Education, Values and Science

Science and Poetry

Mary Midgley

Is art a luxury? Is there any connection between poetry and science? Today it may not be easy for us to relate these two topics on a single map. Academic specialization usually keeps them apart. But there is one very simple map which does suggest a way of relating them, a map which is worth looking at because it still has quite an influence on our thinking today. It is the map which the distinguished chemist Peter Atkins draws in the course of arguing that science is omnicompetent, that is, able to supply all our intellectual needs.

Atkins notes that some people may suggest that we need other forms of thought such as poetry and philosophy as well as science, since science cannot deal with the spirit. They are mistaken he says. These other forms add nothing serious to science:

Although poets may aspire to understanding, their talents are more akin to entertaining self-deception. They may be able to emphasise delights in the world, but they are deluded if they and their admirers believe that their identification of the delights and their use of poignant language are enough for comprehension. Philosophers too, I am afraid, have contributed to the understanding of the universe little more than poets . . . They have not contributed much that is novel until after novelty has been discovered by scientists. . .. While poetry titillates and theology obfuscates, science liberates (Atkins, 1995, p. 123).

Now though this view is not usually declared with quite Atkins’s degree of outspokenness and tribal belligerence, the view itself is actually not a rare one. A lot of people today accept it, or at least can’t see good reason why they should not accept it, even if they don’t like it. They have a suspicion, welcome or otherwise, that the arts are mere luxuries and science is the only intellectual necessity. It seems to them that science supplies all the facts out of which we build (so to speak) the house of our beliefs. It is only after this house is built that we can - if we like - sit down inside it, turn on the CD player and listen to some Mozart or read some poetry.

This is a notion which can make things really hard for young people who are trying to decide what subjects they should specialise in at school and college. More widely, too. It has an odd effect in other aspects of education. The idea that science is a separate domain, irelevant to the arts, is liable to produce a strange kind of apartheid in the teaching of literature, a convention whereby important and powerful writings get ignored if they have a scientific subject-matter. Thus H.G. Wells and the whole vigorous science-fiction tradition which derives from him were long cold-shouldered out of the syllabus entirely and have not yet fully reached it - and this even though writers like Joseph Conrad and Henry James, whose works are central to that syllabus, admired Wells deeply and saw the great importance of his vision. Until quite lately, even Frankenstein was ignored. Potent ideas expressed in these writings do not get properly faced and criticised in the teaching of literature. These ideas are, of course, often ones about science and its relation to the rest of life, which is itself a topic of wide-ranging importance. Increasingly, too, they include ideas about the meaning of the environmental crisis.

These matters get excluded from discussion of literature because the literary theories that have been recently in favour tend to play down the importance of all reference to the outside world in the works studied, concentrating instead wholly on the mind-set of writers and readers. No doubt this is a reaction against an unduly naive, social-realist approach favoured in the past. But the reaction seems now to have gone so far that intending students are confronted with a rather bewildering choice. On the one hand they are offered a somewhat introspective and subjective approach to literature. On the other, they face a kind of science-teaching which never mentions the attitudes and background assumptions that influence scientists at all - indeed, one that often views any mention of these topics as vulgar and dangerous. Thus, they may study either the outer or the inner aspect of human life, but must on no account bring the two together. It seems that, despite the efforts of many both in schools and universities, Descartes still rules. Mind and body are still separated. And since this educational situation has been around for some time, it has by now produced a generation of one-eyed specialists on both sides, specialists who tend, not unnaturally, to find their respective opposite numbers puzzling and so to drift into an unprofitable warfare. Since many of these people are unhappy with this situation, I suggest that it is worth while to take a much harder look at the misleading imaginative picture out of which it arises.

Lucretius and the Vision of Atomism

This is really a very odd picture, one which does not fit the actual history of thought at all. Re-reading Atkins’s words lately, I began to think about his remark that poets and philosophers ‘have not contributed much that is novel [to the understanding of the universe] until after novelty has been discovered by scientists.’ What struck me then was the influence that a single great philosophic poem - Lucretius’s On The Nature Of Things (De Rerum Natura) - has actually played in the formation of modern Western thought and especially of Western science.

That poem was the main channel through which the atomic theory of matter reached Renaissance Europe. It was forcibly stated there, all ready to be taken up by the founders of modern physics. Of course it was the Greek Atomist philosophers who had invented that theory and no doubt their work would have reached later thinkers in some form even without Lucretius’s poem. But the force and fervour of the poem gave atomism a head start. It rammed the atomists’ imaginative vision right home to the hearts of Renaissance readers as well as to their minds. That vision included, not just the atomic theory itself but also the startling moral conclusions which Epicurus had already drawn from it. In this way it forged a much wider strand in Enlightenment thinking.

For Lucretius did not see atomism primarily as a solution to scientific problems. Following Epicurus, he saw it as something much more central to human life. For him it was a moral crusade - the only way to free mankind from a crushing load of superstition by showing that natural causation was independent of the gods. Human beings, he said, are continually tormented by groundless fears of natural events and by useless precautions against them:

They make propitiatory sacrifices, slaughter black cattle and dispatch offerings to the Departed Spirits . . . As children in blank darkness tremble and start at everything, so we in broad daylight are oppressed at times by fears as baseless as those horrors which children imagine coming upon them in the dark. This dread and darkness of the mind cannot be dispelled by the sunbeams, the shining shafts of day, but only by an understanding of the outward form and inner workings of nature . . . How many crimes has religion led people to commit (Lucretius, Book II, lines 50-62, Book I, line 101).

Thus Lucretius launched the notion of science as primarily a benign kind of weedkiller designed to get rid of religion, and launched it in great rolling passionate hexameters which gave it a force that it would never have had if it had been expressed in dry, unemotive prose. His work is visibly the source of the anti-religious rhetoric that is still used by later imperialistic champions of science such as Bertrand Russell and Atkins himself.

The Primacy of Visions

I am not just making a debating point here for the deplorable War of the Two Cultures which Atkins is so keen to wage. This story of the influence that Greek atomistic philosophers have had, by way of a Roman poet, on the founding of modern science is not just a meaningless historical accident. It is a prime example of the way in which our major ideas are generated, namely, through the imagination. New ideas are new imaginative visions, not just in the sense that they involve particular new images, such as Kekule’s image of the serpent eating its tail etc, but in the sense that they involve changes in our larger world-pictures, in the general way in which we conceive life. These changes are so general and so vast that they affect the whole shape of our thinking. That is why something as important as science could not possibly be an isolated, self-generating thought-form arising on its own in the way that Atkins suggests. To picture it as isolated in this way - as a solitary example of rational thinking, standing out alone against a background of formless emotion - is to lose sight of its organic connection with the rest of our ideas. And that connection explains why we have to attend to it.

Changes in world-pictures are not a trivial matter. The mediaeval world-picture was static and God-centred. It called on people to admire the physical cosmos as God’s creation, but it viewed that cosmos as something permanently settled on principles that were not really open to human understanding at all. By contrast, the atomists showed a physical universe in perpetual flux, a mass of atoms continually whirling around through an infinite space and occasionally combining, entirely by chance, to form worlds such as our own. In principle, this new universe was physically comprehensible because we could learn something about the atomic movements and could thus understand better what was happening to us. But it was not morally comprehensible. According to Lucretius, the attempt to comprehend the world morally had always been mistaken and was the central source of human misery. In their mistaken belief that they could reach such an understanding, anxious and confused people had taken refuge from their ignorance in superstition:

I]n handing over everything to the gods and making everything dependent on their whim. . . .Poor humanity! to saddle the gods with suc responsibilities and throw in a vindictive temper! . . . This is not piety, this oft-repeated show of bowing a veiled head before a stone, this bustling to every altar, this deluging of altars with the blood of beasts.

