I have to take issue with the contributions Garth Zietsman has recently made to the Daily Friend.
That he seems incapable of formulating a single coherent and propositional sentence is for me an insult to the intelligence and the taste of readers of these columns, but more importantly, he unblushingly represents the unacceptable and discredited face of scientism – the view that there can be scientific explanations of human meaning and behaviour untroubled and untrammeled by certainties, doubts, and insights from the world of experience, of art, of metaphysics and of human culture.
Scientism is scientific hubris and over-reach—the extension of hand-me-down scientific methods, categories, and authority into domains where they have no place.
When the noted British cosmologist Sir Roger Penrose sets out on a mission to “explain” consciousness by means of quantum mechanics, you may be sure you are in touch with the hubris of scientism, for we can’t even say what consciousness is, let alone explain its existence.
Covid-19
The danger scientism represents is not merely theoretical. It has come to dominate our lives, as exemplified by the global reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic, an over-reaction which will haunt us for years. This over-reaction was exemplified by the British PM at the time, Boris Johnson, who repeatedly justified as follows the procrustean abrogation of human rights he insisted was necessary to quell the problem: “We are following the science”.
The problem here is two-fold. Firstly, there was no settled science regarding either the malady or its remedy (science in fact is never settled). Secondly, the response of societies the world over was not rightly to a scientific question with medical consequences, but to a human question with cultural consequences. It was far too important to be left to scientists to manage.
Ideally, I would like to offer a line-by-line analysis of the last three of Zietsman’s articles, but this may be tedious for readers, especially readers who don’t have his articles conveniently in front of them.
Pinker vs Wieseltier
Instead I will make opportunistic use of the celebrated collision of intellectual forces that took place in 2013, when the literary editor of The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier, in his article “Crimes Against Humanities” took it upon himself to respond to Steven Pinker’s thesis (“Science is not Your Enemy”) that the previously impervious boundaries between the magisteria of the sciences on the one hand, and the humanities on the other, were giving way to porosity.
Pinker’s case – which was met with enfilading fire from Wieseltier – was that science, supported by big data and the endless reach of digital quantification, had attained a state of perfectibility in terms of which – in literary and art criticism, in philosophy and metaphysics, and in epistemology – it was refining and augmenting insights and understanding traditionally the preserve of a plodding scholarship in the humanities.
If the dispute didn’t quite go viral, it picked up swarms of participants arguing for and against the protagonists to the dispute, including such luminaries as Daniel Dennett, and it is a locus classicus of the dispute between science and the humanities for their relative importance in the pursuit of truth and meaning.
Art is not science
Wieseltier’s contention was that the great art we engage with, which has the power of transformation and enlightenment, is not reducible to its constituent parts, but reductionism – particularly the reductionism achieved by methods of quantitative analysis – is all that can be expected from the engagement of science with art – and with, by extension, all the other realms of the abstract investigation of life’s purpose and meaning.
Accustomed as we seem to be to compartmentalising our thought and expression, the binary investigations of science are lapped up by modern audiences, and science makes grateful use of the opportunity to extend its domain.
Art and abstract investigation demand a totality of response, an extended level and focus of attention that doesn’t accord well with a popular need for instant gratification. Modern audiences want clues, direction and tuition, and to participate in the received and shared valuations. In such a world science can suddenly position itself as the portal through which we need to step to appreciate not only art, but all of the classical studies of thought and understanding.
It was not as if Wieseltier was ordering Pinker out of the academy where knotty questions of meaning and purpose are investigated and debated, for, after all, anyone – including statistician Zietsman – irrespective of his or her qualifications and interests, has a right to contribute to humanity’s great investigations of life’s meaning and purpose, and a scientist may have as much insight or indeed more into these matters than a person who has spent life reading Plato’s Dialogues in the original Greek … but not, contends Wieseltier, as a scientist, for, he insists, there is nothing worthwhile that science can add to humanistic endeavour.
Wieseltier vs Zietsman
Why is this relevant to my argument with Zietsman? Because he falls into the classical trap of using science as the necessary means of assessing questions of human value. This seems a good place to offer a supportive comment by the distinguished scientist and polymath Michael Polanyi: “The mechanistic [scientific] explanation of the universe is a meaningless ideal … the prediction of all atomic positions in the universe would not answer any question of interest to anybody … an exact mathematical [scientific] theory means nothing unless we recognize an inexact non-mathematical [non-scientific] knowledge on which it bears and a person whose judgement upholds this bearing” (Knowing and Being).
Human meaning
I hope I am not being unjustly selective if I summarise Zietsman’s main interests as lying in the areas of genetics, heritability, intelligence and evolution, and his mission is to explain how the scientific evidence from areas such as these can inform our mission in creating better societies. In doing so he conflates scientific hypotheses with statements of human meaning, confusing human worth with human intelligence, for instance, or happiness with success.
But the hypotheses that are his stock in trade are subject to modifications or radical revisions that flow thick and fast from the competitive scientific establishment, some faster than others, and some undoubtedly thicker. In so uncertain a context, Zietsman’s airy certainty is misplaced.
