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

Political theory, too, has a natural affinity with the sciences of mind. “What is government,” asked James Madison, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature?” Social, political, and cognitive scientists are reexamining the connections between politics and human nature, which were avidly debated in Madison’s time but submerged during an interlude in which humans were treated as blank slates or rational actors. Humans, we now know, are moralistic actors: they are guided by intuitions about authority, tribe, and purity; are committed to sacred beliefs that express their identity; and are driven by conflicting inclinations toward revenge and reconciliation. We are starting to grasp why these impulses evolved, how they are implemented in the brain, how they differ among individuals, cultures, and subcultures, and which conditions turn them on and off.⁵⁵

Comparable opportunities beckon in other areas of the humanities. The visual arts could avail themselves of the explosion of knowledge in vision science, including the perception of color, shape, texture, and lighting, and the evolutionary aesthetics of faces, landscapes, and geometric forms.⁵⁶ Music scholars have much to discuss with the scientists who study the perception of speech, the structure of language, and the brain’s analysis of the auditory world.⁵⁷

As for literary scholarship, where to begin?⁵⁸ John Dryden wrote that a work of fiction is “a just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind.” Cognitive psychology can shed light on how readers reconcile their own consciousness with those of the author and characters. Behavioral genetics can update folk theories of parental influence with discoveries about the effects of genes, peers, and chance, which have profound implications for the interpretation of biography and memoir—an endeavor that also has much to learn from the cognitive psychology of memory and the social psychology of self-presentation. Evolutionary psychologists can distinguish the obsessions that are universal from those that are exaggerated by a particular culture, and can lay out the inherent conflicts and confluences of interest within families, couples, friendships, and rivalries which are the drivers of plot. All these ideas can help add new depth to Dryden’s observation about fiction and human nature.

Though many concerns in the humanities are best appreciated with traditional narrative criticism, some raise empirical questions that can be informed by data. The advent of data science applied to books, periodicals, correspondence, and musical scores has inaugurated an expansive new “digital humanities.”⁵⁹ The possibilities for theory and discovery are limited only by the imagination, and include the origin and spread of ideas, networks of intellectual and artistic influence, the contours of historical memory, the waxing and waning of themes in literature, the universality or culture-specificity of archetypes and plots, and patterns of unofficial censorship and taboo.

The promise of a unification of knowledge can be fulfilled only if knowledge flows in all directions. Some of the scholars who have recoiled from scientists’ forays into explaining art are correct that these explanations have been, by their standards, shallow and simplistic. All the more reason for them to reach out and combine their erudition about individual works and genres with scientific insight into human emotions and aesthetic responses. Better still, universities could train a new generation of scholars who are fluent in each of the two cultures.

Although humanities scholars themselves tend to be receptive to insights from science, many policemen of the Second Culture proclaim that they may not indulge such curiosity. In a dismissive review in the New Yorker of a book by the literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall on the evolution of the narrative instinct, Adam Gopnik writes, “The interesting questions about stories . . . are not about what makes a taste for them ‘universal,’ but what makes the good ones so different from the dull ones. . . . This is a case, as with women’s fashion, where the subtle, ‘surface’ differences are actually the whole of the subject.”⁶⁰ But in appreciating literature, must connoisseurship really be the whole of the subject? An inquisitive spirit might also be curious about the recurring ways in which minds separated by culture and era deal with the timeless conundrums of human existence.