More Than Meets the Eye in The Times of London

I read this stuff with mounting scepticism, especially now, when the overblown celebrations of Darwin’s anniversary have begun to stick in the throat. I am reminded of the street evangelist who cries “Jesus is the answer”, but who never defines the question. In the same way, we have an accumulation of answers, with no questions asked. Take any aspect of the human condition in which people have invested their hopes and fears — the love of God, of neighbour, of beauty, of virtue — boil it down to a few neurons, and tell the whole story in Darwinese, and you create the impression that some part of the human mystery has been solved. The amazing and puzzling qualities that distinguish us from the rest of nature are merely adaptations, and all are “hard-wired” in the brain.

No doubt there is a part of the brain associated with mathematical calculations. And mathematical competence is an adaptation: if you can’t add, you won’t multiply. Does this tell us what numbers are? Does it solve the great philosophical conundrum of the foundations of arithmetic, or help us to interpret Gödel’s theorem? Of course not. It tells us nothing about mathematics, but only something, and something fairly routine, about the brain. Likewise, the neurononsense that I have summarised tells us nothing about the self, about free will, about God or about beauty. It associates ideas with parts of the brain; but it does not tell us what the ideas mean, or what they refer to. It tells a story about neurons, which cause my arm to rise; but it says nothing about what I do when I raise my arm. And the talk of “adaptations” turns out, on inspection, to be trivial. It tells us that the love of God, of neighbour, of beauty and virtue are not dysfunctional from the point of view of reproduction. Otherwise they would have all died out. Big deal.

The University of Michigan asked applicants for undergraduate admission to submit essay responses to the following prompt:

“The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha — which is to demean oneself.” (Robert Pirsig, Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, p. 16)

Author Robert Pirsig (1928 — ) suggests that science has traditionally concerned itself with truth, while art has concerned itself with beauty. How might these two endeavors be the same? How might they be irreconcilably different?

Science doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about truth. Scientists do. Art doesn’t give a rat’s ass about beauty. Artists do. The scientist and the artist know what they are doing when they abstract — when they say “science concerns itself with truth” and “art concerns itself with beauty” — which they sometimes have to do. The artist is as smitten with truth as the scientist. The scientist is as smitten with beauty as the artist. Both knock on the same door, see the same splendors, drop the same handkerchiefs. And in their earnest flirtations with the world sometimes their very earnestness gets in the way.

The problem isn’t that science and art are irreconcilably different. The problem is that scientists and artists are irreducibly people, and people can be amnesiac. They forget that the world is as modest as she is alluring; that she can stand to be admired or studied only so much. Sketches and biology satisfy so long as we don’t reduce life to them.

Really talented people have had at least moments of trying. Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don and a Nobel Prize-winner in genetics, says that we human beings are “lumbering robots blindly programmed” by our genes which “control us body and mind.” Van Gogh had the gall to call this world “a study that didn’t come off.”

Disenchantment and lassitude are the subject of the celebrated early T. S. Eliot. “And I have known the eyes already, known them all — / The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, / And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, / When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, / Then how should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? / And how should I presume?” As for the American novel, the fugitive nature of the true and the beautiful reaches its apotheosis in front of a couple of cabinets:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table in many colored disarray. While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher — shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue. Suddenly, with a strained sound, Daisy bent her head into the shirts and began to cry stormily.

“They’re such beautiful shirts,” she sobbed, her voice muffled in the thick folds. “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such — such beautiful shirts before.”

I don’t suggest the one thing led to the other, but two years after Nick Carraway narrated The Great Gatsby, Eliot announced that he had converted to the orthodox Christian faith. The darling of the literati and the avant-garde had gone off the deep end as Auden would in 1940. Eliot published no major work for ten years. Some essays came forth, some plays, and then in 1943 Four Quartets appeared. It is the work of a man who has gotten beyond decadent aestheticism and the endlessly self-referential question “Do I dare disturb the universe?” Eliot became a critic of his earlier work, an artist with a new direction. Like Rat and Mole, he’d heard the music from another room.

By the end of the summer, when Gillian enters the ivy halls of Wheaton College — which to do is to get what Stanley Hauerwas calls “a damned good education” (he told me this as we stood next to each other making water at Boston College urinals) — only the caboose of our family will not have left home and taken his religion to school. Wherever Aaron matriculates, I hope he will be the kind of man moved by the scene of Daisy burying her face in Gatsby’s shirts. I hope he’ll be the kind of man who moves in the direction taken by Eliot and Auden and my Great Aunt Mena. If he does? He’ll know that education is something more than preparation for a game show. And when he watches the best game show ever and “Love Songs & Food for 800” is chosen, and Alex reads the answer, “‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’ he asked, and measured out his life” Aaron will be able to pose without need of with coffee spoons the question, “Who is T. S. Eliot?” and wonder if America gets the irony.

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manoeuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with Nineteenth-Century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. MacPhee was a survivor from that tradition. It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men. The time was ripe.

