But there is also a whole mass of science that is incomprehensible to nearly everybody, which pretends that it's The Answer for all kinds of technical or philosophical issues, and which supports experts. Quantum theory is the classic case, relativity is a touch more accessible, but subatomic physics and most of medicine, aeronautics and automobile engineering, soil chemistry and biology, statistics, and the higher reaches of economics, are all subjects that nearly everybody is content to leave to the experts. Mathematics has a strange position, similar but with its own peculiar stance akin to revealed religion - mostly because it has been presented from school onwards as an arcane craft whose practitioners are the only humans with access to Platonic truths.
Then there are the quasi[52]-sciences like astrology, homeopathy, reflexology, and iridology, which simply can't work. They should be sharply distinguished from odd, often ancient practices like acupuncture, osteopathy and herbal treatments, which work sufficiently often but have a theoretical base that is poorly worked out in scientific terms. Many people are attracted by their homespun mix of myth and mysticism (which are all the more impressive because the treatment sometimes works), and feel that a modem scientific investigation would somehow spoil them. It would certainly poke some holes in the traditional rationalisations, but in all likelihood it would make the treatments even better. Whereas the quasi-sciences would be (indeed, already have been, not that everyone's noticed) demolished.
To end that list, we add evolutionary biology, a very well-established set of models founded in the fossil record, chromosomes, and DNA, which explains similarities and differences among today's living creatures much more elegantly and effectively than its creationist or intelligent-design rivals. Nevertheless, a very large proportion of people - especially Christians in the American Mid-West, Muslims in fanatically Islamic cultures, and fundamentalist believers in general - deny that humans evolved. To them, their own brand of authority trumps the scientific evidence, or their `common sense' renders the whole concept laughable. `I ain't kin to no ape!' was the explanation given by a young schoolgirl at one of Jack's Life on Other Planets lectures, when the teacher asked her why she didn't believe in evolution.
There is a general human propensity, of which much use is made in the Discworld books, to set up accepted, unexamined mental backgrounds. Mostly these result from the Make-a-Human-Being kits that each human culture inflicts on its members as they grow up through childhood and adolescence. Each of us is the result of a learning process, only a tiny fraction of which is overt `education' by professional teachers. The kit includes nursery rhymes, songs, stories, the personification of nursery animals (sly foxes, wise owls, industrious litter-collecting Wombles) and human roles from fabulous postman and princess up to crime-fighting Batman and Superman. All these have their place in the unexamined basis of our day-to-day thoughts and actions. A possible explanation for Princess Diana's undeniable popularity with the British public - indeed the world - is that she, unlike `real' royalty, had imbibed the popular impression of What Princesses Do as distinct from the authentically royal version. So she did what we had all learned that real princesses do, she looked and behaved like an icon, not like genuine royalty.
Sophisticated human beings, citizens like us - and indeed like tribesmen and barbarians[53] in today's world, nearly all of whom have heard of Superman, Tarzan, Ronald MacDonald - all have this hotchpotch of images, models, phobias, inspirations and villains. Our day-to-day experience gives us a self whose memory-train is a succession of scenes, thoughts, experiences, and passions, all painted a la Damasio with emotional tags that say `Great!', `Do This Again When I Can!' or `Avoid At All Costs!' when we recall them. But these sit upon a great mass of mostly unexamined structural human material, that labels us as Western Twentieth-Century Biologist or Ghetto Rabbi or Roman Centurion or Seventeenth-Century French Courtesan, or, for most people most of the time, Exploited Peasant.
Each of those roles has a different set of emotional labels for money, for priests, for sex, for nakedness, for death, and for birth. Most people, until quite recently, underpinned that unexamined set of beliefs with a theist (personal, humanlike) God or gods, or a deist (Something Up There with Extraordinary Powers) god-structure, so the emotional tags on important memories have been strongly Godflavoured. When we remember them they may be sins, atonements, redemptions or trials. They may be mitzvahs (blessings) or revenges or charities. Religions, in bringing us into our cultures via their Makea-Christian or Make-a-Maya kit, put different-strength labels on, for example, human sacrifice, so that it has a whole host of associations in adult life. Our adult prejudices, and our scientific theories, go in on top of this crazy mishmash of historical errors, badly understood schooling, mathematics and statistics that barely make sense to us, God-stories of causality and ethics, and educational lies-to-children that permit the teacher to disengage his brain in response to children's questions.
