Against Boundaries 2

I decided that I had a bit more to say about Leon Wieseltier’s anti-scientism argument in The New Republic.  I have moved part of the last post to this one, which concerns Jared Diamond’s use of a quote from Tolstoy.  Here is Wieseltier’s complaint (my paragraph breaks):

In 1997, Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel, another scientistic theory of everything. In one of its less charming passages, Diamond proposes “the Anna Karenina principle” for the understanding of the domestication of animals: “domesticable animals are all alike; every undomesticable animal is undomesticable in its own way.” He is mimicking the renowned opening sentence of Tolstoy’s novel: “all happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

The adage is rather overrated, since all happy families are not alike; but here is how Diamond explicates it: “By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.”

This is a fine instance of the incomprehension, and the buzzkill, that often attends the extension of the scientistic temperament to literature and art. Of course Tolstoy had no such sociology or self-help in mind. His proposition was a caution against generalizations about the human heart, and a strike against facile illusions of intelligibility, and an affirmation of the incommensurability, the radical particularity, of individual experience. In-laws!

I am sorry, but Diamond’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s comment is manifestly superior to Wieseltier’s interpretation.  Let’s put the sentence on the table:

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. 

Wieseltier uses a lot of buzz words (radical particularity) to describe this passage.  If his stuffy phrases meaning anything, they seem to be manifestly wrong.  Is Tolstoy’s sentence really “a caution against generalizations about the human heart.”?  “Happy families are all…” and “every unhappy family is…” are about as broad as generalizations get.  Is the famous opening line really “a strike against facile illusions of intelligibility,” or is it an attempt to say something intelligible about families?  And how can it be “an affirmation of the incommensurability, the radical particularity, of individual experience”?  Families aren’t individuals.  If all happy families are indeed alike, doesn’t mean precisely that families are not “incommensurable”? 

By contrast, Diamond’s interpretation, that happiness (achieving a satisfying outcome, whether in building a life or a family or a herd) means solving a lot of ubiquitous problems and that there are more ways to fail than to succeed, is both intelligible and provocative.  It also makes sense of the quote.  Obviously literature tends to present unhappy situations more than happy ones, for that is where the drama is.  The fact that literature is translatable suggests that all of us have something like a common understanding of unhappiness and that suggests that we can perceive, however dimly, what happiness might be. 

Diamond’s interpretation of Tolstoy’s famous line makes sense of it and, intentionally or not, links back to Aristotle’s view of blessedness.  Virtuous men, in Aristotle’s view, recognize and admire one another because they are more or less alike.  Diamond takes a powerful literary gem and creatively applies it to a new phenomenon: animal husbandry.  In doing so, he reveals the power of the original insight.  He does more to honor the humanities than ever Wieseltier is doing with his attempt to erect property lines between the intellectual domains. 

I think that there is something more profoundly wrong with Wieseltier’s complaint against scientism than bad literary interpretation.  Clearly, he is objecting not just to the abuses of scientific reasoning but to the application of “the scientistic temperament to literature and art.”  Wouldn’t that work also in reverse?  Here is an example of the extension of literary temperament to science, Wislawa Szymborska’s wonderful little poem “In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself.” 

The buzzard never says it is to blame.
 The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
 When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
 If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.

 A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
 Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
 Why should they, when they know they're right?

 Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
 in every other way they're light.

 On this third planet of the sun
 among the signs of bestiality
 a clear conscience is Number One.

Szymborska’s “third planet of the sun” and "the course" of lions and lice leave no doubt that she is crossing boundaries examining the scientific world view from a literary temperament.  Perhaps Wieseltier should swear out a warrant for her arrest.  I testify for the defense.  This strikes me as a profound reflection on the natural world and on the astonishing fact of human conscience.  Human beings are indeed more than animals, even if we are at least animals. 

Is science allowed to reply?  It certainly is going to do so, in effect, whether Wieseltier likes it or not.  Human moral emotions can be understood in light of our evolutionary history, as I have argued in many previous posts.  I could also point out that, if the science is right, she may be a bit stingy.  There is evidence of something rather like a moral conscience in a handful of other animals.  I am pretty sure that she is right about piranha.  I doubt that hands would enable snakes to make claims, but I understand what she means by that.  None of this tells against the poem.  The human things are psychologically rich in ways that constitute a quantum leap (metaphorically speaking) over all other visible creatures.  I can’t imagine a scientist (or even scientizer) objecting to the poem on grounds of a boundary dispute.  

Against Domains: A Reply to Ms. Flint

Faithful reader and cherished friend M. Flint has a couple of comments on my last post.  I think the argument is interesting and important enough to devote a new post to it. 

