To the Editor:
Reading the opening paragraphs of Michael Lind’s article, “The Two Cultures (Continued)” [August 1991], caused me much merriment. The genus Homo now includes Plato, Shakespeare, Einstein, chimpanzees, and the gorilla. Furthermore, this recategorization, Mr. Lind tells us, was achieved by “highly sophisticated biochemical techniques.” I am no scientist, but how can anyone make so enormous an error of categories or in categorical thinking?
The greatest difference in the animal kingdom from the amoeba to Homo sapiens is consciousness. Only Homo sapiens has consciousness; that is why he is sapient. Are we really to believe that the two Yale scientists, John Alquist and Charles Sibley, who are responsible for this reclassification, had not thought of that? . . .
We must regard this supercolossal insult as part and parcel of white-race-bashing, Western-civ-bashing, and white-male-bashing, . . . which is now so common, especially among the practitioners of political correctness.
John Alquist and Charles Sibley . . . act as if human achievements are worthless; as if consciousness has no value at all or is actually undesirable; as if progress has somehow failed and is therefore not a criterion of differences between man and the lower animals. . . .
Andrew Romney
New York City
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To the Editor:
Michael Lind’s idea of “the isolation of the humanities from the natural sciences” omits the most conspicuous of influences: that of physics—on literature, art, and architecture. Picasso in 1905 was not aware that Einstein’s model of space annulled the single perspective of objects and brought time into the ideational process. But in retrospect, the physicist codified what the painter’s intuition discovered to be necessary. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is literary evidence of multiple disparate viewpoints. . . . Einstein termed meaningful objects “empty husks,” and the artistic representation of the empirical world has been problematic ever since. Heisenberg’s indeterminacy theory is contemporary with the art and literature of surrealism, which confidently negated rational causation. . . . Cubism, constructivism, abstract expressionism present the geometry and mechanics of the age’s physical science. . . .
Mr. Lind’s quotation from Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature, to the effect that “very few great writers . . . ever address real science on its own terms,” fails to recognize how apposite the works of the modernists are to scientific terms. . . .
As for the failure of Anglo-American language philosophy to include “the kinds of issues about which science might have something to say,” Mr. Lind fails to note that Heisenberg and Bohr both acknowledged that the ontology of their physics had been described first in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus .Logical positivism was an attempt to reconcile the written word and its figurative ambiguities with the stringent thought process of mathematics. . . .
The humanities are concomitants of physical science whether the age be that of Einstein, Newton, Aristotle, or Pythagoras. “Culture,” Nietzsche wrote, “is the unity of style in every expression of a people’s life.”
Robert Horn
Oneonta, New York
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To the Editor:
I am glad that Michael Lind has reopened the “two-cultures” issue. If nothing else, this may move the increasingly sterile debate between Western-civ traditionalists and their radical critics onto new terrain. Nevertheless, it is hard to take seriously his suggestion that “biological science might map the boundaries” of the humanities and social sciences.
As Mr. Lind is evidently aware, our most visible and vocal humanists and social scientists have a rather quaint notion of science. One prominent intellectual recently put it this way: “. . . materialism, determinism, reductionism, homogenization—however one describes modern natural science. . . .” That is, science is just another “ism.” Others write—sometimes contemptuously, sometimes enviously—of science’s “laws,” its “certainty,” its “authority,” and so on.
But, surely, the distinctive feature of science is its method—the complementary processes of hypothesis-generation and hypothesis-testing. Although successful applications of this method are most visible in the natural sciences, the same approach lies at the heart of modern scholarship in general.
Unfortunately, it appears that something is seriously amiss in the humanities and, to a lesser degree, the social sciences, and that the hypothesis-generating and hypothesis-testing functions are largely uncoupled. There the praise goes to the “novel,” the “striking,” the “creative,” and to the grand synthesizers of seemingly endless combinations and permutations of vague concepts—concepts which, although occasionally useful, will simply not bear the weight of the elaborate structures our humanist theoreticians are forever erecting. . . .
Although I, too, deplore the isolation of the humanities from the natural sciences and would like to see the former revitalized by more contact with the latter, it seems to me that both the radical barbarians at the gate and the traditionalist clerics manning the defenses are ensuring that the humanities will become increasingly intellectually irrelevant. Mr. Lind has cited the example of sociobiology. I would venture the suggestion that the infant field of neuroscience will contribute more to our understanding of “the mind” than that well-known series of footnotes from Plato to Whitehead. And, more than likely, our brethren in the humanities will be too preoccupied with their theological controversies even to notice.
Robert L. Marsh
Villa Park, Illinois
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To the Editor:
Michael Lind’s perceptive article . . . fails to deal with two important issues: what constitutes an intellectual, and what are the reasons underlying the aversion of so-called intellectuals to science and its vast intellectual and practical ramifications.