This mental mishmash is well illustrated by our changing attitudes to Mars. Mars was known to the ancients as a `wandering star', a planet; its reddish colour had bloody associations, so the Romans associated it with their god of war. It also acquired a connection with war in astrology, where the visible stars and planets all had to mean something. We're going to look at a lot of different associations with Mars[54], as myth and rationality engaged with the red planet, as stories by the hundred employed Mars and Martians, and as the scientific picture of Mars changed over the centuries.
We shouldn't ask `which is the true Mars?' We become larger humans by considering all of these aspects; from that stance there really isn't a true, real, objective planet for our minds to engage with usefully. Our simple, thin causal lines can't comprehend a real astronomical object, even a world which is actually out there so that we can see it. The `it' we see can be the disc whose apparent lines Giovanni Schiaparelli called 'canali', which excited Percival Lowell (whose grasp of Italian seems to have been slight, since the word means `channels') to see them as engineered canals. He wrote Mars as the Abode of Life, and this laid the foundation for the folk Mars of the twentieth century.
Between the World Wars, everybody in the West, and many in the East, looked into the night sky and saw inimical Martians, a mental residue of that 1920s picture of a drying, dying Mars. The image was overlaid by the War of the Worlds picture of envious, grim, disgusting tripod Martians invading Earth (or at least England). There was a more romantic overlay for many of those out camping, or sleeping out under the stars: Barsoom. Edgar Rice Burroughs, familiar because of his Tarzan stories, invented a Mars whose dried-out seabeds were home to green Martian warrior hordes, six-legged centaur-like creatures whose egg-incubators were visited regularly. John Carter, an American ex-confederate army officer, had wished himself on to Mars, been captured by the green warriors but soon found himself married to a red Martian princess[55]. Stanley Weinbaum's A Martian Odyssey added more dimensions: the Martian called Tweel, who made long hops and landed on his nose, the hypnotic predator that showed you your most desirable images, and attempts at a gosh-wow desert ecology. Then there were stories of Martians coming to Earth, pretending to be human ... and humans attempting to interact with a more or less mystical ancient Martian civilisation.
The best known, perhaps the best crafted of these romanticmystical portrayals of crude, lumbering Earthmen, insensitive to the ethereal beauties of the Martian crystal cities, were Ray Bradbury's. In the 1950s and 1960s his tales were read by many outside the fantasy/SF world, and they appeared in widely read magazines like Argosy as well as in SF pulps in railway station bookstores. They laid the mystical ancient Martian foundation for Robert Heinlein to build the most potent of all these Martian tales, Stranger in a Strange Land. Michael Valentine Smith had been a foundling on Mars, brought up and trained in their culture by the ancient Martians. He came to Earth, founded a commune of friends -'Water Brothers'- and started a religion whose 'grokking the fullness' of everyday events, from sex to science to swimming, spread to communities of readers. There was a tragic, well-publicised association with the murderous Manson killers, who had used this book as their mantra, but this didn't harm sales, and the ancient mystical Martians became the standard image.
53
This is a special usage devised by the anthropologist Lloyd Morgan in the 1880s, picked up by John Campbell Jr in an Analog editorial in the 1960s, then by Jack in The Privileged Ape: for tribal humans, everything is traditional, mandatory or forbidden; for barbarians, action is driven by honour, bravery, modesty, defiance of precedent; for citizens, some roles are tribal, some barbarian, we choose.
54
Not quite including the confectionery, which was the surname of the originator; he came to England from the USA, and invented M&Ms too. That stands for 'Mars and Mars'.
55
Also egg-laying. Jack, reading Burroughs when young, was disturbed by the idea of their marriage bed ...