside of traditional expressions and spaces. People act religious there, taking on roles and erecting performance spaces. They talk about the effect of the show's stories on their lives. They have a story and a mythology and a kind of ritual structure. Sometimes even a sacred language.

Still, we are used to thinking of religions as different because they make claims about what is true. When I was a kid and watching a lot of Star Trek, I would sometimes wake up in the morning a little confused, forgetting if this or that fantastical device had actually been invented yet. But mainly, trekkers are able to remember that the stories they so much live by are not actually true.

Currents in contemporary theologies of legitimate religions, like the work of Methodist theologian Stanley Hauerwas, have emphasized the role of narrative in constructing a useful, invigorating, people-improving religiosity. Is it possible, I wonder, for the traditional religions to self-consciously take or permit a stance wherein the truth of their central claims is not actually an issue phenomenologically?

Remember Vonnegut's Bokononism, the religion of the untruths that make one happy. Actually I think this is a bit modest a claim: the things we function by and the languages we use (linguistic and perhaps religious) have an intrinsic truth by the mere fact of their being so.

Is this virulently offensive?

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Beauty, Truth, Strings - 9/26/2006 22:14:36
Posted by Nathan

I am reminded of this also as I read this article about the progress of string theory in this week's New Yorker. The author suggests that this field that has dominated theoretical physics for decades still has not produced substantive evidence that it is in fact true; you know, truly true. Its value appears to be based more on aesthetic evidence than the emperical.

Meanwhile string theory has taken on a sociological truth in the scientific community, and one with mixed results. For one, it has produced advances in number theory, including a Fields Prize.

There is a funny something to be said for all these human efforts under possibly false premises. They tend to yield, and in unexpected places. They also seem to be inevitable. But can they ever be separated from those situations in which false premises are virulent, preserved for the search for beauty, meaning, and an interesting way of life?

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