Mr. Lind apparently accepts intellectuals at their own self-definition as individuals interested in and knowledgeable about literature, and also dedicated to promoting fashionable liberal social causes. What is absent from this definition is any reference to science or technology. I believe they define themselves in this way in order to hide an enormous sense of inferiority about their lack of knowledge of the sciences in general and the biological sciences in particular. . . . Whereas in literature they are able to devise irrational analytical systems and use them to support their preconceived prejudices and reductionist notions about human nature and the functioning of human society, they cannot do so in science . . . where their ideas simply would not withstand professional scrutiny.
In my 27 years of academic life, I have refused to dignify such scientifically ignorant individuals as intellectuals. . . .
There are many causes for this anti-scientism on the part of both students and faculty within our culture. The science curricula in our schools are poor, and so is the teaching, particularly in biology, all the way from kindergarten to the 12th grade. Many elementary and middle-school teachers have a fear and loathing of science, often reinforced by stifling religious belief systems. Too often these teachers are atrociously prepared for their classroom task. There is also the factor of poor texts—many written by non-scientists or nonscientifically trained writers. . . .
The two cultures will never be bridged until we develop a scientifically literate populace capable of rational, independent thinking, and an educational curriculum that is suitable for producing such results. . . .
Sheldon F. Gottlieb
University of South Alabama
Mobile, Alabama
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To the Editor:
Two comments on Michael Lind’s fine article: first, modern science is considered by the vast majority of philosophers today to be merely instrumentalist. That is, science does not tell us what reality is really like; rather, it simply is “what works” in the matter of predicting and controlling nature. If that view of science is correct, then it cannot even map the boundaries of the humanities, as Mr. Lind suggests it can, much less make possible a synthesis with the humanities, which he thinks it cannot and should not do. . . .
A more powerful objection than Mr. Lind’s political and pragmatic one to attempts to synthesize science (“facts”) and the humanities (“values”), with science seemingly always holding the trump card, is that such attempts commit the naturalistic fallacy. Edward O. Wilson commits this fallacy all the time, as do advocates of evolutionary ethics from Julian Huxley to F.A. Hayek. There is just no way one can get from the “is” of a biological description of nature to the “ought” of normative judgments. Or rather, there is a way, but it requires the adoption of an Aristotelian view of nature. Since most modern thinkers reject Aristotle’s idea that there exist certain ends in nature and human nature, the naturalistic fallacy remains a problem for anyone who tries to create a scheme of values out of science and its presumed moral authority.
In this sense, science in fact has very little to say to the humanities. Many people, including my brother cultural conservatives, still have not caught up to the fact that Karl Popper’s semi-realist understanding of science was to all appearances overthrown nearly 30 years ago by Thomas Kuhn’s instrumentalist and historicist view of science—a view which gave enormous momentum to what Mr. Lind calls, a little problematically, “cultural determinism.” (Cultural explanations, unlike scientific ones, are notoriously indeterminate, so how can a cultural explanation be deterministic? Marxism may be deterministic, it is true, but Marx’s version of historicism was a peculiarly crabbed one.)
It is not surprising that a philosopher like Richard Rorty, who practically defines what it means to be on “the cutting edge” in contemporary philosophy, looks not to science but to poetry for insights about how we should live. The only way really to disagree with people like Rorty, I believe, is to reject the anti-teleological bias of modern science—its exclusive emphasis on efficient causes and its hostility to formal and final causes. Short of that, it appears that the humanities can trump the mere instrumentalist conventions that we call scientific theories.
What Mr. Lind’s otherwise perceptive article overlooks is the strong (but not unassailable) epistemological basis of the arguments for the autonomy of culture which he rightly deplores. Aristotelian scientific realists are the only ones, to my way of thinking, who do have good reasons for rejecting the autonomy-of-culture view and the fanaticism and utopianism that frequently accompany it. But this is mere quibbling; Mr. Lind deserves great credit for raising the issue in the first place and for discussing it thoughtfully and with insight.
Kenneth D. Zaretzke
San Diego, California
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To the Editor:
Michael Lind’s “The Two Cultures (Continued)” is incisive and provocative, but makes the relationship between Darwin and Tennyson a bit cozier than the facts warrant. If Darwin did indeed have a profound impact on Tennyson, it was certainly not expressed in the allusion to “Nature red in tooth and claw.” “In Memoriam,” from which that line comes, was published in 1850, nine years before Origin of Species appeared; in fact, much of the poem was composed in 1833-34, and the latest possible date of composition for this utterance is 1842, hardly “later” Tennyson.