Here is how I described Leon Wieseltier’s position in his anti-Pinker, anti-scientism argument in The New Republic, from my reply to Ms. Flint’s opening comment:

Wieseltier speaks not of scientists or the scientific community, but of science. He is clearly trying to limit the domain of topics into which science can legitimately inquire. This strikes me as wrong headed, for Aristotelian reasons. If you ask what a human being is, both a materialist scientist and a poet can offer answers: a cloud of molecules and a soul at odds with itself. These answers are not in opposition because they interpret the question in different ways. Occasionally, there will be intersections between their intellectual trajectories. What is the role of neurotransmitters in the capacity for love? Wieseltier wants to discourage such encounters. I think we should encourage them.

Ms. Flint replies in turn:

I read Wieseltier quite differently. In my view, he was not arguing so much that science should not ask questions about certain topics, but instead that it should not smother out other disciplines. He takes issue with the scientific community trying to make every great thinker into a “scientist” and thinks that the humanities have some claim to greatness. I think that that view is fair.  As I read Wieseltier’s article, it seems to me less like he is arguing that science should not ask questions about certain topics and more like it could not provide certain kinds of answers.

We do indeed read him differently.  Regarding the minor point, Wieseltier complains thusly:

Pinker’s essay opens with the absurd, but immensely revealing, contention that Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Smith were scientists.

I am not sure that any of these thinkers would recognize the contemporary division between science and philosophy and I think that Rousseau’s place on this list is dubious as he was a vociferous critic of the modern view (while being resolutely modern!).  At least the first three, however, were certainly representatives of the world view presented by modern science. 

As for the major point, here is Wieseltier:

What von Mises and Diamond—and Pinker—deny is that the differences between the various realms of human existence, and between the disciplines that investigate them, are final. For these scientizers, they are not differences in kind; they are differences only in appearance, whereas a deeper explanation, a scientific explanation, will expose the underlying sameness. The underlying sameness is the presumption of scientism. The scientizers do not respect the borders between the realms; they transgress the borders so as to absorb all the realms into a single realm, into their realm. They are not pluralists.

I am grateful to Wieseltier for telling us how to describe partisans of “scientism” without calling them scientists.  I don’t know how to interpret that except as a claim that there ought to be sharp borders around the kinds of questions that scientists are allowed to ask. 

A similar argument is made by Dave Pruett at the Huffington Post. 

The violations of science's domain by religion are numerous, well known and egregious… 

Science's infractions are subtler but equally damaging to the human spirit. During an enlightening lecture in 2000 by religion scholar Huston Smith, I began to appreciate how science infringes on religion's domain. Smith thoughtfully distinguished science from scientism. The former is an investigative protocol; the latter is a religion, complete with dogma. Science is a formalized procedure for making sense of the world by studying its material properties, perceived through the awareness of the senses, albeit senses heightened by modern marvels such as the electron microscope, the Hubble Space Telescope or the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. Scientism (or scientific materialism), on the other hand, adds to science a statement of faith: The universe is only material.

Moreover, given the spectacular successes of science over the past three centuries, it is more than fair to acknowledge that science represents a powerful way to learn about the world. But scientism ups the ante: Science is the best (or only) way to make sense of the world. In short, scientism is to science what fundamentalism is to religion: cocksure and inflexible.

I disagree with Pruett’s description of science, which I think is hardly limited to material properties.  However, what he calls scientific materialism is a very well established philosophical position going back to the ancient Greek atomists and such thinkers as Anaxagoras.  I think that materialism is absurd but I see no reason why any philosopher or scientist is guilty of a boundary violation by believing in it and arguing for it.  I am sure that Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett think that science is the best way of making sense of the world and I know that neither thinks it the only way of doing so.  However, if either did believe that, they would only be pushing an extreme position on a certain spectrum of questioning.  The history of philosophy is full of such arguments.  The proper response is to respond to the arguments by arguing in turn; it is childish to demand that the scientists get their muddy boots out of the parlor. 

Rather than continue to argue in the abstract, let me offer an example.  Most people of faith in these United States seem to be thorough going dualists.  They believe that the soul is a second, vaporous body somehow attached to the physical body.  That vaporous body is the home of our thoughts, passions, and moral responsibility. 

At death (and perhaps occasionally before that event) the soul detaches itself and floats away.  I am fond of pointing out that this view is not Biblical.  I think that it is opposed by the view presented in the wee books at the end of the New Testament.  I also point out that it is not the view of any major church that I know of.  The Christian churches have always insisted on the resurrection of the body. 

Does science have anything to say about this?  I have argued in these pages that it does.  The famous split brain experiments have shown that when the corpus callosum is severed (as it is in a radical therapy for extreme seizures), the two halves of the brain can no longer communicate with one another.  Something observed solely by the left eye and transmitted to the right hemisphere of the brain cannot be named; for naming is the province of the left hemisphere.  This is odd from the perspective of Cartesian dualism.  If there is a unified soul somehow involved in two-way communication with the physical brain, why can’t it get information from one side to the other? 

That is a case where science, strictly confining itself to scientific questions, can speak to a very robust and centuries old philosophical/religious question.  That it comes down on the side of the New Testament is interesting.  It is precisely this sort of thing that seems to bother the critics of “scientism”.  If this is a boundary violation, I plead guilty.