Our Sense of Wonder ~ Gone Under

Now that scientists like Jacques Monod have helped us toward "an anxious quest in a frozen universe of solitude," here are some time-tested secrets for rediscovering the warm and wonderful.

"Alienation," social scientists say, is our inability to relate meaningfully to others, to nature, and to ourselves. As Dr. Urie Bronfenbrenner reports in Scientific American, alienation is growing at an alarming and unprecedented rate. This trend appears to result from a radically different life view imposed upon the past few generations.

Not so many years ago, most people saw in human events and the things of nature the hand of a purposeful God. But today, many scientists, such as the late Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, regard God, meaning, and an intelligence behind the universe as childish concepts. In Monod's words, man must awaken to

his fundamental isolation. Now does he at last realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world. A world that is deaf to his music, just as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes.

God no longer holds "the whole world in His hands." Now emptiness, the void, accounts for everything, and mankind-long accustomed to living in a world full of meaning-grapples with how to adjust to this revolutionary change.

It hasn't been easy, nor the results encouraging. As historian Theodore Roszak observes, twentieth century society has projected "a nihilistic imagery unparalleled in human history." The main themes of the century stand out as disillusionment, pessimism, and the lure of destruction.

Clearly, Monod was no maverick. Nobel laureate Francis Crick (co-unraveler of the DNA code) has said, "I myself, like many scientists, believe that the soul is imaginary." In schools all over the world, students learn that man is a "naked ape," or, as one textbook puts it, "nothing but a complex biochemical mechanism powered by a combustion system which energizes computers with prodigious storage facilities for retaining encoded information."

This main theme in modern science-"reductionism"-has drawn much criticism. Dr. Roszak, for instance, depicts reductionism as "the effort to turn what is alive into a mere thing." Psychiatrists and social commentators like Dr. Viktor E. Franki feel that the society spawned by reductionism is wearing away humanity's psychological health. Recently, an international congress of psychoanalysis concluded that "ever more patients are suffering from a lack of life content."

In the layman's language, "lack of life content" means anxiety, stress, boredom, apathy, despair, meaninglessness, cynicism-in a word, alienation. As playwright Eugene Ionesco writes, "Cut off from religion, metaphysics, and roots, man is lost. His actions become senseless, useless, absurd."

By defining man as a machine and affording him no more dignity than a stone or a piece of broken glass, reductionism has cut deep. Our sense of wonder, our ability to appreciate life's everyday beauties-the sun, the moon, the fragrance of the earth-has comes into question and grown dull.