We expect novelties and inventions, modern solutions, to be some kind of revelation that will give us a push in the back so that we finally go in the right direction – to find knowledge. At the same time, we utterly fail to remember – and, even more so, we do not know! – what defines our tradition. We are strangers to what – as a wider, national, European community – we have experienced, what we have lived through together with those who have passed away before us. And yet it is only with them, with the dead, that a kind of resolve can be realised, which is a work for collective self-identification.
That is the conservative creed. From it comes the force of my anticipations and more or less vague conjectures about the future, which I always try to place within what has passed. Of course, other answers can be matched to questions about the shape of future directions, pursuits and their possible material crystallisations. Or, to put it another way, all the answers are similar; only the signs by which this world is judged differ, sometimes dramatically and sometimes normally, as in life. Let us take the example of science. Virtually everyone with a so-called ‘left-wing sensibility’ favours science and respects its truth claims. ‘Lab coats’ do not lie; that is counter-effective – one hears flattering words about scientists who have finally succeeded in separating facts from values. Conversely, those who show scepticism about the achievements of science are regarded by modern, progressive people as hicks, as advocates of superstition. A conservative who tries to expose the errors of science and points out the field of possible abuses deserves a similar label. After all, even Czesław Miłosz – the anniversary of whose death we are celebrating this year – the Lithuanian national poet, more a hero of the left than of the right, spoke of the dangers of enlightened knowledge in numerous interviews. ‘My fundamental theme is the erosion of the religious imagination as a result of science and technology’, he said, ‘which in turn causes a loss of the sense of truth. I treat my activity as a poet as a quest for means against the erosion of the religious imagination’. It is not unreasonable for someone to argue that the history of science is the history of scientists adopting self-corrections to the research hypotheses they put forward, that science itself is constantly developing within the framework of the correction of its results, that the assumptions of science are every now and then subject to a falsification procedure. And if that is the case, why is science so apt to err and miss the truth? I cannot rule out the possibility that science, which prompts us to think about steady, sustainable growth, is itself losing touch with reality. Let us listen to what Robert Musil wrote on this subject over a hundred years ago:
The pioneers of mathematics had some very useful ideas about certain fundamentals, which then led to conclusions, methods of calculation and results, which were subsequently used by physicists to obtain new results and, finally, by technicians, who sometimes only took the results and added new calculations to them, and that is how machines were created. And all of a sudden, when everything existed at its best, the mathematicians – those who plod somewhere in the very middle – came to the conclusion that there was something in the underpinnings of the whole thing that could in no way be fitted in with the rest; they checked at the very bottom and found that indeed the whole edifice was hanging in the air. But the machines worked! It must, therefore, be accepted that all of our existence is a dream and a mirage: we owe it, in fact, only to a mistake, without which it would not have come into being at all.