Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it “soul-less scientism”—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. The threat to our humanity today comes not from the transmigration of souls in the next life, but from the denial of soul in this one. . . .

Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West. . . . All friends of human freedom and dignity—including even the atheists among us—must understand that their own humanity is on the line.¹⁰

These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But as we shall see, their case is trumped up. Science cannot be blamed for genocide and war, and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. On the contrary, science is indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.

The highbrow war on science is a flare-up of the controversy raised by C. P. Snow in 1959 when he deplored the disdain for science among British intellectuals in his lecture and book The Two Cultures. The term “cultures,” in the anthropologists’ sense, explains the puzzle of why science should draw flak not just from fossil-fuel-funded politicians but from some of the most erudite members of the clerisy.

During the 20th century, the landscape of human knowledge was carved into professionalized duchies, and the growth of science (particularly the sciences of human nature) is often seen as an encroachment on territories that had been staked and enclosed by the academic humanities. It’s not that practitioners of the humanities themselves have this zero-sum mindset. Most artists show no signs of it; the novelists, painters, filmmakers, and musicians I know are intensely curious about the light that science might shed on their media, just as they are open to any source of inspiration. Nor is the anxiety expressed by the scholars who delve into historical epochs, genres of art, systems of ideas, and other subject matter in the humanities, since a true scholar is receptive to ideas regardless of their origin. The defensive pugnacity belongs to a culture: Snow’s Second Culture of literary intellectuals, cultural critics, and erudite essayists.¹¹ The writer Damon Linker (citing the sociologist Daniel Bell) characterizes them as “specialists in generalizations, . . . pronouncing on the world from out of their individual experiences, habits of reading and capacity for judgment. Subjectivity in all of its quirks and eccentricities is the coin of the realm in the Republic of Letters.”¹² This modus could not be more different from the way of science, and it’s the Second Culture intellectuals who most fear “scientism,” which they understand as the position that “science is all that matters” or that “scientists should be entrusted to solve all problems.”

Snow, of course, never held the lunatic position that power should be transferred to the culture of scientists. On the contrary, he called for a Third Culture, which would combine ideas from science, culture, and history and apply them to enhancing human welfare across the globe.¹³ The term was revived in 1991 by the author and literary agent John Brockman, and it is related to the biologist E. O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, the unity of knowledge, which Wilson in turn attributed to (who else?) the thinkers of the Enlightenment.¹⁴ The first step in understanding the promise of science in human affairs is to escape the bunker mentality of the Second Culture, captured, for example, in the tag line of a 2013 article by the literary lion Leon Wieseltier: “Now science wants to invade the liberal arts. Don’t let it happen.”¹⁵

An endorsement of scientific thinking must first of all be distinguished from any belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. The culture of science is based on the opposite belief. Its signature practices, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are designed to circumvent the sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable. As Richard Feynman put it, the first principle of science is “that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.”