Science and Sensibility
I am a keen student of propaganda. I have looked at how propaganda changed within the European civilization from the Roman Empire to the Cold War.
This poem is inspired by this study and some of the Soviet posters made in the 1980s. (Except the one bellow, which is one of the earliest examples of abstract design from the early 1920s.)
Science and Sensibility
We are sensible people.
Maybe.
We see the world as a round ball of blue.
We see the world as a collection of stories.
We see the world as a collection of struggles amongst the classes.
We see the world as saved and doomed, defiled and honored, holy and wicked.
We see the world in the lens of science,
We split it up like Newton with his prism, the rainbow.
But,
But,
This outlook can be a massive prison as well.
We see the world as a set of calculations:
2 + 2 = 4 or 2 x 2 = 4
A Silica to Carbon cycle equation:
2CO2 + 2H2O + CaSiO3 = CaCO3 + CO2 + 2H2O + SiO2
Maybe a different set of calculations?
2 + 2 = 5? Comrade?
Shouldn’t you be working in a factory to stave away?
Stave away the scheming capitalist?
Don’t you know that a stronger worker can produce 25% more?
More than mathematics?
It is great to be sensible,
To watch out upon the world,
But science can make us all unsensible as well.
When man is just a set of calculation,
Nature is dead.
If nature is dead, God is dead.
But should he be?
Shouldn’t you respect individual humanity?
Ones own destiny? Or is it all just random?
Or is everything just a power struggle?
2 + 2 = 4 is well and good as we can prove it.
But is it true?
What about God and J.C.?
I cannot prove them, yet,
Have you seen men sacrifice, fight, defend?
Ready to be shot for
2 x 2 = 4?
Why would they defend
2 + 2 = 5?
I cannot prove God and J.C.,
Yet,
Yet…
пра́вда ≠ и́стина
