If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, will be as dry leaves in the autumn wind.
I.
The Scientific Revolution was among the most transformative series of events in the history of the western world. Yet, for centuries, it had little impact on the way in which the vast majority of Europeans thought, believed, and lived. Most persons remained ignorant of, unaffected by, and perhaps indifferent to the discoveries of science. It made no practical difference to them that thinkers from Copernicus to Kepler, from Galileo to Newton, from Bacon to Descartes had learned that the ancient and medieval view of nature and the universe were wrong. The sun did not actually rise and set. The earth was not the stationary center of the solar system. It rotated on its axis and orbited the sun. Subject to uniform laws of motion that were expressed in mathematical formula, objects on earth and in heaven moved according to the same mechanical principles. There was no perfect heavenly sphere and no corrupt earthly realm. The laws of science had replaced the laws of God, and were as valid on earth as they were in heaven.
Although it led to a fundamental reevaluation of religion, morality, government, society, and human nature; although it devalued or rejected all other forms of knowledge, such as revelation and magic, the Scientific Revolution was no revolution at all. The process that established this new vision of the universe and the place of humanity in it was neither rapid nor complete. It never involved more than a few hundred thinkers at work in musty studies and crude laboratories, engaged in a long, slow, and often tedious process of observation and experiment. Rather than offering an objective transcript of reality, science, on the contrary, was the product of the human mind and imagination. The most original scientists themselves acknowledged this truth. In Physics and Philosophy, Werner Heisenberg wrote that “natural science does not simply describe and explain nature; it is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” The Danish physicist Niels Bohr similarly cautioned that “it is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”[i] The advance of science thus owes more to the evolution of consciousness than it does to the attainment of knowledge about the natural world. The prestige that science long enjoyed in large measure was but an extension of the growing confidence in the aptitude of the mind.
Sir Francis Bacon, the first evangelist for science, encouraged his contemporaries in all fields of endeavor to strike out on their own, to study the evidence for themselves, to test fresh hypotheses, and to seek new knowledge rather than to accept conventional wisdom without question. Among the first European writers to advocate change and innovation as matters of principle, Bacon, in books such as The Advancement of Learning (1605), Novum Organum (1620), and New Atlantis (1627), attacked the notion that truth rested on the mere authority of the past. His optimism about the future was inexhaustible. Bacon wanted seventeenth-century Europeans to develop confidence in their own abilities rather than adhering slavishly to tradition. He proposed to liberate the mind and to restore faith in its vigor and potential, which he argued were casualties of the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion that had followed.
Anticipating the day when human beings, using reason, would subdue and control nature, Bacon proclaimed that science represented an alternative to the confusion, disorder, and superstition that he insisted had characterized medieval thought. But in one sense Bacon was the heir to the magicians and alchemists of the Middle Ages, who had hoped to uncover the secrets of nature in order to command the forces of nature. Science offered Bacon a more powerful instrument than his forebears could ever have envisioned. Armed with science and mathematics, was there any limit to what the rational mind could accomplish?
Comparing himself to Christopher Columbus, Bacon plotted a new course of intellectual discovery. Neither European civilization nor European thought could be contained within their existing boundaries. There were not only new worlds to conquer, but new ideas as well. Bacon and many of his contemporaries rejected the past not because they hated it but because they considered it irrelevant. They had come to understand that nature, society, and humanity were far more complex than earlier generations had supposed.
By the eighteenth century, many thinkers believed that science rendered inevitable material and moral progress. The more flamboyant among them, such as Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Carita, the Marquis de Condorcet, were satisfied that the achievement of human perfection, the advent of a veritable heaven on earth, was preordained. Thinkers such as Condorcet persuaded themselves that the rigorous application of the scientific method would, in the fullness of time, unravel all the mysteries of the universe that had confounded their predecessors. Some few, among them Blaise Pascal, himself a scientific and mathematical genius, had from the outset entertained serious doubts not only about the unalloyed benefits but also about the intellectual foundations of science. Pascal questioned objectivity, which constituted the essence of modern scientific thought until the twentieth century.
