Seeking glimpses of truth
Twenty-three years after its initial release I am still obsessed with the movie “Moulin Rouge.” The frenetic camera movements, the crazy colorations, the musical mash-ups, the over-the-top characters, and the roller coaster story line all haunt and puzzle and delight me. But perhaps the most obsessive element for me is the insistence by bohemian Toulouse-lautrec that life exists to know “truth, beauty, freedom, love.” Even though the mortal “truth” at the heart of “Moulin Rouge,” made more acceptable to its characters through a haze of absinthe, is that beauty fades, freedom is illusory and love succumbs to death before it is fully realized. Hardly a happy story.
So why the obsession with a movie that is so melancholy? I think it is precisely because it places the hard reality of “truth” at the center of life, even though that truth calls into question the happier emotional and ephemeral stuff of human life.
There is no shortage of people, most of them well-meaning, willing to tell us what the truth is at any given moment. Various religious and philosophical schools of thought are almost all founded on the belief that they have absolute truth at their core. This privileged status in turn demands that they impose their beliefs on others to “save” them from their ignorance. And this dynamic goes far beyond the traditional religious or philosophical factions to include people like self-described gurus of mental and physical health, cultic politicians and even some HOA or other governance board members! All of these “evangelists” (for lack of a better word) have in common the tactic of rejecting any push-back or questioning of their truth by those they are trying to convert to it. To my mind, this heavy-handed proselytizing alone makes their respective versions of truth highly suspect at best. And their total lack of humor about their beliefs only makes them less appealing.
It took me a while to grasp this dynamic, to be honest. I was raised in a traditional Roman Catholic family in rural Illinois. As the oldest son, I dutifully went off to seminary and from there joined a Benedictine abbey, where I was ordained a priest and lived for several years. But the real lives experienced by so many people outside and inside the Catholic fold consistently gave lie to the beautiful stories and liturgical practices. Yes, a sublime Gregorian chant or Palestrina motet might evoke a sense of transcendence (through a haze of frankincense rather than absinthe), but that experience was fleeting and ultimately meaningless in the face of more real corporeal and even “spiritual” human needs. Asking pointed questions was quickly labeled a “crisis of faith” rather than a chance to consider whether the object of that faith was real, much less worthy. Rather than retreat to the comfortable and beautiful, I embraced the crisis and chose to leave behind the cognitive dissonance of an easy but inauthentic life.
Science, which became my eventual community, is itself no stranger to charlatans and snake oil peddlers who consistently confuse beauty for truth. But the fundamental truth-seeking power of science, or at least scientific method, is that no single truth is ever absolute. Sure, we can be fairly certain that the sun rose in the east today, but there is still a possibility that tomorrow it may not. We can hold as true that specific mutations in specific genes cause a horrible disease, but it is also true that sometimes they do not. We can retrace the steps of an incomprehensible expanding universe back to … well, we’re not entirely sure, but it was likely big and bangy. Maybe.
That openness to correction of tentative knowledge without recourse to a higher power makes science both very frustrating and very attractive to non-dogmatic truth seekers. It is also very threatening to many who prefer their alternate absolutes. Science has been attacked as joyless and soulless, an attempt by some malevolent elite caste that uses its unique language to control others. It is none of these things.
My goal with this column going forward is to tell truthful and meaningful stories through the filter of the wonder, the passion, the limitations and even the joy and humor of the scientific method, no matter where it takes us or what noses it tweaks. Even if we disagree, at times I hope you will always find it worth the read.
Fintan Steele is an exbenedictine monk and priest with a PH.D. in biology/ genetics. He spent most of his life in science communications, including scientific publishing and, most recently, for biopharma and academic centers. He and his husband live in Hygiene. Email: fsteele1@me.com.