. . . True piety lies rather in the power to contemplate the universe with a quiet mind (Lucretius, Book V, lines 1185 and 1184-1203).

Instead of this anxious pursuit of bogus social explanations for natural events - instead of these wild speculations about irresponsible gods, people should now become calmer and look for physical explanations which, though much slighter, would be reliable so far as they went, and would thus quench their anxiety.

This dynamic and chilling yet ordered world-picture made physical speculation seem possible and indeed necessary. At the Renaissance, moreover, it came together with another picture which had not been available before - namely that of the world as a machine. The invention of real complex machines such as clocks gave the human imagination an immensely powerful piece of new material. Machine-imagery changes the world-view profoundly because machines are by definition under human control. They can in a sense be fully understood because they can be taken to pieces. And if the world is essentially a machine, then it can be taken to pieces too. It was the fusion of these two imaginative visions that made modern science look possible. And it had to look possible before anybody could actually start doing it.

This dependence of detailed thought on entirely non-detailed visions is the main point that I want to get across. By their nature, the originating visions are necessarily vague. When the Greek atomists spoke of the various kinds of atoms as having their own specific movements, they had not the remotest idea of what these movements might be or how anybody could discover them. Though it was central to their position that the movements themselves were fixed, definite and invariable, they could not, in the nature of the case, possibly supply definite examples. They had to convey their point through the necessarily vague medium of imagery. What they were supplying was much more like a Turner sketch than it was like a photograph, and it was not in the least like an engineer ’s diagram.

At this imaginative stage, then, they were putting forward a theory about exactness - they were envisaging an ideal of exactness comparable with that which we now think of as typical of science - but they had not got anything like an exact theory. It is important that, at this stage, this kind of vagueness is not a vice, any more than it is a vice in a map of the world that it does not show the details of the small areas within it. It is natural and proper that our detailed thinking arises from imaginative roots. But it is important that we should recognise the nature of these roots - that we should not confuse the ideal of exactness with the actual achievement of it.

Impressive and influential theories do not originally gain their influence by telling us exact facts about the world. It is usually a long time before they can provide any such facts. Actual precision comes much later, if at all. What makes theories persuasive in the first place is some other quality in their vision, something in them which answers to a wider need. That need is sometimes a genuine intellectual thirst for understanding, but not always. Any theory that has a serious and widespread influence on thought owes its appeal to satisfying a number of different needs, many of which those who are influenced by it are not aware of. As the theory is used and developed, this plurality of power-sources begins to become visible, and it can result in serious conflicts.

The Meaning of Determinism

For instance, the determinism which the atomists introduced - the belief in a completely fixed, completely knowable physical order - obviously did not originally owe its appeal to being established as an empirical fact. It goes so far beyond any evidence that there is no way in which it could be established empirically. Much of this appeal was obviously due to its convenience for science - to the fact that it seemed to promise intellectual satisfaction by guaranteeing the regularity of nature. But of course, the fact that we want this satisfaction does not show that nature will always supply it. Determinism was not and could not be a conclusion proved by scientific methods. It was an assumption made in order to make the scientific enterprise look, not just plausible so far, but infinitely hopeful. And that infinite hope was not seen as optional. When, early in the twentieth century, physicists began to question this total determinism it became obvious that scientists did not view their deterministic faith merely as a dispensable matter of convenience. They saw it as a central element necessary to any scientific attitude. Einstein, when he objected to the reasonings of quantum mechanics by insisting that God does not play dice, was certainly talking metaphysics. Karl Popper, commenting on this, remarks

Physical determinism, we might say in retrospect, was a daydream of omniscience [my emphasis] which seemed to become more real with every advance of physics until it became an apparently inescapable nightmare (Popper, 1972, p. 222).

Popper is suggesting that determinism was really welcomed as much for its flattering view of ourselves as for its soothing account of the world - as much because it declared us infinitely capable of knowledge as because it claimed that the world itself was ordered and knowable. While both claims are unprovable, it was (he says) the first claim - our own potential omniscience - rather than the second which was really attracting theorists. (It still does). This bias towards establishing and glorifying our own status is still more obvious over mechanism - the further development of determinism which relies on machine imagery, thus producing the delightful impression that in principle we can copy all natural objects as well as understand them. Thus Julien de Lamettrie, meeting objections to mechanism based on the complexity of natural beings, replied that, with a bit more trouble, we will be able to make machines to imitate every kind of complexity;

If more instruments, wheelwork and springs are required to show the movements of the planets than to mark and repeat the hours, if Vaucanson needed more art to make his flute player than his duck, he would need even more to make a talker . . . The human body is an immense clock, constructed with so much artifice and skill that if the wheel that marks the seconds stops because of rust or derailment, the minutes wheel continues turning. . . (La Mettrie, 1994, p. 69).

Fatalism and Contemplation

At this point, however, the messages from these different visions begin to divide. Lucretius and Epicurus did not promise this kind of complete knowledge at all and took no interest in the technology that might grow from it. They were much more thoroughly sceptical. They had no confidence in any practical improvements of human life. In fact, Epicurus himself despised the pursuit of theoretical knowledge for its own sake as one more distraction from the pursuit of inner peace and warned his followers against it. ‘Set your sail, O happy youth’ he cried, ‘and flee from every form of education’. Lucretius is more interested in details about atoms, but for him too knowledge itself is not the aim. Knowledge is a means not an end and a means to inward peace, not to improved outward activity. Primarily it is a cure for anxiety, a path to ataraxia, peace of mind. It is in these terms that he celebrates Epicurus’s achievement:

When human life lay grovelling in all men’s sight, crushed to the earth under the dead weight of superstition . . . a man of Greece was first to raise mortal eyes in defiance, first to stand erect and brave the challenge. Fables of the gods did not crush him . . . He, first of all men, longed to smash the constraining locks of nature’s doors. . . He ventured far out beyond the flaming ramparts of the world and voyaged in mind throughout infinity. Returning victorious, he proclaimed to us what can be and what cannot; how the power of each thing is limited . . . Therefore superstition in its turn lies crushed beneath his feet, and we by his triumph are lifted level with the skies (Lucretius, Book I, lines 62-78).

This is splendid stuff. But there is no mention here of any research programme to follow, no talk of the need to track down every kind of atom and establish its powers. It is enough for Epicurus to have shown, in principle and a priori, ‘what can be and what cannot’, that is, essentially it is enough to have proved a negative, to have shown that we need not fear the gods.

This vision of salvation through science - this hope that scientists can ensure human happiness simply by removing religion - is still familiar today. It is worth while to ask how far the people who now preach it actually share Lucretius’s vision. Essentially, what the Epicureans were preaching was a fatalistic quietism. They did not think that human happiness could be increased either by political activity or by the satisfactions of love, or indeed by knowledge either. Instead, they put their faith in a stern limitation of human ambition, a concentration on what little is possible to us here and now. They thought that people who had once fully grasped that they could not change the world at all, either by sacrificing to the gods or by any other kind of effort, would cease their anxious striving, would compose their minds, would be able enjoy the satisfactions that life actually gave them in the present, and would console themselves for their sorrows by admiring the cosmos. Knowing that death would not lead to divine punishment or to a gloomy afterlife, they would no longer fear it. When they died, they would be content simply to dissolve away into their constituent atoms. And, since they knew that natural disasters - lightning, earthquakes, diseases - could not be prevented, they would concentrate on facing these things calmly, instead of dissipating their energy on fruitless efforts to influence nonexistent gods.

