Anson Cameron: One thing you can be sure of, science ain't poetry
" 'THE LORD HAS NEED OF THESE FLOWERETS GAY.'/ THE REAPER SAID, AND SMILED;/ 'DEAR TOKENS OF THE EARTH ARE THEY,/ WHERE HE WAS ONCE A CHILD'."
This is carved on the headstone of an infant briefly named Cecil who died in 1890.
And this on the headstone of a boy named Keith who died in 1920: "HE WANTS NOT – FOR GOD TOOK HIM./ HE IS NOT DEAD –THE CHILD OF OUR AFFECTION./ BUT GONE INTO THAT SCHOOL,/ WHERE HE NO LONGER NEEDS OUR POOR PROTECTION/ AND CHRIST HIMSELF DOTH RULE."
Both these inscriptions are on graves in the St Kilda General Cemetery where many abbreviated lives are documented in stone. Walk any graveyard and you will find the word "Infant" again and again. The onetime incessant slaughter of the young by disease meant a stonemason could carve that word in his sleep. But these horrific statistics tail off through the 1900s. By the 21st century infant mortality all but vanishes from our gravestones. I didn't find any contemporary infants in that cemetery.
Steven Pinker in his book Enlightenment Now writes: "Ever-creative Homo sapiens had long fought against disease with quackery such as prayer, sacrifice, bloodletting, cupping... But starting in the late 18th century with the invention of vaccination and accelerating in the 19th with acceptance of the germ theory of disease, the tide of battle began to turn." He goes on to namecheck famous medical pioneers such as Fleming, Salk, Pasteur, Florey, Ramon et al. And includes a table listing their discoveries and the estimated billions of lives they saved. These and other scientists explain the rarity of "Infant" on the contemporary headstone.
On the day I took my walk through the St Kilda General Cemetery this country's ad hoc PM, Scott Morrison, was in Albury asking us to pray for rain. "I pray for that rain everywhere else around the country. And I do pray for that rain. And I'd encourage others who believe in the power of prayer to pray for that rain and to pray for our farmers. Please do that."
The PM's prayers set me thinking how routinely science is taken for granted, rejected, and belittled by both left and right. On the left you have the profitable pas de deux of charlatans and fools gorging on alternative medicines, the paranoid anti-vaxers sacrificing virgins on rocks, the anti-GM brigade who imagine an agri-Eden that never existed, and now postmodern professors are teaching students that all cultures have equally valid myths and that science is merely another way of explaining the world, no more true than the many other fables and philosophies with which we have explained our existence.
Over on the right you have foot-stomping religionists and arch-capitalists; the first are offended by science's constant disproval of scripture and the shrinking dominion of God, and the second by science discovering proofs that unchecked capitalism will be globally catastrophic. The right rejects climate science because it is an insult to the integrity of the free market. No surprise – new truths always insult dogma.
A man with my addictions to literature and music, writing in this section of the paper, should perhaps resist the urge to make light of poetry, symphony, cinema, Picasso and beautiful gardens. But I wouldn't be doing my duty to the truth if I didn't observe human happiness is more likely to be engendered by having living children and no music than dead children and the compensations of prayer, Bach and Moliere.
Let's go back to the cemetery. Put whatever disingenuous quatrain you like on the tombstone of a child, the consolations of Longfellow are ipso facto shallow when carved in such rock. But if Cecil and Keith had been born today their parents – Bertha and Wilkie, Isabel and William – could expect them to live to be octogenarians. Imagine how the lives of those two mothers and two fathers would have been enriched had that happened. Imagine their joy, and then multiply that joy by the billion or so parents who have science to thank for their children's lives. Do that and the idea that poetry, music, art or prayer are more salutary to the soul than science is starts to look like the conceit of wealthy, coddled folk.
Yet – you can name three Australian authors, three Australian musicians, three Australian Holy people (undisgraced is more difficult), and countless Australian politicians. Can you name three Australian scientists, not including the aforementioned Florey, who saved as many lives as both world wars cost?
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