About the Fellowship
Many people think of the scientist as a disinterested observer of the world, an abstracted intellectual who deals with empirical facts, his mind unclouded by subjective passions and dogmas. That's a myth. Scientists are not machines, but human beings, and as such cannot help being influenced by the culture in which they live and work.
Take Charles Darwin. In 1859, the publication of his On the Origin of Species was an event so earth-shaking that 150 years later, the trembling still reverberates. In their recent book Darwin's Sacred Cause, Adrian Desmond and James Moore argue that the Darwin family's deep roots in the British anti-slavery movement caused young Charles to start asking questions about the common origins of humanity. "It is the key to explain why such a gentleman of wealth and standing should risk all to develop his bestial 'monkey-man' image of our ancestry in the first place," they write.
The authors make a case that Darwin, who was never himself a social activist, undermined racial prejudice with his discoveries. That is true – to a point.It is also true that Darwin's work on evolution and natural selection, as it became popularized, inspired scientists and laymen to take more interest in racial differences, an intellectual passion that would have sinister consequences in the science of eugenics – founded in the late 19th century by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.
Eugenics attempted to discern genetic characteristics particular to races and classes, with the idea of "improving" humanity through what one might call unnatural selection. Eugenics was considered cutting-edge science, and the Progressive Era policies of "racial hygiene" developed from its research were widely endorsed. The Nazi legacy ended that.
So, can Darwin be justly credited for having a role in freeing the slaves? Can he be blamed to some degree for Bergen-Belsen? The problem, says Cambridge University literary critic Gillian Beer, is that you can find support in Darwin's research and writing for both abolitionism and eugenics.
"Darwin's observations are deeply grounded in empirical evidence but are constantly read out into fresh political and world concerns," she writes in an e-mail. "Their implications are selectively seized upon by people wishing to authenticate their actions."
In a lecture this summer in Cambridge, Dame Gillian, whose acclaimed book Darwin's Plots examines the great scientist's theories as interpreted by Victorian novelists, explained that the assimilation of Darwinism in 19th-century British popular culture depended a great deal on people seeing in Darwin what they wanted to see.
This was an era of anti-clerical rationalism, of British imperialism and of the Industrial Revolution; partisans on all sides of these profound intellectual, geopolitical, economic and technological trends tried to cloak their own causes and interests in the mantle of scientific authority. In contemporary America, perhaps more than in any other society, they still do.
Why? It began with the Enlightenment, whose leading thinkers set about to liberate civilization from what they considered the mental chains of religion and superstition, and to turn our collective face toward the light of Reason. The 18th-century revolution in thought generated revolutions both scientific and political (e.g., the French and the American) and unseated church, Scripture and tradition as sources of moral authority. In time, scientists, whose work depended on examining and interpreting the world empirically, became the new clerical class.
Given the miracles and wonders scientists have conjured in the past century, their authority has only grown. Europeans, having suffered through two wars made far more devastating because of technology, are generally more skeptical about science's social beneficence than are Americans. We tend to be naïvely optimistic about science and technology, viewing science unambiguously as a generator of social progress.
The problem is that true science is morally neutral. It tells us how the world works but says nothing about why it works that way, or how it ought to work. As the late scholar Allan Bloom wrote of science, "In general, it increases man's power without increasing his virtue, hence increasing his power to do both good and evil." Interpreting and applying scientific research is the province of philosophy, politics, theology, art and the other humanistic disciplines. But rather like eager courtiers around a throne, the pre-eminent cultural authority of science compels lesser authorities to draw upon its legitimacy to bolster their own arguments. This opens the door to scientism, the (mis)application of scientific methods and findings to areas in which science has no special competence.
Scientism in popular culture can have profound consequences. Bloom devoted his blockbuster 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, to lamenting the intellectual and social decay of American civilization, which, he argued, has its sources in an improper valorization of science as the primary way of knowing the world.
And not only a valorization of science, but also a misunderstanding of what it tells us – a result scientists cannot control. "Freud," he wrote, "enabled Americans to think the satisfaction of their sexual desires was the most important element of happiness. He provided rationalization for instinct, although this was surely not his intention."
Einstein's Theory of General Relativity is sometimes taken, bizarrely, to legitimize moral relativism. Genetics research has caused a common but unsupportable belief that free will is severely limited, that our beliefs and abilities are pre-determined, and that morality is best viewed as a problem of medical science. Environmental science and epidemiology are often highly politicized. And then there's the pop-culture biggie: quantum mechanics, the very complexity of which allows all kinds of parties to claim it as validation of their own agendas.
"If you Google around, you'll find everything from 'quantum healing' to 'quantum babysitting,' " says Charles Harper, an Oxford-trained planetary scientist. "Quantum mechanics can technically support some ideas that are rather mystical. If quantum mechanics does anything, it explodes vulgar materialism," which Harper defines as the crude belief that the only things that exist are phenomena that can be measured.
"But just because it does that does not mean it can validate ideas about things like miracles," he said.
Though it's unfair to hold scientists entirely responsible for the misappropriation of their work, we can't let them off so easily. Scientists quite naturally resent any attempt to place limits on their freedom of inquiry, often not appreciating that their work has inevitable consequences beyond the laboratory.
The infamous "Bell Curve" controversy in the 1990s was largely about whether it was dangerous to discuss intellectual ability and racial inheritance, given the persistence of racism. Today, in an era of mass terror, no responsible person would argue that biological warfare experimentation should not be highly regulated for the common good. To invoke intellectual freedom as an absolute defense of scientific prerogatives, as we have recently seen in the debate over stem cell research, is to duck moral and social responsibility.
Some scientists have made names for themselves marshaling the authority of science behind favored social crusades. Richard Dawkins, the eminent biologist, is perhaps the foremost campaigner for atheism, and a relentless advocate of crushing religion in the name of scientific materialism. The overreaction of the Dawkinses provokes a like response from their opponents, who often defend their values by launching misguided attacks on science – all because an ideologically engaged scientist plays at being a social prophet.
The problem, says Cambridge molecular biologist Denis Alexander, is the ideological abuse of science in the public square – of which Darwinian evolution is perhaps history's most battered concept.
"It is a game as old as science itself," Alexander says. "The sad consequence in this case is that it brings science into the center of a quite unnecessary culture war. If the science is just accepted as science, rather than being invested with all kinds of unnecessary ideological baggage, then everyone can unite happily around a great theory and let it do the scientific work for which it was originally intended."
That's the ideal, certainly. But reality is much messier, especially in an age of mass media. To tell the story of science, journalists, whose understanding is often superficial, have to simplify matters and report findings in ways the public can understand. Interpretive errors, through media amplification, create social realities that scientists are often powerless to correct.
What's more, the public, lacking the training and expertise to interpret science, tends to impose a moral narrative on findings, casting them in ways that are political, religious and philosophical, despite what the facts warrant. Alexander, who writes frequently about science, cautions the public to beware of media hype in reporting, especially regarding research that hasn't been first published in a peer-reviewed journal. He also warns that one should be skeptical of those who extrapolate scientific findings into nonscientific areas of thought, like religion and politics.
"That is the way that science is often hyped and played up, and it's normal, I think," laments Harper, who is also a theologian. "But one often wishes that people would not see science as a form of ideological debate, because that's really a misrepresentation of science."
Darwin faced the same thing in his day. A century and a half later, things haven't much evolved.
Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is [email protected].
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