The Limits of Epicureanism

Things have not, of course, turned out that way. Anxiety turns out to be a much more robust and central part of human life than Lucretius supposed. We modern addicts to anxiety may be deprived of an outlet to it through sacrificing to the gods but this does not stop us worrying. We simply exhaust ourselves instead in a frantic search for success, or security, or for better life-styles or for new medicines. No doubt, the general thought that the physical world is orderly and reliable does have some reassuring effect. But we don’t seem to have gained the salutary recognition of our own insignificance, the humility which Epicurus hoped would flow from his vision of the vast, formless impersonal universe - has not followed. Our knowledge of science has not stopped us living largely in the future rather than in the present. We are still continually planning crowds of incompatible schemes and continually being disappointed. Most of us still live on jam to-morrow instead of soberly enjoying what we have while we have it, as Epicurus advised.

In fact, though Epicurean morality has much to recommend it, it does not seem to be compatible, as a whole, with the nature of human striving. Historically, Epicureanism was a faith born of very brutal and unmanageable times - hopeless times during the last century of the Roman Republic when civil war and corruption made it seem that all effort to improve the world was indeed futile. And there were many such bad times in the Greco-Roman world, and during the Dark Ages. Accordingly, Epicureanism was valued throughout those eras as a spiritual refuge where people could shut themselves away when necessary and try to forget about outside distresses. When things went a little better and civic activity became possible they tended to prefer Stoicism, which left much more scope for social interests and duties.

During the Renaissance, people who were searching for new ideas found both these pagan philosophies helpful in many ways and used them both freely in forming later thought. There is much more of both in our current ideas than we usually notice. But in the early modern period there was a further special reason for welcoming the Epicurean attack on religion, namely the wars and persecutions that disgraced the name of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Enlightenment philosophers such as Hobbes, Hume and Voltaire who were horrified by those wars and persecutions saw a quite new force in Lucretius’s invectives against religion. His exclamation, ‘Quantum religio potuit suadere malorum’ (‘how many crimes has religion made people commit’) expressed their views exactly. I believe that this is why atomism itself was once more seen as having a profound moral significance. That is why its world-picture gained so much force and prevalence among a wide readership - a circle far wider than just the scientists who managed to turn it into a successful physical theory.

Religion, Magic and Contemplation

Now, what am I not saying? I am not saying that the atomic theory would never have emerged in science if it had not had these particular philosophical and poetic roots in Greece and Rome. I am saying that, if the theory had had different roots, it would not have brought with it this particular world-picture, this myth, this drama, this way of accommodating science in the range of human activities, this notion of what it is to have a scientific attitude. In particular, there seems no reason to think that the mere advance of science itself would necessarily have brought with it the Epicureans’ undiscriminating, wholesale hostility to religion - their notion that the value of science lay primarily in its power to make people happier by displacing religion from human life.

That idea surely is peculiar because the notion of religion that it involves is such a narrow one. Of course the anxious, insatiable business of propitiatory rituals which Lucretius describes does play a large part among the vast range of human proceedings which we call religious. But it clearly belongs in a special department of that range, namely the department called Magic. Among the great religions, Buddhism rejects this kind of magic entirely and in Judaism there were strong protests against it as early as the Psalms. It was never incorporated into Christian or Islamic teaching. The idea of bribing or bullying a deity to change your destiny is quite foreign to the spirit of these religions. Of course it has often crept into religious practice and often become prominent there, because anxiety is such a powerful human motive - for instance in the sale of indulgences. But when magic has crept in in this way, reforming movements have repeatedly been formed within these religions to get rid of it and to point out that this is not what they are about at all.

Besides this, Pagan religions too usually contained far more admirable things than the kind of low-grade magic that Lucretius deplores. His own tradition contained Pindar’s hymns to Apollo, Plato’s myths and the Eleusinian mysteries. And indeed, Lucretius himself furnishes an example of the splendid things that Paganism could contain in the great opening passage of his poem On the Nature of Things. This passage is a straightforward Hymn to Venus - an invocation of her as the Spirit of Life, the generous maternal force in nature which fills living things with delight and makes possible the whole admirable world around us. Here is devotion to a force and an ideal which is clearly seen as spiritual as well as physical - devotion of a kind which polytheists often express very nobly towards their deities, because those deities mean something serious for them. When Lucretius mentions the Earth, too, he repeatedly has trouble in restraining himself from openly venerating it as our divine Mother (e.g. Book II line 596-600 and lines 993-8) in a way that recalls the current embarrassment of some scientists in handling the concept of Gaia.

But beyond this and more centrally, he shows an intense reverence for the vast atomic system that he portrays - a system that he sees as essentially ordered and universal although in another way it is chaotic. And it is just this reverence that he wants, above all, to arouse in his readers. He hopes that it will take the place of the useless anxiety that now drives them to make their futile sacrifices, that it will cure them of fearing death and also of entertaining idle ambitions, since it will show that earthly success is hollow, trifling and transient in the perspective of this vast impersonal universe.

There is no doubt that this is a noble vision. But it does seem to be rather a narrow one. In some ways, the Epicurean ideal is quite close to the Buddhist concept of enlightenment through non-attachment, but it is much more purely negative and asocial. There is no element of Buddhist compassion here, no suggestion of delaying one’s own enlightenment to promote the salvation of other sentient beings. Epicureanism offers us a private salvation if we will only respond rationally to the physical universe. But we may want to ask, can the thought of that physical universe alone be expected to produce this degree of philosophic detachment? Can such calm acceptance be expected to follow simply from the findings of physical science? There are now many scientists in our culture who are deeply convinced of the atomic structure of matter and who know far more about it than Epicurus ever dreamed of. But it is not clear that this acceptance frees them from the fear of death, nor even that it tends to cure them of ambition. It certainly doesn’t necessarily make them view Nobel Prizes with lofty contempt as mere earthly trifles. If we want to get a wider perspective within which earthly success really does appear insignificant we will probably need to turn to sages who are prepared to give us a more positive and constructive spiritual vision.

The Need for Dialogue

It is important to concede the part Lucretius got right. The exaltation of science does indeed have a philosophic point. The modern scientific vision of the world does have enormous grandeur. Contemplation of it certainly can enlarge our mental horizons, distract us from mean preoccupations, raise our aspirations, remind us of wider possibilities. This is a real benefit, for which we should not be ungrateful. The trouble about it is that, once we have this new vision, there are many different interpretations that we can put on it, many different directions in which it can lead us. It is quite hard to distinguish among those different directions and to map them in a way that lets us navigate reasonably among them. This kind of mapping is not itself scientific business, so scientists tend not to be trained in it. It calls for different ways of thinking.

For instance, many different responses are possible to the miracles of modern physics. To some people, those miracles suggest only more and better weaponry. That is why a high proportion of the world’s trained physicists are now engaged on military projects. Beyond this, there is a wider circle of people to whom these miracles chiefly symbolise just an increase in power, without any special idea about how that power had best be used. Out of this fascination with new power there arises our current huge expansion of technology, much of it useful, much not, and the sheer size of it (as we now see) dangerously wasteful of resources. It is hard for us to break out of this circle of increasing needs because our age is remarkably preoccupied with the vision of continually improving means rather than saving ourselves trouble by reflecting on ends. This is the opposite bias from the fatalistic quietism of the Epicureans, who refused to think about means at all. It is not clear that our bias is any more sensible than theirs. But, at a casual glance, it is just as natural a response to the grand vision of the physical world which we derive from modern science.

The difficulty is to make that glance more than casual, to criticise properly the various visions that constantly arise in us. We need to compare those visions, to articulate them more clearly, to be aware of changes in them, to think them through so as to see what they will commit us to. This kind of criticism is not itself scientific business, though of course scientists can and do engage in it. It is necessarily philosophic business (whoever does it) because it involves analysing concepts and attending to the wider structures in which those concepts get their meaning. It starts with the fuller articulation of imaginative visions and moves on later to all kinds of more detailed thought, including scientific thought.

