I don't really much blog anymore, but I feel compelled to air my grievances about a show I saw the other night called "A Gifted Man". The titular "gifted man" is a super-rational, slightly misanthropic neurologist whose wife has died and left behind a clinic. He works at some sort of sophisticated neurology place (complete with obligatory-goofy-looking-computer-animated-holographic-hand-gesture-reconizing-sciency-deal-that-while-not-serving-any-discernible-purpose-that-couldn't-be-fulfilled-by-a-regular-computer-still-seems-cool-and-futuristic-and-such-and-so-is-obligatory) he built along with volunteering at the poor people's clinic (could these two worlds ever come into conflict and our hero be forced to choose between the oppressed masses and his well-to-do clients? I tremble in anticipation.) This all complicated by his ability to see and converse with his dead wife which confronts his empiricist worldview as he sees her as a real manifestation of his wife and not a hallucination on his part. The mechanics of the show don't allow for his wife to be either unambiguously real or a product of his own mind, but if it is only internal, the show is made (slightly) more interesting when one considers his wife's existential crisis (if she actually exists) of being able to observe but having no agency in the world. Walker Percy talks quite often about people in modern, scientific society wandering around in their bodies like Banquo's ghost at the party - unable to really effect any changes but able increasingly to know everything about the world around them (thanks to science) while not knowing themselves. This would be interesting if the wife is somehow a sublimated expression of the man's own self cast as his dead wife to engage with dialectically, but if she just a ghost, it's not; I'd think that being ineffectual and ethereal-feeling is pretty much standard operating procedure for ghosts.
The whole dead wife thing points to the other major conflict in the show - science vs. the "spiritual". Those scare are there because the "spiritual" in question is New Age-y stuff; in the episode I saw the main character removed the partially absorbed twin from the head of an Indian teenager but was unable to stop the voice said teenager kept hearing in his head. The voice was finally stopped and removed when a shaman/carpenter performed a ritual to draw the spirit of the voice into a big piece of that rock-crystal candy stuff that's really just sugar and food coloring and not, I would think, inherently magical while he burnt like a fat blunt of rolled sage in a closed room with some candles in it (seriously). Oh and the carpenter's last name is Little Creek, so he's an American Indian of some generic, unnamed tribe, likely, which explains his magic, apparently. And so the plot is supposed to be this big conflict between these two healers -the neurologist and the shaman - and (BROAD OVER-ARCHING THEME ALERT) faith and science, which the two characters represent. The problem is that the choice of New Age spiritualism and ground on which they fight - healing- isn't a profitable or interesting intersection between the two. It is easy to lay them against each other antagonistically because the battle becomes essentially science vs. pseudo-science. The shaman is a practitioner in an esoteric field of study, but not, for the writers at least, functionally different than the neurosurgeon; as long as he performs the rituals correctly, the result will come. The real weakness of empiricism and the scientific method is not its own field, but the many things that fall outside its purview. The scientific method only approaches truth on an asymptote, its goal is to discover what is not the case. It doesn't deal with Truth, it approaches facts. The real problem for it (and thus for scientific societies such as our own) is its inability to describe the actual experience of being human. Biology, for example, can tell me that I will one day die, but not how to react to or live with that knowledge. I, for one, don't find science vs. faith nearly as interesting as science as faith and the problems which attend it, but I suppose cliched antagonism is easier to write and make seem superficially compelling. None of this is to say that there are not real points at which science and faith have conflicts (not Creation as some would assume, but the Resurrection, we know scientifically that you can't come back from the dead- of course I would argue that miracles cannot be studied scientifically- science is only interested in events so far as they are testable, part of class, rather than individual acts that God chooses to perform- but that is the subject for another post which I will likely neglect to ever write), but only that science vs. faith as pseudo-science is one of the least interesting topics imaginable.
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