Let me say at
once that I consider we would get on much better if the word “science” didn’t
exist.
It is often claimed
that there is an intellectually significant distinction between what scientists
do and what, for instance, you and I do when we study a bus timetable or decide
that the washing is ready to take out of the machine. That is a false position. We are all reasoning creatures, and what is
called “science” is just this: someone reasoning about one of the class of
questions that we have agreed to call “scientific”. If you or I had worked
through the same chain of reasoning as Darwin or Einstein, and had brought to
it the same clarity and sense of proportion we bring to our observation of the
peaceful washing machine, we would have reached the same conclusions.
In the days of
Darwin, indeed, people rarely referred to themselves as scientists. They called
themselves chemists, or zoologists, and by that they named chiefly the subjects
with which they occupied themselves. I think that’s fine, but it seems
necessary to add in this context that a subject is, after all, a methodological
convenience. A subject does not exist in the way that my sisters exist or my
bay-tree exists.
Reasoning is a
curious sort of activity because it can be done right or wrong. Two children
struggle over a sum. Flo gets it right and Serena gets it wrong, but both are
reasoning in the sense that they are engaged in the same sort of mental
activity. We take this so much for granted that we easily fail to see how
bizarre and unique it is. If Flo and Serena stop doing sums and start playing
instead, there are doubtless many comments that can be made about them. We may
say that Flo plays too roughly, that Serena sulks and loses interest, but we
can hardly say that either arrives at the wrong conclusion. And so it is with
eating, driving, writing poetry, gardening, making love or breathing.
Well, if
someone is truly anti-reasoning, then of course there is no arguing with them.
Hence people (and more particularly, spokespersons for institutions) that make
a business of reasoning are very prone to accuse their opponents of being
anti-rational, anti-Truth, anti-Enlightenment or anti-Science. It saves the trouble of answering them.
I do not
believe that a person ever existed who was in fact anti-reasoning in the sense
that these people and these spokespersons imply. I consider it an absolutely
impossible state of mind. The wackiest new age hippie who sweeps away the
astronomers with an intuitive belief in the influence of star-signs is not, in
my opinion, anti-reasoning. The hippie is saying: your reasoning is inadequate
and has led you to false conclusions. A perfectly fair position – and although
I am not interested in astrology and don’t think that the hippie has, so far,
made much of a case, I believe she’s onto something.
It is open to
me to criticize that young scientist (i.e. reasoning human being) Serena for
having got her sum wrong. That does not make me anti-reasoning. I can also
criticize Flo if what she was working out (albeit correctly) was the number of
sweets she was going to steal from Serena. That does not make me anti-reasoning
either.
Now let me say
what I mean by being anti-science. (I am, I really am.)
I am not
“against” the “scientific method” because in my opinion the scientific method
has nothing distinctive about it. It is merely reasoning on certain topics and,
as I have already said, I don’t believe it is possible to be anti-reasoning.
It would be
easy for me at this point to insist “I love reason. I love truth. I love
reality. Oh sweet Reason, for all the ills committed in thy name, thou art
pure, as clear as a window, the fierce light of the sun on the Mediterranean,
source of all kindness and all happiness.” My heart says that. But if I am
going to be strenuous about this, I guess that what my heart warms to is
actually “what I personally perceive to be correct reasoning, what I personally
perceive as the truth, what I personally see as reality”. So I won’t say it.
There is too much of this rhetoric – especially from scientists.
I am not
“against” scientists who just think, and experiment, and write up their conclusions
with no end in view but finding something out. I am very interested in plants
and animals and I enjoy studying them myself. I do not, indeed, regard this
activity with any special reverence. For clever young people to devote
themselves to this occupation strikes me as no nobler than, for example,
devoting themselves to making tables. I wouldn’t bother to make that point if
many scientists and scientific journalists didn’t claim the opposite. Of
course, joiners speak up for themselves, too, with a proper measure of pride –
but then no-one takes them as making an important statement about our
society.