II.
Only after 1945 did Americans and peoples around the world come more fully to appreciate the critique of science that Pascal had voiced nearly three hundred years earlier. The use of atomic weapons against Japan quickened popular disillusionment with science. In addition, the terrible human costs of the Allied strategic bombing campaign prompted some to question its morality. Amid the desperate crisis of war, the British and the Americans, it seemed to critics, had abandoned their sense of humanity and had sunk to the same level of viciousness as their enemies. The triumphant accomplishments of science, observed Richard M. Weaver, ironically portended the destruction of man:
The Western genius for technology had invented a weapon of destruction which took no account of terrain or of distance—the bombing plane, which could fly practically anywhere and drop its lethal cargo on any target that military science or the spirit of vengeance might suggest. . . . . Mass killing did in fact rob the cradle and the grave. Our nation was treated to the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust which is said to have taken tens of thousands of lives, pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. . . . Such things are so inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built that they cast into doubt the very possibility of recovery. [ii]
Similarly, although the French philosopher and historian Bertrand de Jouvenel recognized that the barbarism of the Second World War emerged from, and was sustained by, ruthless national passions, he argued that the destruction would not have been so extensive or so indiscriminate had it not been for the weapons that science put at the disposal of combatants:
In this war everyone—workmen, peasants, and women alike—is in the fight, and in consequence everything, the factory, the harvest, even the dwelling-house has turned target. As a result the enemy to be fought has been all flesh that is and all soil, and the bombing plane has striven to consummate the utter destruction of them all. [iii]
By the end of the war, it had become apparent that the Nazi regime also depended on modern science and would not have been possible without it. German scientists conducted murderous experiments on prisoners and the inmates of concentration camps. As Churchill early understood, a Nazi victory would not initiate a return to the Middle Ages but the lurch toward a new Dark Age. “The Battle of Britain is about to begin,” Churchill told the House of Commons on June 18, 1940. “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. . . .@ If Hitler wins and Awe fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” [iv] The incipient and growing opposition to science rested on Churchill’s intuition that science could do as much harm as good, a reality that the experience of war too amply demonstrated.
At the same time, modern science, or more accurately modern scientists, intentionally or not, abandoned the pretense of objectivity and became political. The refinement of poison gas during the First World War, like the creation of atomic bombs during the Second, arose in response to the demands of politics not the requirements of scientific inquiry. In the 1950s, scientists affiliated with the Democratic Party warned of the dangers associated with nuclear fallout while their Republican counterparts were at pains to deny them. Ordinary citizens hardly knew what to make of these political disagreements, but grew apprehensive and mistrustful, fearing that something had gone amiss.
Such disenchantment notwithstanding, many who vilified science in one moment extolled its virtues in the next. The allure of science remained, evinced, for example, by the popular fascination with computers as well as the academic prestige of the social sciences. Meanwhile, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle shattered the intellectual foundations of objective science, confirming Pascal’s initial skepticism. But like the early findings of the Scientific Revolution (so-called), Heisenberg’s recognition of indeterminacy in the basic substance of the material world, although a momentous advance in the intellectual history of the West, exercised almost no practical effect on the conduct of scientific research. Most scientists, including Albert Einstein, denied, or at least failed to contemplate, its implications. Perhaps, again like Einstein, they did not wish to do so.
In any event, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle did not—at least it has not yet—overcome the Cartesian dualism that expediently partitioned the world into subject and object. It has not produced a more realistic, more chastened, or more humane understanding of the nature and limits of scientific investigation. Instead, we are left with the outworn conception of science as the source and arbiter of objective truth and the persistent rejection of science as a collection of fables and lies. If neither perspective has much utility, at least the latter view, nonsensical though it often is, has the merit of stumbling blindly toward the right questions: for what purpose do men and women intend to use the scientific knowledge they have accumulated? Can that knowledge be isolated from the purpose that it was designed to serve?
