From:
Timothy
Taylor
Date: 4.17.02
Far from recognizing recent putative victories of
science as heralding a 'new humanism', I see the
potential for a new barbarism. If a literary critic
wrote something about 'air atoms' we might laugh;
but when an eminent evolutionary biologist uses
the word 'metaphysical' as if it meant 'supernatural'
or 'mystical' (as one recently did) no one appears
to notice. Arts, humanities and philosophy scholars
read popular science—if they read it at all—with
an already jaded eye. No misuse of language (and
consequent betrayal of muddled and unsophisticated
thought) comes as a surprise any longer.
One could go off in many directions from the provocative
starting point of John Brockman's essay on the 'new
humanists', contrasting humanities subjects with
'hard' sciences; experimento-predictive science
with historical science (necessity vs. contingency);
or post-modernism with various brands of rationalism
and Marxism.
Certainly
I recognize some of what John diagnoses as frustrating
(and worse) in the social sciences—'text-in,
text-out' bubbles of inconsequential, content-free
activity only blasphemously given the name of
scholarship. But we must also recognize that there
has been an extraordinary—and often extraordinarily
arrogant—underestimation of the complexity
of the humanities by some hard scientists who
extend themselves across the arts-sciences divide.
Personally, I have no doubt that to do moral philosophy
well, for instance, requires a longer intellectual
training than is typically needed to make advances
in, say, plasma physics or genetics. But I also
know that some physicists and geneticists are
prone not to recognize this. I do not mean to
say that what they do is simple-minded (emphatically
it is not), simply that some (perhaps much) of
it is epistemologically more straight-forward.
There is much that I agree with in what John has
said, but points of disagreement too and it will
perhaps be useful if we first agree on what things
we might mean by humanism. The Oxford English
Dictionary gives four general definitions
and a fifth, specifically philosophical one. Here
they are:
1.Belief
in the mere humanity of Christ.
2.The character and quality of being human;
devotion to human interests.
3.Any system of thought or action which is concerned
with merely human interest (as distinguished
from divine), or with those of the human race
in general (as distinguished from individual);
the 'Religion of Humanity.'
4.Devotion to those studies which promote human
culture; literary culture; esp. the system of
the Humanists, the study of the Roman and Greek
classics which came into vogue at the Renascence.
5.Philos. A pragmatic system of thought . .
. which emphasizes that man can only comprehend
and investigate what is with the resources of
the human mind, and discounts abstract theorizing;
so, more generally, implying that technological
advance must be guided by awareness of widely
understood human needs.
We
should note that only in (1) and (3) is an association
with atheism explicitly signalled and that Renaissance
humanists like Leonardo believed in God (indeed
their sense of wonder at the world and their urge
to invent and subcreate within it was often felt
to be part of discharging human duties that were
ultimately divine in origin). However, scientific
humanism, as it arose with Darwin in opposition
to the dogma of Victorian clerics, is explicitly
associated with atheism or agnosticism, and is
understood by many to point the way towards a
purely scientifically-grounded theory of right
action—ethical humanism.
These definitions obviously contain contrastive
elements. I take it that John might often be professionally
concerned with definition 4, most usually associated
with rhetoric, grammar, poetry and a knowledge
of the classics—i.e. those things which popular
science writing can benefit so much from (and
which it sometimes fails to display); I am wondering,
however, whether by new humanism John instead
means to indicate something that furthers knowledge
of humanity more rigorously and lucidly (more
scientifically in one use of the word) than American
sociology and socio-cultural anthropology currently
do (disciplines which, powered by post-modernism
and relativism, have all but imploded in some
areas). If this is so, then the debate on what
a new humanism might be as conducted in and from
the US will be rather different to the debate
which might be had elsewhere.
