THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 26, 1997 TAG: 9701230484
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Dave Addis
LENGTH: 60 lines
Balloon-adventurer Steve Fossett finally dropped from the sky the other day, into a pasture in India, in a region populated by shepherds and farmers.
Many of the villagers had never seen such a sight. Some mistook the rig for a floating temple, according to press accounts, and believed Fossett to be a human incarnation of their mythical monkey-god, Hanuman.
It's easy to laugh at the simple beliefs of a rural people, but we ought not to. We have cultists of our own, among them people who believe that the Boston Red Sox might someday win a World Series.
You'd be farther ahead to bet on the return of the monkey-god.
But it certainly was refreshing to learn that large expanses of the planet remain untouched by cellular telephones and the Internet. Places where Ed McMahon has never stuffed a mailbox with promises of instant wealth. (Again, put your money on the monkey-god.)
If we were to take seriously the commercials that have flooded the television this winter, we'd have to believe that every Buddhist monk in every cave in the Himalayas is surfing the 'net with an IBM laptop computer, and every goat-herd in Scotland is moving mutton futures in Chicago with the help of a pocket-sized flip-phone.
This simply is not true. This winter, researchers working near the Arctic Circle, in what used to be the Soviet Union, ran across a tribe of nomads whose lives revolve around hunting reindeer. Curious, the researchers asked how the nomads' lives had changed since the fall of communism.
It became clear that things hadn't changed much for the nomads because they'd never even heard of the Soviet Union, or Lenin, or glasnost, or any of the rest of it. In 75 years, word simply hadn't worked its way that far north.
In reality, the gap between science and superstition on our planet is as wide as it's ever been. Maybe wider. And the science that the rest of us take for granted is so fantastical that it's going to get harder and harder to explain to those who've been left behind.
Let's say, for example, that you tried to explain to those shepherds in India what it was that fell into their fields.
It is not a floating temple, you'd tell them, but a sophisticated experiment that allows a man to float around the world, above mountains and clouds, with the aid of a gas, like air, that is really lighter than air. All the while, the man in the balloon could still speak to his family back home, and he could appear on Nightline. . . which is actually a god named Ted, who has an odd-looking head and speaks to people in the middle of the night through a glass box in their living rooms. In color.
Now, if you were the shepherds, would you find that story more comforting than the legend of Hanuman, the monkey-god?
You don't have to be a villager in rural India to be frightened by the gap between what science has made available and what your mind is able to grasp.
I was thinking that the other night as I was trying to master a simple task on a new piece of software on my home computer. I tried the ``help'' button and got no help. I tried the instruction manual and got no instruction. I tried the ``Dummies'' guide and learned that I'm still a dummy.
Tonight, I'll reload the software and pray to Hanuman. It couldn't hurt. MEMO: Dave Addis is the editor of Commentary. Reach him at 446-2726,
or addis(AT)worldnet.att.net