That is why all science grows out of philosophical thinking - out of the criticism of imaginative visions - why it takes that criticism for granted and always continues to need it. It is why Peter Atkins’s vision of a free-standing, autonomous science with a monopoly of rationality - a science that does all our thinking for us - is not workable. Philosophic assumptions don’t stop being influential just because they have been forgotten. They lie under the floorboards of all intellectual schemes. Like the plumbing, they are really quite complicated, they often conflict, and they can only be ignored so long as we don’t happen to notice those conflicts.

When the conflicts get so bad that we do notice them, we need to call in a philosophic plumber. Of course this person need not be a paid philosopher, but he must be someone who knows that the philosophical angle matters. Rationality is not available without this kind of attention to the conflicts between our various assumptions because rationality itself is something much larger than mere exactness. Rationality itself is an ideal - one which we perceive somewhat cloudily in a vision, but towards which we can certainly move - an ideal of a just and realistic balance among our various assumptions and ideals.

The Cognitive Role of Poetry

As for poetry and the arts generally, they too play a central part in our intellectual life because they supply the language in which our imaginative visions are most immediately articulated, the medium through which we usually get our first impression of them. Shelley said that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. This is strong language, but his point may really be needed in an age when literature may seem to have sublimated itself into a haze of texts bombinating above us in a metaphysical stratosphere. Shelley meant that poets - including, of course, imaginative prose writers - express, not just feelings, but crucial new ideas in a direct form that is often necessary before our intellects can grasp them, and that these ideas directly influence our life. These writers do not usually do their legislating by literally spelling out theories, as Lucretius did, but by showing forcefully (as novelists and dramatists can) how the new ideas would work out in real life. Shakespeare does this all the time. And again, the ideal of detachment from worldly affairs which the Epicureans offered is one that can take many forms and lead to many different life-styles. Plato presented one of these life-styles dramatically in the portrait of Socrates that he drew in his dialogues, There are others, ranging from the totally ascetic and solitary to the altruistic, which would lead to very different lives. In War and Peace, Pierre attempts this kind of detachment; the difficulties which he runs into cast a sharp light on its problems. Since we often have to make choices among paths of this kind, literature plays a vital part in life by stirring our imaginations and making us more aware of what particular choices can involve. If it is taught in a way which plays down or even suppresses this imaginative action, something vital is lost from life. And we may begin to wonder why, on these conditions, it is important to study literature at all.

It is worth noticing, too, that in this way philosophy itself is a branch of literature. Any major kind of philosophising always presents some distinctive ideal for life as well as for thought because life and thought are so closely related. The great philosophers of our tradition have usually displayed their ideals quite explicitly, as have those of other traditions, and if contemporary academic philosophers suppose that they are not doing this they are deceiving themselves. Academic narrowness is a way of life as much as any other. It is quite as easily conveyed by a style of writing, and even more easily by a style of teaching.

The Imaginative Role of Science

All of us who talk and write reveal what kind of things we think important and what we think trivial. We all communicate our particular vision of life, and those of us who deal in large visions convey them more clearly and more influentially than the rest of us. As I have been pointing out, science too incorporates these influential visions, and this is certainly not something that scientists should avoid or be ashamed of. Scientists have influenced our life profoundly and they do so increasingly today. However much they may try to be objective about particular facts their own personalities inevitably influence the general shape of their message and there is no reason why it should not do so. They influence us by their imagery, by their selection of topics, by the ways in which they explain their theories, by the views that they express about what does and what does not constitute a proper scientific attitude. In this way they contribute to the constant ferment of dialectic that goes on as we try to compare different attitudes and balance the force of various ideals. And this is thoroughly satisfactory provided that they know that they are indeed making this kind of contribution - provided that they listen to the other contributors and grasp the general shape of the debate as Galileo and Darwin and Huxley did, rather than supposing that the particular imaginative vision espoused by current science must always prevail.

Peter Atkins is not mistaken, then, in claiming that science plays a crucial part in our intellectual life. His mistake lies in the somewhat wild suggestion that science occupies the stage alone, that it is the sole contributor of rationality to an otherwise thought-free world. This kind of illusion of omnipotence is a disease that easily afflicts people who isolate themselves from general conversation. It is strongly encouraged by today’s academic specialisation, and it infects other academic tribes as well as the scientific one. We all tend to think that we know best. Today’s over-exaltation of science originated as a response to the absurd over-exaltation of classical studies that ruled in the nineteenth century. At present, various kinds of rather unreal anti-science rhetoric tend to encourage this warfare by supporting the idea of a simple conflict between a single personified science and some other champion for the single position of intellectual dominance. No such position is available, so the idea of a War between Two Cultures is a futile one. Instead we all need to sit down together and exchange our visions.

Atoms, Memes and Individuals

Mary Midgley

In my first lecture I discussed Peter Atkins’s claim that science is ‘omnicompetent’ - an independent, solitary intellectual citadel, the only real source of rational thought, a central government under which both poetry and philosophy are only minor agencies. As I said then, this idea is not often expressed today as confidently and brutally as Atkins puts it. Yet it deserves attention because it flows from an important element in our current beliefs, namely the mysterious isolation of science. The trouble is that modern specialization makes it so hard for us to relate the various aspects of our thought that the physical sciences tend to appear to us as somewhat cut off from the rest of our thinking. To most of us, the most obvious fact about them is simply their power. Seeing their immense successes embodied in technology, we often find it natural to exalt them, so we are not surprised by the claim that their methods ought to be extended to cover the rest of our thought. That claim - first made by Auguste Comte, founder of positivism, and repeated by many sages since - underlies many desperate attempts today in other studies - especially in the social sciences - to become, in some sense, ever more ‘scientific’.

On the other hand, this mysterious isolation can just as easily produce alienation and fear. We are struck by the dangers of technology. We see how easily the power of science can be misused, and that science itself cannot correct that misuse. We despair of the scientific ideal and sometimes declare war on science itself. We oscillate between idealising science and fearing it.

In these lectures I want to say that both these attitudes are equally wrong. Both express an unreal abstraction. The sciences are not cut off in this way from the rest of our thought. They don’t compose one solid, distinct, autonomous intellectual entity. There are many scientific ways of thinking but all of them grow out of common thought, draw on its imagery and share its motivations. Scientists do indeed aim at objective truth about the world and they sometimes achieve it. It really is true that water is made of hydrogen and oxygen and that the liver secretes bile. But scientists have to select for their investigation patterns in that world which particularly interest them. And the reasons for that selection are by no means always as obvious as they may seem.

Now I am not suggesting, as some sociologists of science have done, that scientists just make up their results by framing experiments to prove what they already want to believe. Extreme social constructionism is not a convincing story at all. But I do find it striking how deeply scientific thinking is pervaded by patterns from everyday thinking and, in particular, how strong an effect the imagery chosen has on what is conceived at a given time as being scientific. In order to illustrate this, I shall go on talking in this lecture about the meaning of the atomic model.

The Meaning of Atomism

As I mentioned in the previous lecture, the pioneers of modern science drew that model from the Greek atomist philosophers and more directly from the passionate Epicurean version of it given by the Roman poet Lucretius. They did not receive atomism merely as a scientific hypothesis but as part of a strong and distinctive ideology. They saw it not just as a literal truth but as a symbolic pattern suggesting meanings affecting much wider areas of life. Morally, for instance, atomism seemed to point the way, not only away from religion but also away from communal thinking and towards social atomism - that is, towards individualism. And in the matter of scientific knowledge, atomism seemed to promise a most reassuring kind of simplicity and finality - a guarantee that the world would prove intelligible in the end in relatively simple terms, once we had split it up into its ultimate elements. In fact, understanding the world was essentially a matter of finding those ultimate units.