III.
Conflicting attitudes toward science are at the heart of the debates about climate change and the Coivd-19 pandemic. Either science, which has contributed to both crises, offers the only salvation for humanity or, alternately, science is a weapon in the hands of experts to deceive and oppress the masses. I am not proposing a false equivalence. Criticism of science, or rather of “scientism,” the conviction that science holds a monopoly on truth, is not the same as the denial of science. The mindless rejection of science today is as deadly as was the credulous acceptance of science during the 1940s and 1950s. Both positions are dangerously irresponsible. The problem may be beyond solution, for it originates in human nature.
Human beings may on occasion be capable of reasoned judgments, but that ability does not make them rational creatures. They are, in fact, often impervious to rational inquiry. Under stressful circumstances, they tend to abandon reason altogether and made superstition, fear, and even hatred vital components of life. Many, at least enough to make a difference, come to believe that the rules and standards of society have subjected them to a terrible violation of their rights. “Primitives in revolt,” as the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset characterized them, they have inherited a comparatively prosperous and stable world, while remaining unaware of, and perhaps apathetic toward, the effort required to create and sustain the many advantages from which they now benefit. [v] As a consequence of their grievances and their ignorance, they forsake any and all obligations to their fellow human beings. Like perpetual children, they yearn to be free to exercise the rights and privileges that they think they deserve, which the unrighteous and the unjust, the cunning and the diabolical, have so cruelly denied them.
They dream that life is perpetually easy and bountiful, or that it ought to be. When they find themselves toiling under grave restrictions, deprived of the things to which they believe justice entitles them, they look for someone to blame. In their determination to assert themselves and to exercise power over others, they forfeit intellectual and emotional maturity. They dispense with civility and truth. They come to mistrust ideas and to scorn intelligence. They negate morality, adopting whatever expedient serves the interests of the moment and enables them to justify actions for which there can be no justification. They are consumed by partisan zeal. The nineteenth-century German historian Theodore Mommsen concluded that those bewildered but uncompromising souls routinely dismiss “logical and ethical arguments. . . . They listen only to their own envy and hatred, to the meanest instincts. Nothing else counts for them. They are deaf to reason, right, morals. One cannot influence them.” [vi] Mommsen likened such a disposition of mind and soul to a terrible disease for which medicine has no cure.
Are such men and women perverse? Are they stupid? It turns out that they may be merely human. The human capacity for self-delusion is almost boundless. What people already believe about the world is more important in determining their judgment and their conduct than evidence or facts. It has ever been thus. Although I am not fully conversant with the literature, scholarship in psychology and neuroscience suggests that expecting people to be convinced by reasonable arguments is itself unreasonable. Reason is inseparable from emotion. How people feel about controversial issues, from gun control to abortion rights, from climate change to vaccine and mask mandates, shapes their thinking far more than logical argument or factual proof. Bias is an innate quality of mind. It predisposes men and women to discredit ideas that they find odious or threatening. They substitute rationalization for reason, making an impassioned case for a preordained conclusion. To put matters bluntly: people believe what they want to believe and go to unconscionable lengths to alter or dismiss an unwelcome but incontrovertible reality.
Studies reveal that people do not brazenly ignore or massage scientific evidence to deny or validate climate change or to diminish or affirm the severity of the pandemic. Instead, they tend to reject the authenticity of science or to disavow scientific expertise if outcomes not only challenge their ideas but also, and more important, contradict their values. Liberals are not immune. The Anti-Vaxx Movement, which insisted that ordinary childhood vaccines had caused an epidemic of autism, originated among liberal activists such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and actors such as Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey. The most ardent opponents of vaccines continued to defend their beliefs even after Andrew Wakefield, who initially asserted the connection between vaccines and autism, repudiated his conclusions. Like those who abjure climate change and the pandemic, anti-vaxxers created their own paradigm to sustain the alternate reality they preferred to inhabit.
