Philip Ball
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Conflict or Consilience?
The sciences and the arts/humanities often look like rivals who want to get along but just keep rubbing each other up the wrong way. They are generally polite enough in public, but you should hear what they say about each other in private. Every now and then the rancour spills out, as it does in these remarks in 2002 by the biologist Lewis Wolpert:
Although science has had a strong influence on certain artists – in the efforts to imitate nature and thus to develop perspective or in the area of new technologies – art has contributed virtually nothing to science. Art does not explain, but it broadens our experience in ways that are not clearly understood. I value it in its own terms but it has nothing to do with understanding how the world works. To pretend that it does is to trivialise science and do nothing for art. We should stop pretending that the two disciplines are similar, and instead rejoice in the very different ways that they enrich our culture.
Unlike the second law of thermodynamics, population genetics or quantum mechanics, which require much basic knowledge to appreciate properly, the response to a painting needs no prior training – though it can increase appreciation and pleasure… Science needs a much greater, and quite different, intellectual effort.
There is much to argue about here, but I think it’s fair to say that at the root of comments like these is a sense that whatever claim to truth the humanities can make is subjective and contingent, whereas science speaks to what is objective and eternal. To some extent, one can see this as a battle for supremacy of intellectual authority. But Siân Ede, former arts director for the Gulbenkian Foundation, suggests that the rift here – the hoary old divide of the Two Cultures–goes deeper. She says
it derives from radical difference in two epistemological traditions concerned with the nature of knowledge itself. On the one hand is the view that there is an implicit reality out there waiting to be discovered, independent of the observer’s mental state, as very many scientists maintain. On the other hand is the idea that reality is all or at least partly a construction of the human mind, phenomenologically and linguistically determined and therefore unfixed, and whether we are aware of it or not, viewed in accordance with the prevailing values and beliefs of particular times and places… many in the arts and humanities… are suspicious of any constituency that claims to be wholly right in finding the route to Truth and particularly can’t agree to assess all human behaviour, perceptions and products outside any political and cultural context. We must always assert the right to ask who makes the judgement and why.
Observations like these are commonly regarded by scientists as, at best, secondary to the real nature of their task. Yes, they will say, of course individual scientists are products of their time, and prone to the all-too-human foibles of ambition, vanity, self-delusion, and aggrandizement. If pressed, they will admit that even Charles Darwin’s writings were marred by the racism habitual to nineteenth-century European thought. None of this, however, invalidates what endures: Newton’s laws, the theory of natural selection, general relativity. For such scientists, their ultimate goal is to distil the pure spirit of eternal truths from the grimy residue of cultural, political and personal contingencies.
As Ede hints, there is a common belief that this can and should be done even for understanding human behaviour. Biologist E. O. Wilson was more inclined to find an accommodation – what he calls a consilience – between the sciences and the humanities, but in the end he felt that science must be the firm bedrock on which the latter disciplines build. He says that
until a better picture can be drawn of prehistory, and by that means the evolutionary steps that led to present-day human nature can be clarified, the humanities will remain rootless… The humanities have always been viewed as an ensemble of disciplines that explain “what it means to be human”… To achieve this goal will require a great deal more of the information available from scientific research than has been used by scholars of the humanities.
Underlying these tensions seems to be an assumption on the part of the sciences that the humanities are striving to ask and answer the same questions as they pose, but with inadequate tools. In art criticism, says Wilson, “due to the extreme subjectivity of the target, the insights easily slide across the surface and off target.” In avant-garde arts and criticism, he says,
It is not surprising that bizarre subcultures sprout abruptly and randomly [that] defy coherent explanation… Whether emanating from ordered or disordered minds, they give us glimpses, still disordered unfortunately, of the emotional checkpoints and decision centers of the subconscious mind.
But, he adds, “it is time for a deeper probe in a different setting, entered at a different angle, to a greater depth, and exploring a deeper causation”. In other words, time for science to bring order and rigour to this confusion!
The harsh but somewhat justified term of this sort of thing is scientism: a belief that scientific methods and techniques are the only routes to reliable knowledge, and that, if properly applied, there is no corner of human experience they cannot illuminate.
I am not proposing to resolve these conflicts. What I want instead to suggest is that, by insisting on them, we constrain science to be less than it can be, and less than it needs to be. We prevent it from speaking as widely, and certainly as wisely, as it can and should.
In his book The Age of Wonder, biographer and historian Richard Holmes offers a different view:
Perhaps most important, right now, is a changing appreciation of how scientists themselves fit into society as a whole, and the nature of the particular creativity they bring to it. We need to consider how they are increasingly vital to any culture of progressive knowledge, to the education of young people (and the not so young), and to our understanding of the planet and its future. For this, I believe science needs to be presented and explored in a new way… We need to understand how science is actually made; how scientists themselves think and feel and speculate…The old rigid debates and boundaries – science versus religion, science versus the arts, science versus traditional ethics – are no longer enough. We should be impatient with them. We need a wider, more generous, more imaginative perspective.
I agree with Holmes, and I want to talk about how we might find that perspective. I believe that it depends on recognizing that many of the questions that have been at the heart of human experience and culture since time immemorial do not neatly partition in ways that align with academic disciplines. Science adds to them new facets and new implications, but not in the manner of a sage deigning to offer crumbs of wisdom; rather, the very practices of science are as much a part of the question as of the answers. In particular, science can, and should aim to, contribute significantly and meaningfully to questions about meaning and purpose, and how these are expressed in our cultures. Science will surely not supply anything like an explanation of these attributes, but it can deepen and enrich the discussion. Rather than seeking to emphasize how science is different from other intellectual pursuits, we can afford to celebrate their integration.
Towards an Integration of Science and Culture
When they speak to a broad