Both these promises - the social reliance on individualism and the intellectual confidence in final simplicity - were central elements in Enlightenment thinking. They are both still prominent in our thought today. But both are now causing us a lot of trouble. On the physical side, scientists no longer think in terms of hard, separate, unchangeable atoms at all. Attempts to go on imposing atomistic patterns in other intellectual areas are increasingly unhelpful. And, on the social side, things really do not work well when we imagine people as separate, independent atoms of that kind. Yet we still find it very hard to reshape both these thought-patterns. These ideas, like a lot of others which we owe to the Enlightenment, have come to be accepted as necessary parts of rationality. Changes in them tend to look like attacks on Reason itself. If we want to rethink them as we now need to, I think it will help to glance back and see what made them so appealing in the first place.

The Source

Atomism arose in Greece out of a desperate attempt to find something in the world which was truly fixed and immutable. Parmenides proposed that what was real could only be a single ultimate unchangeable substance. He thought this was necessary because any plurality or change in the world would involve a void or nothingness, and nothingness cannot be real. It does not exist. Both change and plurality were therefore only illusions. It followed that all the things which we actually experience are unreal. For, as Heraclitus had pointed out, these everyday things are many and are in constant flux, they change as constantly as if they were made of fire. As he said, you can’t get into the same river twice. . .

So, putting Parmenides’s insight together with that of Heraclitus, it seemed that the world around us was indeed unreal, that reality must be a mysterious eternal something lying behind it, a realm which was altogether hidden from us. This was not a satisfactory situation. Democritus and Leucippus therefore did everybody a service by breaking the deadlock by introducing atoms. They suggested that the changing world consists of innumerable tiny units which genuinely are changeless - ultimately real in just the way Parmenides demanded - and which really do cause the changes which we see. They called these units atoms, which simply means indivisible objects.

An infinite number of these atoms, then, swirl around randomly through infinite space and infinite time, colliding and combining now and then by chance to form temporary universes, of which there are many besides our own. There is no purpose anywhere in this process and the gods, who have been formed by it just as much as humans have, do not try to control it. Nor do they interfere in human life. They simply live serenely on their own in the space between the universes. As for mind, it is real enough but it too consists of atoms - very fine, spherical atoms which can move freely through the coarser forms of matter. At death, this mind-stuff dissolves away into its component atoms just like the rest of the body and is lost in the vast cosmic chaos.

Now this is an extremely impressive vision. In my first lecture I said something about its moral and social consequences. I mentioned its usefulness in resisting superstition and also its thinness as a total philosophy for life. Here I want to look rather at its consequences for science and for our notion of what it is to be scientific. We can see at once that some of these consequences are good. The sheer vastness of the perspective - the sense of infinite space and time surrounding us - is most impressive. And the central insight that visible processes can sometimes be explained by finding smaller, invisible processes going on inside them is of course hugely powerful. It has been immensely fertile for science. Yet there is an unbalance in the scheme which is bound to lead to trouble. It concentrates so strongly on the atoms themselves that it has little to say about how they are related.

We naturally ask what forces are making the atoms move. But on this point the Atomists were parsimonious to the point of being miserly. They thought that nearly all the movement was simply caused by collisions. They did add the idea of a clinamen or bend - a kind of native, original tendency in the atoms to move slantwise. But that seems only to have been a defence against the objection that otherwise they might never meet at all, merely falling in parallel like rain. No reason was given for the slant, and since the atoms have no working parts it is hard to see how there could be any such reason. The atoms collided and sometimes got hooked together, but they never truly interacted. Nor, of course, was the slanting motion of any actual use in explaining in any detail why they behaved as they did, still less how they came to be moving in the first place. Change itself had not really been explained at all.

Trouble with Time

This difficulty is part of a twist in the original model which has caused lasting trouble - namely, that it is essentially static rather than dynamic. The Greek atomists’ notion was that the mere shape and size of the atoms would explain their workings fully without reference to any forces at work or to the kind of whole within which they were working. Their pattern was still that of Parmenides, a timeless pattern requiring an inert whole incapable either of change or relation. The Atomists had not got rid of this pattern, they had merely repeated it indefinitely on a smaller scale. Their atoms are tiny Parmenidean universes.

As we know, however, later developments in physics have not borne out their insight. Since Faraday’s time particle physics has steadily moved away from this static model. Forces and fields are now the main players in the game and mass is interchangeable with energy. Particles are defined in terms of their capacities for action, which naturally vary with the contexts in which they are placed. There is genuine interaction. But this scientific development was delayed for a long time by the imaginative grip of the static model - by the belief that impact was indeed the only possible source of movement, the only force that reason could recognise. In particular, the notion of gravitation was long thought to be irrational because it involved action at a distance, not caused by any collision.

Underlying these difficulties, there was a real and lasting reluctance to admit that change itself could be real. Werner Heisenberg, in his profound little book Physics and Philosophy, remarks on how far modern physics has now moved away from this Parmenidean obsession with the static. As he says,

Modern physics is in some ways extremely near to the doctrines of Heraclitus. If we replace the word ‘fire’ by the word ‘energy’ we can almost repeat his statements word for word from our modern point of view. Energy is in fact the substance from which all elementary particles, all atoms and therefore all things are made, and energy is that which moves. Energy is a substance, since its total amount does not change . . . Energy may be called the fundamental cause for all change in the world . . .

In the philosophy of Democritus the atoms are eternal and indestructible units of matter, they can never be transformed into each other. With regard to this question modern physics takes a definite stand against the materialism of Democritus and for Plato and the Pythagoreans. The elementary particles are certainly not eternal; they can actually be transformed into each other (Heisenberg, 1989, pp. 51, 59).

As Heisenberg explains, after these collisions the resulting fragments again become elementary particles on their own - protons, neutrons, electrons, mesons - making up their lost mass from their kinetic energy. So it is this energy itself which can be defined as ‘the primary substance of the world’ if anything can. As he puts it,

The modern interpretation of events has very little resemblance to genuine materialistic philosophy; in fact, one may say that atomic physics has turned science away from the materialistic trend it had during the nineteenth century (Heisenberg, 1989, p. 47).

Reality and Intelligibility

What materialism means here we will consider in a moment. The first thing to notice is that this shift calls for a deep change in our traditional notion of reality, a change which we have by no means fully made yet. We are free now from the metaphysics which seemed to go with the old physics, from the notion that only the unchanging is real. We don’t any longer need to posit a static terminus to explanation, treating all explanations as provisional until they reach that terminus.

Change, in fact, is not unreal, it is a fundamental aspect of reality. The reason why Parmenides thought that changeable, interacting things were unreal was that he thought they were unintelligible. But this idea flows from a special notion of what intelligibility is, of what it means to understand something. Certainly there are some forms of understanding which abstract from time and change, notably in mathematics. And this timelessness does give these explanations a specially satisfying kind of completeness. But for other problems, such as when we want to understand fire or explosions, time and change are part of the subject-matter. And there are other situations again, notably ones involving living organisms, where a whole range of different changes are going on at the same time. Yet we do gain some understanding of these matters. Thermodynamics and biology and climatology are not just a string of lies and delusions. Their explanations are in a way less complete, less final than those of mathematics, but this is because, being less abstract, they do so much more work. Their greater concreteness allows them to apply more directly to the actual world around us and that world is what we need to explain. That world is (we must insist) not an illusion. It is not a flimsy shell covering a true reality. It is the standard from which our notions of reality are drawn.

