| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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counterpoints in science The Deconstruction of Science
Auden casts a wide net over Iago, quoting the Credo aria from Verdi's Otello, and citing parallels from French theater and Freudian analysis. After all this erudite exposition, I was jolted by Auden's concluding statement. We cannot condemn Iago, he writes, because he represents the "pursuit of scientific knowledge through experiment which we all, whether we are scientists or not, take for granted as natural and right. " Iago could claim that he was only trying to find out what Othello was really like, and "we must admit that his experiment is highly successful." In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. "The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb the other." I felt personally offended and hurt by this twist of logic, as though an old friend had suddenly turned against me. Comparing Iago to an experimental scientist seemed gratuitous and far-fetched. Nevertheless, there was no mistaking the fact that Auden, one of the leading literary figures of this century, had a strong dislike for modern science. Auden, of course, was not alone in his antipathy to science. His predecessors, the great Romantic poets Goethe, Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge, hated the strictly rational approach of science, its demand for testing and replication; they preferred the idiosyncratic flashes of insight leading to "deeper truths" than those provided by empirical observation. Despite the opposition of poets and prelates, the scientific enterprise has grown and flourished. The world we perceive has expanded from a flat patch of earth to encompass quarks, quasars, and a vast universe containing billions of galaxies. Much of contemporary life is permeated with the applications of scientific understanding: electricity, plastics, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, television, computers, the entire corpus of modern medicine with its antibiotics, imaging techniques, and space-age surgical procedures. As Auden has written elsewhere, though, "Nothing fails like success," and science these days seems to be under attack from all sides: right, left, and center. The assault from the right, from religious conservatives and literalists, started with Galileo, grew more intense with Darwin, and continues with ever-renewed fury today. H.L. Mencken's "bible-thumpers" no longer claim that the Earth is flat or at the center of the solar system, but they do deny that life has evolved here and would if they could prevent the teaching of evolution in the schools and replace modern biology with the Book of Genesis. A back-handed tribute to the success of science is the desire of some of the most anti-scientific institutions to coopt its name and rigor, as in Christian Science, Creation Science, and Scientology. Depending as they do on revealed and immutable dogma, these belief systems are in fact the antithesis of science, which relies on observation and experiment and is always subject to modification if new data emerge. The conflict between science and religious fundamentalism is old news, of course. What's new is the enfilade being mounted against science by academics on the left of the political spectrum: sociologists, social theorists, cultural anthropologists, humanists, Marxists, and literary critics. This movement is analyzed in the book Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross and Norman Leavitt (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
The growing antagonism of some left-wing intellectuals to science is a surprise, in a way. Political progressives have usually been allies of science in its struggle against mysticism, superstition, and the dead weight of religious and social dogma. The authors of Higher Superstition attribute much of the reaction against science to the resentment these academics harbor for the prestige and resources that science now enjoys in society and within the universities. In an attempt to regain the high ground, the cultural disciplines assert that the methods of social theory and literary analysis are equal in power to those of science. They muster their troops under the banner of "postmodernism." Like so many fashions in clothes and ideas, postmodernism is a product of France. Its couturiers and gurus are Jacques Derrida and the late Michel Foucault. These seers and their many votaries view scientific knowledge as historically and socially "situated," and "encoding" prevailing social prejudices. Modern science is seen as a powerful instrument of the reigning order, imposing capitalistic hegemony on helpless third-world nations. The practitioners of postmodernism have their own jargon, which involves frequent use of the words "situated," "embedded," "privileged," "encoded," "discourse," "narrative," "text," and "subtext." Though some postmodernists grudgingly admit to a physical reality, according to their writing, the only real things in their cosmology are words. That makes the literary critic the scientist of postmodernism, who can "deconstruct" texts and tell you what they mean. Astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology are, to quote Gross and Leavitt, mere "transcriptions of Western male capitalist social perspectives." Hence, there is no ground for distinguishing reliable knowledge from superstition. Science is not a body of knowledge anyway, but an allegory that encodes a mythic structure justifying the dominance of one class, one race, one gender over another. That's the way postmodernists talk. When they write articles about real science, about relativity or quantum mechanics or molecular biology, they usually get it embarrassingly wrong. But they're not embarrassed. They consider their version of science as good as anybody else's. Last year, physicist Alan Sokal pulled a hoax on a leading postmodern journal, Social Text, by submitting an article full of pseudoscientific gibberish and errors that anyone with a decent scientific education would have recognized as a joke. The article, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," was promptly accepted and published. To the true postmodernist, though, ignorance of science is a badge of honor. Andrew Ross, professor of English at Princeton and an editor of Social Text, wrote a book about culture, science, and technology. It begins, "This book is dedicated to all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been written without them." The antics of the postmodernists would be funny, except for the reality that they have taken over many of the major university departments of English, sociology, social anthropology, and "cultural studies." Their absurdities have had little or no effect on science departments, which are mostly unaware of their existence. But they are beginning to have some adverse effects on their own domains. Sociologists, for instance, are worrying about shrinking enrollments and disappearing departments, according to the journal Science (August 23,1996). Sociologist Lee Ellis of Minot State University, North Dakota, writes, "Sociology's loss of majors and its deteriorating image are mainly due to most sociologists still stubbornly insisting, contrary to overwhelming evidence, that biology is not important for understanding human social behavior." He says that "today's sociological theories are all exclusively environmentalistic" and that sociologists had better get over their "biophobia" if they want the discipline to survive. An example of Ellis's thesis is the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, published in 1994 by the erstwhile, august Oxford University Press. The book defines "childhood," for instance, as "constructed on the inabilities of children as political, intellectual, sexual, or economic beings," which "serves the needs of capitalist states." In this "deconstruction," childhood is not a normal stage of human growth and development but a pathological political condition!