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From the novel That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis

I am not religious. I do not believe that personhood is conferred upon conception. But I also do not believe that a human embryo is the moral equivalent of a hangnail and deserves no more respect than an appendix. Moreover, given the protean power of embryonic manipulation, the temptation it presents to science and the well-recorded human propensity for evil even in the pursuit of good, lines must be drawn. I suggested the bright line prohibiting the deliberate creation of human embryos solely for the instrumental purpose of research — a clear violation of the categorical imperative not to make a human life (even if only a potential human life) a means rather than an end.

On this, Obama has nothing to say. He leaves it entirely to the scientists. This is more than moral abdication. It is acquiescence to the mystique of “science” and its inherent moral benevolence. How anyone as sophisticated as Obama can believe this within living memory of Mengele and Tuskegee and the fake (and coercive) South Korean stem cell research is hard to fathom.

That part of the ceremony, watched from the safe distance of my office, made me uneasy. The other part — the ostentatious issuance of a memorandum on “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making” — would have made me walk out.

Restoring? The implication, of course, is that while Obama is guided solely by science, Bush was driven by dogma, ideology and politics.

What an outrage. Bush’s nationally televised stem cell speech was the most morally serious address on medical ethics ever given by an American president. It was so scrupulous in presenting the best case for both his view and the contrary view that until the last few minutes, the listener had no idea where Bush would come out.

Obama’s address was morally unserious in the extreme. It was populated, as his didactic discourses always are, with a forest of straw men. Such as his admonition that we must resist the “false choice between sound science and moral values.”

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See “Obama’s ‘Science’ Fiction” in the WP

Many of the most fundamental claims of science are against common sense and seem absurd on their face. Do physicists really expect me to accept without serious qualms that the pungent cheese that I had for lunch is really made up of tiny, tasteless, odorless, colorless packets of energy with nothing but empty space between them? Astronomers tell us without apparent embarrassment that they can see stellar events that occurred millions of years ago, whereas we all know that we see things as they happen. When, at the time of the moon landing, a woman in rural Texas was interviewed about the event, she very sensibly refused to believe that the television pictures she had seen had come all the way from the moon, on the grounds that with her antenna she couldn’t even get Dallas. What seems absurd depends on one’s prejudice. Carl Sagan accepts, as I do, the duality of light, which is at the same time wave and particle, but he thinks that the consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost puts the mystery of the Holy Trinity “in deep trouble.” Two’s company, but three’s a crowd.

Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism. It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin in the NYTBR

If antiquity was the childhood of civilization, then modernity is adulthood.

Modern man outgrew old myths and elevated science to a position of supremacy; he ditched his lyre and donned the lab coat. The modern world is a world of facts. It is a bourgeois world, a busy and business-oriented world, a place where poetry and art sit quietly at the margins of day-to-day life.

Whereas the child assumed the posture of nature’s student and admirer, the adult fancies himself teacher and master over nature. He concerns himself with grown-up things: money, security, the latest news, the latest studies. The earth is not a mother but a reserve of manipulable resources. Snow is a cluster of crystallized molecules; it is also a nuisance.

The modern world did show signs of longing for its days of youth (see: Romanticism). But the inexorable passage of time could not be thwarted, and gray hairs began to grow. Old age brought senility: incoherence, confusion, forgetting the function of toilets. It’s called postmodernism.

The irony is that postmodernists think they are riding the cusp of all that is fresh and new. Really they are suffering — some of them, anyway — from the gerontic afflictions of cataracts, memory loss and dementia. They’re stuck in solipsistic language games. Who can say what “the Earth” is? How could we pretend to know anything “true” about snow?

The extent to which we have progressed beyond modernity into postmodernity, beyond adulthood into old age, remains debatable. In any case, death is lurking. Birth rates are absurdly low; Western economies are surviving on an influx of immigrants. Europe’s identity has been almost entirely effaced. America is following suit.

But maybe it is just here that the analogy breaks down. Maybe an aged civilization, unlike an aged human being, can find fresh springs of rejuvenation and continue far into the future. Are there such springs?

It seems clear from our past that neither myth nor fact, by itself, can satisfy us for long. The realist in man, the scientist, will always rebel from a world of pure myth. And the dreamer, the poet, will always rebel from a world of pure fact. We will be satisfied only when we can embrace myth and fact together, when we can marvel at beauty and revel in truth, when we can enjoy the wonder of childhood and the knowledge of adulthood at one and the same time.

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Bryce Taylor, my son Gabriel’s friend and Silliman suite-mate. See the complete column in today’s YDN

Those who would use science to solve real human problems often must first translate those human problems into narrowly technical problems, framed in terms of some theoretically tractable model and a corresponding method. Such tractability offers a collateral benefit: the intellectual pleasure that comes with constructing and tinkering with the model. But there is then an almost irresistible temptation to, as E. A. Burtt said, turn one’s method into a metaphysics—that is, to suppose the world such that one’s method is appropriate to it. When this procedure is applied to human beings, the inevitable result is that the human is defined downward. Thus, for example, thinking becomes “information processing.” We are confronted with the striking reversal wherein cognitive science looks to the computer to understand what human thinking is.

[Matthew Crawford]