We need to disentangle the physics here from the metaphysics. The physical question what stuff things are made of is quite distinct from the much more mysterious question of what reality lies behind the whole world of everyday experience. Physics itself is of course part of that everyday world. The ontological question about a presumed reality behind appearance implies a sweeping distrust of all experience - including the observations reported in science. And that distrust needs some special kind of justification.

In the passages just cited, Heisenberg is not just doing physics. He is not just telling us that modern science finds Heraclitus’s conceptual scheme more convenient than that of Democritus. He is also pointing out how misleading Democritus’s scheme is metaphysically, how it can distort our notion of reality, leading to the notion that mind or consciousness itself is in some sense not real. The trouble is not just that Democritus’s proposal of fitting mind into the atomic scheme by supplying it with smooth round atoms turned out not to work because there were no such atoms. Even if there had been those atoms, they still would not have furnished a usable way of thinking about mind or consciousness. In order to do that we have to have a language for the subjective. We have to take seriously what happens at the first-person point of view. And there is no way of doing this inside the atomic scheme, which is irredeemably an external, third-person one.

This is why atomistic thinking led people to metaphysical materialism, to the idea that only matter is real. The Greek atomists were the first people who seriously made this striking claim, the first real materialists. Unlike their Ionian predecessors such as Thales, they did not simply take it for granted that life and spirit were included as properties of their primal substance. Instead they seriously tried to show how life and consciousness could emerge from a world consisting only of static, inert atoms.

I am suggesting that they failed resoundingly, and that this failure is enormously instructive and fertile once we understand it. We are, I think, only now beginning to get it in focus. As Heisenberg says, during the nineteenth century materialism became hugely popular and, in spite of the efforts of modern physicists, on the whole it still remains so. It became an ideology, a creed expressed in a whole stream of devout pronouncements such as that of Karl Vogt that ‘The brain secretes thought as the liver secretes bile’. But what do we mean by reality if we deny that our own experiences are a part of it? The point can’t just be that experience is misleading or unreliable; it has to be that it doesn’t happen at all. After all, a brain that has finished thinking doesn’t deposit any tangible, measurable residue of thought in the experimenter’s petri dish. Perhaps, then, conscious thought is just an illusion which can vanish from the equation entirely?

Metaphysical behaviourists such as Watson did sometimes try to take up this startling position but they never managed to make much sense of it. Modern exponents of materialism usually take the more modest line that experience does happen but doesn’t matter much, that it is somehow less real, more superficial than physical processes. This means that accounts of events involving consciousness are legitimate at their own level but they are not complete or fundamental. They are only provisional. In order to be made fully intelligible they must be reduced, by way of the biological and chemical accounts, down to the ground floor of physics which is the only fundamental level, the terminus that alone provides true understanding.

Explanations

In this form, the creed doesn’t necessarily mention the notion of reality, so it is less obviously metaphysical. Instead it appears in more modern guise as a view about explanation and what can make it complete. But the trouble here is that clearly no explanation ever is complete, and, in so far as we do demand completeness, contributions from physics don’t necessarily help it. When we ask someone to complete an explanation, what we normally want is something visibly relevant. For instance, if an explanation of a historical phenomenon such as anti-Semitism seems to have gaps in it we ask for material that will fill them. But that material will primarily be historical or psychological because that is the field we are dealing with. There is no obvious reason why physical details about neurones in the brains of anti-Semites could ever be relevant to the problem.

This makes a great difference to what we mean by calling an explanation fundamental. If we say that a certain explanation has indeed managed to be a fundamental one it won’t be because it involves physics. It will be because it answers the central historical and psychological questions that it set out to answer. Some physicalist philosophers believe that in the future, when we know enough about brains, we shall discover quite new kinds of explanation which will displace all these existing forms of thought on the matter and will show that they were just superficial ‘folk-psychology’. But this is simply a confusion about what different kinds of explanation do. Examining the neurological causes at work in anti-Semitic brains would do nothing at all to explain the ideas involved, any more than examining the brains of mathematicians can explain the mathematics that they are working on. Nobody has yet suggested studying mathematics in this way and it is no more plausible to propose relying on it for explaining the rest of conduct.

Why Materialism?

Metaphysical materialism got into European thought in the first place as a weapon used, first by the early atomists and then by political campaigners such as Hobbes, against the dominance of religion. In modern times the prime motivation behind it was horror and indignation at the religious wars and persecutions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its main target was the notion of the soul as a distinct entity capable of surviving death. As I mentioned earlier, this social and political motivation was very close to that of the ancient atomists, especially of Epicurus and Lucretius who were also moved by outrage at disastrous religious practices.

This motivation was a very suitable one for forging a doctrine which could be used as an effective weapon against these religious practices. But it was much less able to forge one that could serve as a balanced foundation for the whole of science, let alone for a general understanding of life. For that wider understanding, change and interaction needed to be seen as intelligible in their own terms and the first-person aspect of life had to be taken seriously as well as the objective one. Descartes notoriously saw this last problem and made a magnificent attempt to deal with it by making Mind or consciousness the startingpoint for his systematic doubt. He did succeed in getting subjectivity finally onto the philosophers’ agenda, but for a long time there continued to be radical puzzlement about what to do with it.

Descartes still described Mind ontologically, not as a first-person-aspect or point of view but as a substance, something parallel to physical matter but separate from it and not intelligibly connected with it. This dualism had the fatal effect of making Mind look to many scientists like an extra kind of stuff, not like one aspect (among many) of the real world but like a rival substance demanding to compete with Matter for the narrow throne of Reality. This vision inclined scientifically-minded people to sign up for an ideology called Materialism, meaning by that not just allegiance to Matter but in some sense disbelief in Mind. The idea of the two as rivals for the status of Reality persisted. Mind was seen as an awkward nonmaterial entity which ought perhaps to be removed with Occam’s Razor and one which was certainly too exotic meanwhile to deserve serious scientific attention. And alarm about it was particularly deep in the social sciences, which were becoming increasingly sensitive about their scientific status.

That is why, in English-speaking countries through much of the twentieth century, scientists, whether social or physical, avoided so far as possible any mention of subjectivity and particularly of consciousness. In psychology this avoidance was particularly strong and was expressed as behaviourism, a ruling that the proper study of man is simply overt human behaviour. After Watson, behaviourists did not usually treat this approach as a metaphysical one. They did not claim that mind was unreal. They said their choice was simply a methodological one based on convenience. Outside behaviour (they said) was easy to observe while inner motives were occult and unobservable. So it was obvious that psychologists should confine themselves to studying behaviour.

In truth, however, such a choice of method is never likely to be separate from metaphysics. Selection of subject-matter depends on what one thinks important, and judgments about importance are part of one’s general vision of the world. As I said in my first lecture, both the method and the metaphysics flow from background presuppositions of which we are often unconscious, presuppositions that are part of our picture of life as a whole. About behaviourism this dependence quickly became obvious because, before long, strict behaviourist methods were found not to be at all convenient for psychology and had to be abandoned. The attempt to study behaviour without considering the motives behind it proved hopelessly artificial because it is not really possible to observe and describe behaviour at all (apart from the very simplest actions) without referring to the motives that it expresses. And since we are social animals, we actually know a great deal about those motives.

It was not convenience, then, which had recommended this method in the first place. The attraction had been a quite different one - namely, that it looked scientific if one defined scientific method in devoutly materialist terms, in a manner derived from the old atomistic vision, as a method that dispensed with the concept of mind. During the last thirty years, however, notions of mind and consciousness have rather suddenly escaped from this taboo that so long suppressed them. It has been interesting to watch how they have now become matters of lively debate among a wide variety of academics. The Journal of Consciousness Studies, founded in 1994, thrives and prospers, supplying a place for many vigorous controversies. Much of what goes on there is metaphysics though it is often supposed only to be science. The main point of the enterprise must surely be to forge a new vision that can heal the Cartesian rift between mind and body, showing them, not as warring rivals but as complementary aspects of a larger whole. Physicists like Heisenberg saw the need for that long ago and we need now to get on with this difficult business.