High on the best-seller lists this year was John Horgan's book, The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996). Horgan writes for Scientific American. His profiles of prominent scientists are incisive and amusing, his descriptions of their work accurate and lucid. In his book he proposes that science may be a victim of its own success. So much has been discovered in the past century, he says, that there may not be much left to find out. Horgan would deny that his book is antagonistic to science. It's certainly more intelligent, more readable, and more entertaining than the dogmatic denials of the creationists or the formulaic effusions of the postmodernists. But in a subtle way it is a kind of put-down of the scientific enterprise which says, in effect, "Okay, folks. We've found out just about all there is to know. We can put away our test tubes and telescopes now, and go home and watch TV." In some ways this infection at the core is the most ominous disorder. The U.S. Congress essentially responded to this attitude when it killed the Superconducting Supercollider a couple of years ago. This accelerator would have retained U.S. preeminence in exploring the world of high- energy physics, a true frontier of science that promises better understanding of the structure of matter and the origin of the universe. The lead has now passed to the Europeans. It's the end of American leadership in this field, but not the end of science. It may seem logical and plausible to a writer that we're approaching the limit of our ability to understand ourselves and the world we live in, but to most working scientists, the idea is utter nonsense. Our present knowledge, like the Earth we live on, is a tiny speck of dust in the vast universe of our ignorance. Horgan challenges the scientists he interviews with the proposition that in recent decades there have been no great unifying breakthroughs like relativity and quantum mechanics and the structure of DNA. He wants to know what they expect to come next, if anything. The very question betrays a misunderstanding of how science works. Relativity and quantum mechanics were totally unexpected solutions to growing problems in physics created by experimental results that didn't fit into the old theories. The DNA double helix was also unanticipated; most biochemists had thought that the genetic material would be some kind of protein. The great new paradigms, like the previous ones, will come out of left field, or from a Martian meteorite, or from some unknown Einstein putting things together in a new way in an obscure garret. Horgan thinks science is ending because we're not getting a revolutionary discovery every decade. But it was two thousand years between the great physical insights of Archimedes and those of Newton, with almost nothing in between. We still don't have a good theory that combines relativity and quantum mechanics. We don't understand human consciousness or its interaction with the observable world. We don't know whether there are other forms of life than Earthly ones, or whether such forms can be created in the laboratory. Those are just three of the Big Unsolved Problems that we're aware of, and the most significant ones are probably those whose existence nobody yet suspects. The poet Alexander Pope wrote that the world we see around us is "a mighty maze, but not without a plan." W.H. Auden did his own riff on the theme. In his poem "The Maze," a man is lost in one of those hedgerow mazes t hat used to be popular on English country estates. He tries to think his way out. Theologically speaking, the maze must have had an Architect, so there must be a plan, just as Pope said. Mathematics states a straight line is the best way to proceed, but history says it would be better to go right, then left. Aesthetics suggests he go whichever way he pleases. Maybe, he reflects psychoanalytically, his own guilt created the maze and the way out is known to his unconscious. He concludes that there is probably no theoretical solution. Then he looks up and wishes he were a bird, "to whom such doubts must seem absurd." Auden's lost stroller seems to have tried every way of getting out of the maze except that of the experimental scientist. Instead of walking round and round a hundred times, engaging in theological speculation, historical deconstruction, introspection, despair, and wishful thinking, he might have explored the maze systematically, made his own map, ruled out dead ends, and ultimately found the right path by trial and error. It would be nice to have a bird's-eye view of our labyrinthine universe, but we live within it rather than flying above it, and the scientific method remains the most successful approach yet discovered for mapping its mysterious ways. Jerold M. Lowenstein is a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and chairman of the Department of Nuclear Medicine at California Pacific Medical Center. |
Winter 1997
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Rummaging
through a second-hand bookstore in the lovely old city of Bath last
September, I picked up a volume of essays by one of my favorite poets,
W.H. Auden. In one essay, Auden analyzes the character of Iago, the
villain and prime mover in the Tragedy of Othello, who by his wicked
machinations succeeds in ruining the lives of Othello, Desdemona, Cassio,
Rodrigo, and himself. Auden sees Iago as a malcontent, a person with
a general grudge against life and society." What differentiates Iago
from Shakespeare's many other villains is that he never gives us any
convincing reason why he wants to wreak havoc on all around him. He
seems propelled by what the poet Coleridge called "motiveless malignancy."