Stephen Meyer
The Cambridge-educated mathematician, Stephen Meyer, has made telling inroads regarding the received scientific wisdom on genetic coding (as have other leading-edge geneticists) and evolution. I don’t have to be a Meyer disciple to consider that there are large areas of scientific uncertainty regarding the role and action of genes in assembling the phenotype, and I find compelling Meyer’s simple question: “If the nucleotide bases code for protein production, who or what is responsible for the coding?”.
Is the genome necessarily the phenome and is the phenome necessarily the human being, and is the human being no-more than the sum of his or her genes?
Is biology merely reactive, in which case it and life itself can be explained by known and pre-determined chemical properties, or does it have powers of proactivity, in which case it lies in the realm of those life forces for which science can give no account?
And then there is the unresolved ontological problem: all scientific claims to causality are condemned to an infinite recession of causes: the genotype may well cause the phenotype, but what then causes the genotype? Science does a good job of answering the question how, but the answer to the question why remains as elusive today as it was in Plato’s time.
Evolution debunked
In regard to evolution, Meyer has done the maths and finds that the odds of creating a complex organism on a random chance basis impossible, no matter how much time you allow the process. Darwinian evolution is a purely reactive phenomenon, unguided and undirected, purposeless and meaningless. Yet scientific writers – and Zietsman is no exception – conflate two contradictory hypotheses, an error that becomes clear whenever we come across the word “adaptation”, as in an “adaptation” that achieves a better fit between animal and environment.
Under Darwinian evolutionary theory, there can be no such thing as “adaptation”, because adaption must necessarily entail a proactive biological strategy to achieve an outcome. The choice is therefore clear: either Darwinian evolution is in its entirety a game of chance, or, alternatively, it is driven, even if only in part, by a creative process of adaptation, in which case, I suggest, the word evolution, as customarily used, is misleading, for what we are talking about is actually “development”.
But scientists, both the real and the quasi versions, are miffed to have to accommodate a view of human nature that transcends scientific explanation. And if Darwinian evolution has no purpose, how do you account for the fact that human beings do have a purpose. Indeed life has purpose, because why else would all living beings strive to live, the odds being so monumentally against them?
Culture and burning alive
Zietsman appears to be unaware of the role of culture in arriving at value judgements. Here is an example. He approvingly quotes from Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, a book I bought and read some years ago, in spite of its silly title, and was duly unimpressed. Pinker amasses whole container loads of statistics relating to mortality and crime to prove that there has been an increase in humanity’s moral capacity over the last few thousand years.
I was not sure whether his stats, often reflecting the realities of life from distant times and climes, were always trustworthy, but even if they were, I had the permanently nagging feeling that the statistical method he employed was inadequate to the task of investigating an alleged change in human nature, a change that does not easily lend itself to measurement by numbers.
Take the practice of burning your enemies and adversaries at the stake. It continued to happen until not so long ago. Over centuries, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of unfortunates were dispatched in this cruel way.
There can be few human proclivities more diabolical, one might think, than the ready willingness to condemn people to this level of agony, no doubt undertaken before treating oneself to a splendid dinner, and kissing one’s wife and children before going off to have a good night’s sleep.
Today, nobody is burnt at the stake. Does this reflect an improvement in humanity’s moral capacity? Do our “better angels” prevail? Obviously “yes” say Pinker and his fellow travelling statisticians. But wait. No, not so obviously say the humanists.
Now I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not in favour of burning people at the stake, and I am glad that we currently desist from the practice. But the argument regarding moral capacity needs a great deal of further unpacking, and the conclusions we draw regarding it are not self-evident.
Burning at the stake represented a humanity that took the existence of good and evil a great deal more seriously than we do now. Few things today are regarded as truly evil, evil enough to deserve of so disproportionate a punishment. We recoil in horror from the capability of one person to condemn another to deliberate pain, and we assume that, historically, it could only have been done by a collapse in empathy and a capacity for unrestrained sadism.
That may be a partial truth, but it is not a complete truth. It was also done because the putative miscreants so punished were regarded as representing an evil capable of undoing God’s purpose here on earth, of destroying the necessary order of life and harming the prevailing civilisation. These were not trivial considerations in the context of the time.
Moral capacity
More to the point, I want to consider the extraordinary moral capacity of the men and women, numbering as we have noted, in their thousands, who well understood the consequences of their beliefs and actions, but who knowingly and with reserves of courage unknown to us today, went about the task of fulfilling their destinies at such extreme risk.
Often it was for a minor error of judgement, for a minor display of loyalty or the utterance of an unguarded comment that started off their journey to the stake, and although the consequences of their actions may have been fearful, my reading suggests to me that they lived out their lives in relative states of happiness, in grace and forbearance, not in a state of permanent and abject fear of life. My proposition is that they displayed a far greater reserve of moral fortitude than the common run of humanity does today.