Atomistic Influences

So far, I have been outlining certain rather general ways in which primitive forms of atomism survive and do unrecognised harm to present-day habits of thought. But the only example of this that I have yet given is the case of behaviourism in psychology. In order to show the force of the whole phenomenon I should, I think, probably add some others.

Behaviourism itself is quite a striking example because it has been such a powerful influence throughout the social sciences and, in spite of some changes within psychology, it still remains so today. Another striking example of quite a different kind does not concern materialism but simply the atomistic habit of breaking up wholes into ultimate units. It is the social atomism that lies at the heart of individualism - the idea that human beings are essentially separate items who only come together in groups for contingent reasons of convenience. This is the idea expressed by saying that the state is a logical construction out of its members, or that really there is no such thing as society. A social contract based on calculations of self-interest is then supposed to account for the strange fact that such things as societies do actually exist.

As I say, this social atomism does not involve materialism. But the curious pattern which it traces of unrelated human units milling around in a social vacuum does seem to me to echo very closely the equally strange pattern of unrelated Democritean atoms spinning in the void. The two patterns developed in European thinking at the same time during the seventeenth century and I suspect that they may well have reinforced each other. The physical theory conferred a reassuring scientific flavour on the social one, and the social one, when it began to operate in everyday life, made the physical theory look reassuringly familiar. The language of ‘one man one vote’ and ‘each to count for one and nobody for more than one’ sounded not only rational but scientific. At the present day I think that the idea of the Selfish Gene owes much of its appeal to recent revivals of this individualistic pattern. Actual genes are not really individualistic in this way; they are elements in a whole within which they need to co-operate quite closely.

I don’t want to say much here about the drawbacks of social contract thinking, and of excessive individualism generally, because I have written about them, and about the way in which they distort gene-talk, in a number of other places. So indeed have plenty of other people. I think that my best course for now is simply to quote what one of these people says about it. So here is a piece on the subject from Michael Frayn’s excellent little book Constructions:

In some moods, at any rate, it seems to us that Robinson Crusoe is the human archetype. Just as philosophers thought that the thick stew of human discourse, with all its lumpy inaccuracies and indigestible assumptions, could in theory be refined down to pure white crystals - atomic propositions embodying atomic fragments of experience - so we feel that human society, with all its compromises and relativities, is a construction from the series of atomic individuals, each of them sovereign and entire unto himself. We feel that we are Crusoes who have been set down in sight of one another, so that the difficulties of communication and co-operation have been added to those of our isolation. As if we are what we are and then we enter into relations with the people around us.

But man is the child of man. He comes from the belly of another human creature, seeded there by a third. He can become conscious of his thoughts and feelings only by articulating them in a language developed by communication with his fellows. Even in his inmost nature he is defined by interaction with other beings around him (Frayn, 1974, p. 67).

Memes

Well, that is one kind of social atomism. Do we want more kinds of it? If we do, these days we can have cultural atomism as well, the theory that culture too has an atomic structure, being composed of units known as memes.

This idea was originally proposed by Richard Dawkins in the last chapter of his book The Selfish Gene and it has since been taken up by a number of other sages, most recently by the sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson in his book Consilience. Wilson hopes that, by positing these units, he can provide a means of reconciling the humanities and social sciences with physical science by bringing them finally within its province. Memes (he says) will form ‘the conceptual keystone of the bridge between science and the humanities’.

But is culture the sort of thing that can be understood by dividing it up into ultimate units? It must be, says Wilson, because atomising is the way in which we naturally think. ‘The descent to minutissima, the search for ultimate smallness in entities such as electrons, is a driving impulse of Western natural science. It is a kind of instinct’ (p. 50) We need, he says,

to search for the basic unit of culture. . . Such a focus may seem at first contrived and artificial, but it has many worthy precedents. The great success of the natural sciences has been achieved substantially by the reduction of each physical phenomenon to its constituent elements followed by the use of the elements to reconstitute the holistic properties of the phenomenon (Wilson, 1998, p. 134).

In fact (says Wilson) it has worked in science so it is surely bound to work for the humanities.

The only way of testing this idea is to see how the pattern works out in practice. But the various meme-fanciers propose several quite different ways in which they might use it. Wilson himself seems at first to keep quite close to the pattern set by the discovery of ultimate physical particles. He wants minutissima - ultimate units of thought comparable to fundamental particles in physics, and he thinks these units can eventually be linked to particular brain-states so as to provide a kind of alphabet for a universal brain-language underlying all thought. This is a very ambitious project. At other times, however, Wilson forgets it and describes his particles just as readily as units of culture - obviously a quite different concept.

Most of the examples that other memologists give are closer to this cultural pattern. Dawkins himself calls his memes ‘units of cultural transmission’ giving as examples ‘tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes-fashions, ways of making pots or building arches’ to which he later adds popular songs, stiletto heels, the idea of God and Darwinism. These are remarkably miscellaneous and they are plainly not the kind of things which could possibly figure as Wilsonian ultimate atoms of thought.

Dawkins insists, however, that they are not just convenient, arbitrary divisions either. They are natural units not conventional ones, fixed, distinct and lasting. Daniel Dennett is still more emphatic on this point. He gives a long list which is even more mixed than Dawkins’s, a list which includes deconstructionism, the Odyssey and wearing clothes, and he insists that these are not just conventional divisions.

Intuitively we see these as more or less identifiable cultural units, but we can say something more precise about how we draw the boundaries. . . the units are the smallest elements that replicate themselves with reliability and fecundity. We can compare them, in this regard, to genes and their components (Dennett, 1995).

If that’s right, we might ask why it is that the Odyssey (for instance) contains within it several stories which are well-known in their own right - for instance the story of Polyphemus and that of Scylla and Charybdis? Wearing clothes seems to be a general term covering a vast range of customs. Deconstructionism is a loose name used to describe an indefinite jumble of minor theories and the idea of God is also a very wide and ambiguous one.

Moreover, as Dennett himself points out, none of these items is immutable, which genes (of course) are supposed to be. Customs and traditional items of the kind he lists change and develop constantly, unless we deliberately fix them, as we do the Odyssey, by devices such as printing them. This constant change and development means that cultural items behave in a way quite like that of whole organisms such as plants or animals but quite unlike the behaviour of genes. Sometimes, indeed, the memologists do seem to be comparing these cultural items to whole organisms - to phenotypes - and the memes to hidden entities, unseen ‘replicators’ which are the occult means by which those phenotypes leap from mind to mind. This is the model on which they offer to build a science of memetics, parallel to genetics, as the right means for understanding culture. Memetics is then supposed to instruct us about the devious strategies by which these imagined entities go about their business of reproduction, the ways in which they manage to infest us. But it can’t do so because there is simply no room for such entities. We already know how human beings communicate. Occult causes are not needed to explain this process . . . The pseudo-genes serve no function and they need to be cut off with Occam’s Razor.

In short, cultural items like these are not ultimate, immutable fundamental particles, atoms of culture, nor are they genes which might transmit it. They are patterns within culture. Understanding them is not a matter of splitting culture into its ultimate particles because culture is not a substance, a solid stuff of the kind which might be expected to consist of particles. Instead, culture is a complex of patterns, a set of ways in which people behave. And ways of behaving are not the kind of thing which breaks down into ultimate units at all.

