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

The historian of science David Wootton has remarked on the mores of his own field: “In the years since Snow’s lecture the two-cultures problem has deepened; history of science, far from serving as a bridge between the arts and sciences, nowadays offers the scientists a picture of themselves that most of them cannot recognize.”²³ That is because many historians of science consider it naïve to treat science as the pursuit of true explanations of the world. The result is like a report of a basketball game by a dance critic who is not allowed to say that the players are trying to throw the ball through the hoop. I once sat through a lecture on the semiotics of neuroimaging at which a historian of science deconstructed a series of dynamic 3-D multicolor images of the brain, volubly explaining how “that ostensibly neutral and naturalizing scientific gaze encourages particular kinds of selves who are then amenable to certain political agendas, shifting position from the neuro(psychological) object toward the external observatory position,” and so on—any explanation but the bloody obvious one, namely that the images make it easier to see what’s going on in the brain.²⁴ Many scholars in “science studies” devote their careers to recondite analyses of how the whole institution is just a pretext for oppression. An example is this scholarly contribution to the world’s most pressing challenge:

Glaciers, Gender, and Science: A Feminist Glaciology Framework for Global Environmental Change Research

Glaciers are key icons of climate change and global environmental change. However, the relationships among gender, science, and glaciers—particularly related to epistemological questions about the production of glaciological knowledge—remain understudied. This paper thus proposes a feminist glaciology framework with four key components: (1) knowledge producers; (2) gendered science and knowledge; (3) systems of scientific domination; and (4) alternative representations of glaciers. Merging feminist postcolonial science studies and feminist political ecology, the feminist glaciology framework generates robust analysis of gender, power, and epistemologies in dynamic social-ecological systems, thereby leading to more just and equitable science and human-ice interactions.²⁵

More insidious than the ferreting out of ever more cryptic forms of racism and sexism is a demonization campaign that impugns science (together with reason and other Enlightenment values) for crimes that are as old as civilization, including racism, slavery, conquest, and genocide. This was a major theme of the influential Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, the quasi-Marxist movement originated by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who proclaimed that “the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant.”²⁶ It also figures in the works of postmodernist theorists such as Michel Foucault, who argued that the Holocaust was the inevitable culmination of a “bio-politics” that began with the Enlightenment, when science and rational governance exerted increasing power over people’s lives.²⁷ In a similar vein, the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman blamed the Holocaust on the Enlightenment ideal to “remake the society, force it to conform to an overall, scientifically conceived plan.”²⁸ In this twisted narrative, the Nazis themselves are let off the hook (“It’s modernity’s fault!”). So is the Nazis’ rabidly counter-Enlightenment ideology, which despised the degenerate liberal bourgeois worship of reason and progress and embraced an organic, pagan vitality which drove the struggle between races. Though Critical Theory and postmodernism avoid “scientistic” methods such as quantification and systematic chronology, the facts suggest they have the history backwards. Genocide and autocracy were ubiquitous in premodern times, and they decreased, not increased, as science and liberal Enlightenment values became increasingly influential after World War II.²⁹

To be sure, science has often been pressed into the support of deplorable political movements. It is essential, of course, to understand this history, and legitimate to pass judgment on scientists for their roles in it, just like any historical figures. Yet the qualities that we prize in humanities scholars—context, nuance, historical depth—often leave them when the opportunity arises to prosecute a campaign against their academic rivals. Science is commonly blamed for intellectual movements that had a pseudoscientific patina, though the historical roots of those movements ran deep and wide.