The dangers of scientists attempting to become
the new humanists are best illustrated by specific
examples. For instance, Richard Dawkins' idea
of 'memes'—proposed cultural counterparts
to genes—has not been adopted in archaeology,
precisely the discipline where it should have
succeeded had it been useful. It is unsurprising
(and no real discredit to him) that a top-notch
geneticist does not cut the mustard when it comes
to theorizing cultural transmission: after all,
Richard Dawkins may have no more training in cultural
theory than I have in genetics. A problem arises,
however, if people who may know no better think
that memes must be a good idea, and interpret
the paucity of critical discussion of them as
evidence of the acceptance of the concept.
Similar kinds of concerns arise in relation to
the psychologist Steven Pinker's formulation of
a 'language instinct'. This is not a bad idea
in theory, but it is elaborated with—apparently—total
disregard for an extensive body of work by Russian,
French and German philosophical linguists which
has reached very different conclusions. That is
to say, whether or not one accepts Pinker's linguistic
judgements, his work has come out from a cognitive
psychology background into the glare of public
attention (and has been widely accepted to be
true by the media) without engaging with those
humanistic debates of most central relevance to
the plausibility or otherwise of his most dramatic
claims (as expressed by followers of L.S.Vygotsky,
to take one example).
One has to confront the tricky problem that popular
science often either preaches to the converted
or, when it strays into more 'humanistic' domains,
makes an unwitting ass of itself. The US has an
excellent tradition of scientists writing for
a broader audience, but a scarily growing third
of the national population share a metaphysics
which cannot accommodate Darwinian evolution,
let alone understand what it entails. The rise
of Creationism in the US is an unfolding intellectual
tragedy that will only be turned around once there
is greater respect, among scientists in particular,
for the sophistication and unpredictability of
human social and cultural formations. This will
require a renewed humility in addressing the true
complexities of our behavioural well-springs.
The prospect of a great nation intellectually
split between religious fundamentalism and an
equally assertive, dogmatic and unreflectively
narrow scientism is not pretty.
The 'human needs' alluded to in definition 5 above
may well—in contrast to definition 3—include
religion. Historically and prehistorically, they
obviously do: viewed in a socially—and biologically-evolutionary
perspective, religious beliefs generally (but
not without exception) appear to represent adaptive
systems which create and mediate cultural values
and relationships. This indicates that to be fully
human involves more than purely 'rational' existence.
We might reflect here on Darwin's own horror of
the possibility that the uneducated working classes
would outbreed those who were more educated, like
himself, even though, by his own survival-of-the-fittest
logic, he should have taken a neutral, value-free
view. He clearly thought that there was something
valuable about humans 'at their best' that extended
beyond reproduction. If it could no longer be
viewed as a divine spark, then it was something
equally transcendent—a quest for enlightenment
and truth for its own sake, for example.
A real victory for science would consist not in
sweeping other aspects of existence, such as religion,
away (not that it has any hope of doing so), but
in respectfully deepening understanding of what
it is to live and die as a human and observe the
universe from that perspective. Many dimensions
of non-rational, symbolic or ritual behaviours
can, of course, be partially or wholly analysed
within a scientific framework, but other aspects
will never be amenable to such a thing. There
are places where experiment and verification cannot
go and we have to observe, interpret, reflect
and explain perceived phenomena in a qualitatively
different way.
What we should remember, whatever disagreements
and convergences this debate reveals, is that
no data are untheorized; that theories embody
values; and that therefore empirical research
can never be wholly objective. In this sense,
then, science is already pervaded by humanism—steeped
in categories, perceptions and styles of entitation
that have a long and distinctive cultural history.
Science may be a (the?) most powerful way to answer
questions, but both questions and answers are
imbued with humane value. What is most important
for John to do next is to encourage more people
trained in traditionally 'non-scientific' disciplines
to present their often highly sophisticated and
demanding ideas in a way that enables greater
dialogue across the arts-science divide. One day
we may be able to just consider the quality and
nature of our knowledge—distinguishing only
good from bad thinking.
