I am trying very hard not to make this a book report. I am also aware that being nobody also means that I have little power to fight something as powerful as science and technology. But I am a full-blooded airhead, a modern day Don Quixote, so I ain't need any help from a Czeslaw Milosz to stand in the way of a juggernaut. Yeah, I was told that the men who wear wigs in Europe awarded the Czeslaw Milosz guy the Nobel Prize and he taught in an American university where I happened to be a student. Big deal! Hey, his prize is in literature, not in science. I'm not impressed.

The point I am trying to make here is small yet can be big. I am strongly against using scientific methods and formulae to make arguments concerning human mind and human behavior. No matter how successful science and technology are in our time, our mind, our ideas, our thoughts, our feelings, emotions, desires, impulses, dreams, fantasies, are not entirely scientific, no matter which way you cut it. It is a crime, really, to reduce human minds into numbers, a series of cute symbols in a complicated equation which only the nerdiest nerds can figure out. Can we say this, or do we still have the right to say, that we are humans, not dots, numbers, symbols or whatever you scientific attitude likes to render us?

It has gone far enough, I'm telling you. My friend John is a poet and also a lecturer at the university and occasionally does some literary criticism. One of his articles was published in a journal so he was pretty happy about that; however, his happiness did not last long because one day, he got a phone call from a visiting professor whom John had "attacked" in that article. John was very nervous because he did not know what to expect from this guy who seemed to come out of nowhere. And the meeting went fairly bad because the first words out of that professor's hairy mouth was "John, very nice to meet you. But I must tell you that you have no right to criticize me because I am a scientist and you are not."

Hey, John, how could you let him get away with statement as arrogant as that?

Well, Newton, given time you will catch up with the bad side of the American academic environment. Science symbolizes power, you see. Even if you are a coward, a nerd, one who does not know a thing about life, as long as you are allied with science and technology, you are guaranteed to be in the winners' circle.

But people make fun of nerds, right?

Those are wrong kind of nerds.

Wait a minute, his guy is a behavioral scientist, isn't he not?

There. That's what's so weird about our damn world of too many contradictions. Although each of us behaves in our uttermost human way, there are those who prefer to monitor our random deeds scientifically. They love to simplify things, including the most complex thing in this God-created world: human brain...

So poor John went on and on. I know those are harsh words out of a frustrated mind. But isn't there any truth that in our world of power-hungry souls, only those who are weak use science or whatever they can cling to empower themselves? Who can blame them? If science can simplify the complexity, it will definitely help extend the limits of those minds. And there are so many limited minds crowding our living quarters anyway. Those are my thoughts by the way, for John has been responsible too many things I say in the public.

I must admit that there are geniuses in sciences who have no tendency to simplify the complexity of our world, of human brain and human capacity. Both Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking openly wonder about the amazing fact that human brain has the capacity to know the universe in spite of the fact that human body is made of the same material of which the universe is made.

Science is a monster created by our own minds. The monster has wreaked more than its share of destruction to the world while benefiting only the human species. Science and technology are the main reason that Planet Earth is in such shambles. And this state of destruction largely comes from some people's fanatic devotion and blind belief in science and technology.

Now we have reached the stage at which our human ego is too over-inflated to be humble in front of mother nature. We've discovered some natural laws but also got too clever with them. We let our creativity get into our way of objectivity and humility. Now we are forced to reconsider our basic survival of human species in a more fragile living environment. The monster must be tamed, and it's a task of no other's but our own. It's time to set the records straight: Science belongs to human, not the other way around.

September, 1994