Wither then do we goest? People can change their minds and even alter the neuro-pathways of the brain. But those with strong convictions are unlikely to do so. The appeal to fact, evidence, reason, and logic will continue to fall on profoundly deaf ears. Meanwhile disagreements and confrontations become increasingly malicious, portending violence. Everyone, it seems, is frustrated, angry, and demanding retribution. Experts, of course, are often wrong, mostly because they project a continuation of the present into the future. The unpredictable is always possible. The future can astonish and confound the expectations of the present, sometimes miraculously so. I take what comfort I can from Jacob Burckhardt’s recognition that “for the people that seems the most sick the cure may be at hand.” In his wisdom, Burckhardt also knew that the people appearing “to be healthy may bear within it the ripening germs of death, which the hour of danger will bring forth from their hiding-place.”[vii] Are we a sick people trying to get well or have we assented to, and even welcomed, our destruction?
I intend no hyperbole when I say that we have long been peering into the abyss even as we pretend to be immune from its gravitational pull. I believe the pandemic may forever alter our way of life. I wonder whether we will awaken to its horrors before it is too late, or whether we can stop shouting at one another long enough at least to mourn the dead, which may, in the end, be all the remains for us to do. I believe that climate change may make large portions of the earth uninhabitable, and more quickly than most climate models anticipated. In all candor, I have never so ardently hoped that those who disagree with me about these matters are right and that I am wrong. I am not confident that it is so, but the world would be better served if it were.
Both the dominion over the natural world that science has made possible and the abdication of responsibility that the unreserved denunciation of science exemplifies propel us headlong toward death. It is no longer implausible to assume that human beings, in fact, entertain a death wish. “To be perfectly realistic in this matter,” declared Richard Weaver, “we must put the question of whether modern civilization wishes to survive.” Do men and women “wish to go on living, or do they wish to destroy the world?”[viii] Weaver was most concerned about the deployment and use of nuclear weapons; his apprehension, sensible though it was, seems almost quaint now. We must admit that if we remain on our present course, we will have lost control of our destiny. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—pestilence, war, famine, and death—again thunder across the face of the earth, this time summoned not by a vengeful God but by human beings submerged at once in their arrogance and their ignorance.
If we do succeed in killing ourselves and destroying the world, then it will not matter who was right and who was wrong about science, the pandemic, climate change, or a host of other problems and afflictions. Our vicious quarrels, which at the moment so distort our perspective and seem so vital to our identity, will be as dry leaves in the autumn wind. They will be no more than “tales told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”[ix] Only no one may live to tell such tales, and no one who by some extraordinary chance does manage to survive will want to hear them.
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[i] Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science (New York, 1962), 81; Niels Bohr, quoted in Aage Peterson, “The Philosophy of Niels Bohr,” in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 19/7 (1963), 12; see also, David Favrholdt, “Niels Bohr and Realism,” in Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 153, ed. by Jan Faye and Henry J. Folse (n.c., 1994), 83.
[ii] Richard M. Weaver, “A Dialectic on Total War,” in Visions of Order: The Cultural Crisis of Our Time (Bryn Mawr, PA, 1995; originally published in 1964), 98-99
[iii] Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth (Indianapolis, IN, 1993; originally published in English in 1948), 3.
[iv] Winston Churchill, “Finest Hour” Speech, June 18, 1940, in Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches (New York, 2003), 228. Yet, Churchill could declare that “no extreme of violence would be considered too great for victory.” See Weaver, “A Dialectic on Total War,” 99.
[v] Jose Ortega y Gasset, Revolt of the Masses, (New York, 1964; originally published in 1930), 98.
[vi] Quoted in Peter G. J. Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York, 1964), 299.
[vii] Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (New York, 1995; originally published in 1860), 319.
[viii] Richard M. Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago, 1948), 185.
[ix] William Shakespeare, “Macbeth,” Act 5, Scene 5.
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