Yet a
scientist out of the lab is no more worthy of attention than a joiner out of
the workshop. Understanding plant genetics does not usually give one human
wisdom in the broader sense. I wish this were as obvious to the lab people when
they diversify into journalism and writing popular books. Indeed, very little
is ever heard about the sacrifice that is involved in devoting oneself to
scientific labours. I don’t mean the scientist’s sacrifice, I mean the world’s
sacrifice. Clearly, much time and mental energy are being diverted from other
endeavours, and therefore it is most likely that a scientist (all things being
equal) will be more ignorant of other things, more emotionally atrophied, less
able to retain a sense of proportion, less responsive and quick to act than
other people. I wouldn’t press it: of course there are scientists who are
splendid and life-enhancing individuals. But how often do we see the sense of
humility that should go with such a taxing discipline? How often, on the other
hand, do scientists betray a fatally narrow and complacent outlook on life by
the cast of their words (here, as a writer, I can claim a little expertise)?
The silliness of Lewis Wolpert, a scientist and journalist quoted to great
effect in one of Karl Henning’s recent pieces, comes into my mind.
Nor is my
banner of “anti-Science” primarily based on the harmfulness of discoveries made
by scientists. There is no end to that debate. I talk about nuclear missiles
and you talk about spectacles. You mention innoculation and I mention
agrochemicals. Then we get into imponderables like whether the world is a
juster or happier place than two hundred or a thousand years ago – and whether
scientists have anything to do with that. It is altogether too big a subject
for either of us. We are just here and this is as it is and the question is
about now, not about the record.
The
institutions of science are very frightening because they mix intellectual
arrogance (i.e. unreceptivity) with real power in a combination scarcely
without parallel since the medieval church. The business of these institutions
is expensive and therefore will only usually take place if underwritten by
commercial interests. Hence few scientists in fact work for disinterested ends.
They may do so personally (trying to ignore the source of the monthly salary as
if it were just a kind of moral reward from heaven, a sort of higher benefit
payment) – just as someone else may disinterestedly do the photocopying, or
disinterestedly upgrade the computers. It is of such innocent components that
bodies which oppress freedom, destroy nature, spread falsehoods and persecute
individuals are made. For that, it seems to me, is what the business of
commercially driven institutions amounts to. A scientist in the lab makes a big
deal about needing to focus, to ask the right questions. Quite right. But how
many rather more pressing questions were not asked in order to arrive at that
enviable, salaried, air-conditioned liberty?
Outside the
lab, a small brown bird sings in an ornamental cherry tree. At home, a daughter
is faking sickness to get off school. A partner stealthily drinks vodka in a
car-park. Clouds spread across the sky and canoes bobble on the lake. The lorry
thunders down the highway, trailing dust. A check-out girl dabs at her eye with
the corner of a Kleenex. The scientist must ignore all this, must put it right
out of her mind in order to grapple with the chromosome count or the new
extraction process. But as human beings, we need to bring it all right back in,
if we are to live.
This, then, is
the nub of my attitude to science. Science in the lab means reasoning – and
that’s OK. But science in the world means a fearsome proliferation of business
opportunities (I think this is a bad thing); a convenient term for prettifying
gross and inhumane ventures; a media term to slam down the dimly-recognized
objections of those who are able to feel sensitively but are perhaps less able
to articulate; a career-path to be held out to talented people in our
communities, to implicate them and make them safe. It is as an idea, rather
than as a human activity, that “science” is most harmful – even though as an
idea it doesn’t really exist!
In a way I am
ashamed of my argument. It is so dogmatic, so lacking in supporting evidence –
no scientist would put forward a view on such vague grounds (except out of the
lab). And of course that evidence, unlike as it is to the range of materials
that scientists are used to handling, ought to be presented. You should not be convinced or be barracked
into sharing my opinions. I view it more as a proposition than a conclusion: the beginning, not the end of
reasoning.