Marx did look upon Origin of Species as, in his words, “a basis in natural science for the class struggle in history,” but Darwin was not impressed by this homage: “What a foolish idea seems to prevail in Germany,” he wrote, “on the connection between Socialism and Evolution through Natural Selection.”
Edward Alexander
Seattle, Washington
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Michael Lind writes:
Andrew Romney objects to the suggestion of John Alquist and Charles Sibley that the genus Homo should be redefined to include “Plato, Shakespeare, Einstein, chimpanzees, and the gorilla” on the grounds that “only Homo sapiens has consciousness.” If we follow this approach to taxonomy, then Shakespeare was not a mammal, because armadillos are not known to write plays, and Plato was not a vertebrate, because trout cannot philosophize. At any rate, our fellow hominoids, along with dogs, cats, horses, and many other animals, indisputably do have consciousness, even if it is far less developed in some directions than our own. Denials that animals are conscious have often excused indifference to their suffering. I would not want to be Mr. Romney’s dog.
In my article, I discussed the curious lack of interest by humanists and social scientists in modern biology; as Robert Horn correctly points out, I did not treat the influence of the physical sciences on the social sciences and the humanities. Had I done so, I would have deplored the immense damage done to the social sciences by the “physics envy” which has encouraged behaviorism in political science and by the attempted application to the economy of mathematical models devised to describe the activity of gases. I would also have criticized the often-encountered idea, endorsed by Mr. Horn, that there is a mystical correlation between the development of modern science and 20th-century artistic fashions, like cubism or streamlining. It is mere Hegelianism to treat, say, Newton and Milton as outgrowths of a “Baroque” Zeitgeist .To say, as Mr. Horn does, that “in retrospect [Einstein] codified what [Picasso’s] intuition discovered to be necessary” is preposterous, notwithstanding the generations of art historians who have blathered on about Picasso painting the “fourth dimension.” Modern scientific advances have built upon previous science, not upon contemporary fashions in art and politics.
On the other side of the equation, it is true that some artists have been inspired by their conceptions (or misconceptions) of modern science. Even so, when modern visual artists and composers have gone whoring after strange methods in the physical sciences their arts have usually suffered. The adoption of new materials and techniques (acrylic paints, glass, and steel) could have taken place without the wholesale adoption of pseudo-scientific terms and procedures by the misguided modernists who replaced ateliers and conservatories with “laboratories” and “workshops” and masterpieces with “experiments.” Cobbler, stick to your last.
This admonition does not apply to imaginative literature, which has as much in common with history, religion, moral philosophy, and law as with the more purely formal arts. Unlike music or architecture, literature is necessarily enriched (or polluted) by the larger conversation of a culture. That conversation should incorporate far more discussion of the conclusions (not the procedures) of natural scientists, as Robert L. Marsh and Sheldon F. Gottlieb join me in stressing. I thank them for their comments. Mr. Gottlieb’s refusal to dignify the scientifically illiterate with the title of “intellectual” is justifiable, but perhaps too conservative. While the genus Homo is enlarged to include the chimps, should the honorific sapiens perhaps be limited to those who are aware of the elementary facts about their species, its origins, and its world?
Kenneth D. Zaretzke makes several important points. His critique of the epistemological relativism of Kuhn (which applies with equal force to the more radical relativism of Feyerabend) is right on the mark. While teleology has no place in astrophysics or geology, something like the Aristotelianism Mr. Zaretzke endorses can provide the necessary link between fact and value in human affairs. When the subject is the behavior of man as a political animal, the “naturalistic fallacy” is no fallacy at all. Of course it is possible to derive a social-moral “ought” from a sociobiological “is.” Because the deer is a particular kind of polygamous mammal, deer ought not to live in hives organized by queens. Similarly, there are any number of possible and appealing societies which can never be realized because we are not only rational entities but also primates with peculiar needs and characteristics explicable in the light of a particular evolutionary history. One can call this Aristotelian scientific realism—or post-Darwinian common sense.
Edward Alexander caught me in an oversimplification. The Tennyson of “In Memoriam” was influenced by the pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories he found in Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830-33), J.F.W. Herschel’s Discourse on Natural Philosophy (1830), which the poet obtained in 1843, and Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), in which he found this suggestion: “Is our race but the initial of the grand crowning type? . . . There may be then occasion for a nobler type of humanity, which shall complete the zoological circle on this planet.”
As I noted in my references to Erasmus Darwin and Goethe, the ancient idea that humans evolved from other species had been discussed in Western Europe for generations before Charles Darwin suggested a possible mechanism. As an undergraduate at Trinity College, Tennyson defended the theory that “the development of the human body might possibly be traced from the radiated, vermicular, molluscous, and vertebrate organisms.”