I have long been astounded, and still am, at the sangfroid of one Hugh Latimer, who, in 1555, manacled to the stake over a pile of faggots awaiting the spark that would result in a prolonged agony as he is slowly burned alive for his Protestant beliefs, turns to his terrified companion, awaiting a similar fate, and says: “Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle, by God’s grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.” Can we imagine any public figure today capable of such an act of moral transcendency?
I know what I know
Zietsman appears to make no provision for the existence of subjective knowledge, a level and a kind of knowledge which is, I suggest, sometimes more trustworthy than scientific knowledge. He makes, for instance, much of the power of heritability, and the need to factor in that power when we strive to understand human behaviour.
Well, I don’t need science to tell me that I am a product of a mother and a father, and I know I have inherited some elements of their physical likenesses, and maybe even some aspects of their personalities. But I also know with an absolute certainty that – notwithstanding what I may have inherited – I quickly became my own person as I grew up. I also know that in multiple dimensions I simply could not be more different from my mother and my father. I therefore insist that all of us are self-made with our own unique powers of agency, whatever the scientific claims of heritability may be.
When the science of inheritance can explain why the 27 plays of Shakespeare were written by Shakespeare, and not by Shakespeare’s mother or his father, or by his children, then I will begin regarding the science of inheritance as having something important to tell me.
Determination and free will
Implicit in Zietsman’s oeuvre is the assumption that human beings are made by material and social forces external to themselves, which would mean of course that we are determined in our thoughts and actions – that we either have no free will or limited free will and we live in a deluded dream of moral agency. Instead of a lengthy quasi scientific rebuttal of this position, I will merely say that I know myself to be a free agent. It’s as simple as that.
Yes, I have my proclivities, my preferences and my prejudices, but I take full responsibility for them. My experience of being myself – who I am – tells me irrefutably that I have free will. There is no scientific postulate that can disprove my position.
I take some comfort in my dogmatism on this point by the support I receive from the American-German philosopher Hans Jonas, who argues that there is in the simplest living being a spontaneity, a power of self-constitution, that cannot be exhaustively explained in terms of chemical and physical reactions.
Nice to be stupid
Intelligence is another of Zietsman’s core concerns. I don’t deny that intelligence is real, and I don’t deny that it is nice to have. But why is it that intelligent people regularly do stupid things, and stupid people regularly do wonderful things? Why is it that the entire evidence of the contemporary world is the evidence of intelligent leaders following unimaginably stupid policies? Isn’t it time to give the unintelligent people a chance to govern?
I don’t understand why levels of intelligence play such a central role in our bid to understand human behaviour or to build better societies, or why we treat it as a marker of the most desirable of human states? Get the damned concept off the table, I say.
Thinking clearly
I would like to conclude by going back to my allegations about Zietsman’s writing style. As is ever the case, the language we use to formulate propositions that must navigate exquisite challenges of discrimination is key. If, for example, you write a sentence using the formulation “the law of gravity” you are saying something fundamentally different from a phrase that might seem to be interchangeable with it, “the existence of gravity”, for by using the word “law” you explicitly claim that there is an abstract law of the universe to which gravity conforms. Laws precede the actions they govern. The first formulation is metaphysical, the second physical.
Opacity
Therefore, my complaint regarding Zietsman’s opaque style does not arise from a grammarian’s pettifogging concern for linguistic purity, but because no thought exists independently of the way in which it is formulated. Brilliance is made manifest in expression. I cannot litter my contention with endless supportive quotations from Zietsman’s articles, but here is just one example: “Reason …is the provision of a reason …for your beliefs or behaviour. Giving reasons forces the communicator to at least attempt to make sense, it makes the communication more convincing and it is amazingly flexible … Reasoning is the construction of a convincing argument based on those reasons, and rationality is our intuition as to the plausibility or trustworthiness of the reasons …”.
It doesn’t seem to me that this enhances our understanding of anything. The first phrase is tautologous, and I am not sure whether I find the ensuing attempt at clarification crushingly obvious or – paradoxically – contradictory.
Is reason at play, for instance, when we give our reasons for behaviour that is irrational, such as anti-Semitic behaviour? Is a convincing argument demonstrated by its reasonability, or is reasonability demonstrated by a convincing argument? A “convincing argument” … but to whom? because the reason-based arguments I make for a restorative justice system cuts no ice with advocates of putative justice protagonists, and both of our positions are based on reason.
How can “rationality” be made to be synonymous with “intuition:” What happens when our intuition fails the test of “plausibility and trustworthiness”, as it regularly does?
“An attempt to make sense” is not an impressive achievement of reasonability when it fails to make sense. Does a word such as “amazingly” add to the meaning of the formulation?
Shakespeare again
Let me sign off with a quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The mercurial Hamlet says to the pedestrian Horatio: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
I would like to say much the same thing to Garth Zietsman, with whom I have enjoyed a friendly companionship as a fellow libertarian for 40 years or more.
[Image: by ADDICTIVE_STOCK]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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