When we want to understand some aspect of culture, such as deconstructionism or the idea of God, we do indeed often analyse it into distinct elements, sub-patterns that compose it. But just as certainly we also need to look for the wider context of ideas out of which these patterns arise, the background which is needed to make sense of them. Explaining such things is primarily placing them on a wider map of other ideas and habits, relating the patterns within them to the larger patterns outside. In ordinary life that is what we do when we want to understand these patterns. And people who want to understand them more precisely - people such as historians, anthropologists, philosophers, social psychologists, novelists, poets and literary critics - have developed, over time, many subtle and skilful methods of carrying this mapping process further.

That kind of cultural mapping is, in fact, the main business of the humanities. The proposal to use the meme pattern as a means of understanding culture cannot therefore be used as a way by which the sciences can liaise with this huge range of humanistic methods, as Wilson wants. Instead, it is simply a way of ignoring those methods and offering a meaningless pattern of atomic entities as a substitute. Memetics is phlogiston and, what’s more it’s unnecessary phlogiston. The idea of phlogiston did at least mark a blank on the map, an empty place which needed to be filled by a proper theory of combustion. But there is no such blank on the humanistic map waiting to be filled by a new, quite general, proposal for how to start understanding culture. Of course the methods that we now use are grossly imperfect, often terribly faulty. But this is because of particular faults which we must work to correct, not a case where we haven’t started to see how to proceed at all.

These, of course, are alarming words. Can it (you ask) really be true that these very intelligent, high-minded and highly-qualified people are trying to sell us phlogiston? Can it be true that they themselves have bought it? I’m afraid it is, and of course I have to explain why I think that such a surprising thing is possible.

The explanation lies in the point that I have been trying to make throughout these lectures - namely the tremendous influence of imaginative visions in general and the atomistic vision in particular, on our thought-patterns. This atomistic picture has always had enormous appeal because of its seductive finality. It seems to provide ultimate simplicity and completeness and even a kind of stability, since the atoms at least last for ever even if we don’t. When we are trying to understand the shifting chaos of human affairs, the idea of simplifying them in this way is hugely attractive, especially to people who have grown up thinking of the atomic pattern as the archetype of all scientific method. In the nineteenth century all scientists thought in this way. Since then the physicists - the original owners of the pattern - have seen reason to drop this seductive vision and to recognise that the world is actually more complex. Many biologists, however, still cling to the atomic model and hope to extend its empire so as to bring order into the muddled rain-forest of human society. But that hope really is mistaken. We need to recognise the atomic vision for what it is - just one possible interpretative pattern among many - and to look for our understandings of human culture elsewhere.

Conclusion

Throughout these lectures I have been emphasising the imaginative continuity between the physical sciences and the rest of our thought. I have been pointing out the imaginative visions which underlie those sciences in an attempt to break the habit of polarization that separates them radically from the humanities - a polarization which produces a hopeless ‘war of the two cultures’ that no-one can win. As I said at the outset, this feud saddles schoolchildren with a painful and quite unnecessary dilemma, forcing them to specialise on one side or the other of this divide - a choice which they must make much earlier and much more completely in English-speaking countries than they do in European ones.

I hope it is obvious that, in trying to close this culture-gap, I am emphasising the importance of science in our culture, not attacking it. The reason why I have drawn attention to the imaginative and metaphysical background of our scientific tradition is that this background deeply affects the rest of our thought, contributing strongly to the shape of our moral attitudes and our value-system. The reason why science cannot be viewed as an isolated, autonomous, omni-competent castle is that it is an organic part of our total world-view. And for that reason we all need to be conscious of it. The visions that underly science ought therefore, as I believe, to get far more attention than they presently do in the teaching of both literature and the physical sciences. I suspect, too, that both these subjects will become far more interesting to students if they are taught with a clear awareness of this background than they are when it is ignored.

Science Versus the Citizen I

The Threat of Scientism

Bryan Appleyard

My title for these two lectures - Science versus the Citizen - is a reversal of the title of a book published in 1938 by Lancelot Hogben. Hogben’s Science for the Citizen was sub-titled ‘a self-educator based on the background of scientific discovery’. It was a fat book clad in a strange, wallpaper-like cover that sat, throughout my childhood, on my father’s bookshelves.

Then I did no more than look at the pictures - they were thrilling illustrations of the state of science at the time. I did not read it, but the memory of the title stayed with me. Childishly I was puzzled by the word ‘citizen’ and wondered who this person was for whom science was being done.

Finally, I have now read it, having found an identical wallpaper-clad edition in the London Library. I admit I have still not read it all - I omitted the very lengthy descriptions of the state of science in the late thirties. But Hogben’s justifications for his title - even his use of that mysterious word ‘citizen’ - are intriguing. The book, he says, is written:

[F]or the large and growing number of adolescents, who realize that they will be the first victims of the new destructive powers of science misapplied (Hogben, 1938, p. 9).

This, remember, was 1938, when Stalin was already rampant, the war was a year away and Hiroshima only seven years in the future. It is also written, says Hogben, because:

[N]atural science is an essential part of the education of a citizen, because scientific discoveries affect the everyday lives of everyone. Hence science for the citizen must be science as a record of past, and as an inventory for future, human achievements. (Hogben, op. cit.)

The citizen was not someone to be patronised. Hogben launches a savage attack on the popular science writers of the day whose work he describes as ‘weak-kneed and clownish apologetics’ that show contempt for the common man. And he remembers a golden age of science writing:

The key to the eloquent literature which the pens of Faraday and Huxley produced is their firm faith in the educability of mankind (Hogben, op. cit.).

Science, for Hogben, was in danger of losing touch with reality. He was a utopian socialist who believed in the practical application of science. He wrote:

If the physicist capitulates to the frozen patents of monopolistic capitalism and seeks refuge from reality in speculations about the future of the universe five million million years hence, if the geneticist accepts the lop-sided mechanical technology of today and is content to culture his fruit flies in the laboratory, cut off from the urgent problems of crop and stock, if our biologists use their knowledge to concoct ingenious excuses to defend educational privileges and imperialistic exploitation of backward cultures, physics and biology will lose the driving force which science has always derived from living contact with the world’s productive work, and the satisfactions of man’s common needs (Hogben, 1938, p. 1081).

Science’s job was to assert the common cause:

The revolt against the beehive city of competitive industrialism has already become a retreat into barbarism; and the retreat will continue unless science can foster a lively recognition of the positive achievements of civilisation by reinstating faith in a form of constructive effort (Hogben, 1938, p. 1086).

The past, as is often said, is another country, they do things differently there. Hogben’s idealism sounds quaint to our ears. And so, for obvious reasons, it should. After Hiroshima, after Chernobyl, after the murderous quasi-science of communism and the industrialised slaughter of Nazism, after the bloodiest and most scientific century in human history, the dream of a scientific-technological utopia sounds like the delirium of a madman.

Yet, in fairness to Hogben, we could say he was right - bad science triumphed at the expense of good. Totalitarian and capitalist science prevailed. Good, humane, communal science never happened. Perhaps Hogben was right and we should try again.

But this, in truth, is like the argument of those old Marxists who insist that real communism has never been tried. Or like those crazed free marketeers who blame the gangster economy of postcommunist Russia on the failure to impose full-blooded capitalism. Maybe they have a point, but who would dare to let them have another go? Would we really want to give Marx another chance in the vague hope that, this time, millions might not die? Would we really wish to start work on any scientific utopia on the off chance that, this time, it might just work? The risk is too great and, anyway, the benign nature of the reward is far from obvious.

And yet science, if not in the idealised form proposed by Hogben, is still triumphant. First physics and now biology have made and are making promises of a new world so potent and so radical that they reduce the mouthings of politicians and non-scientific commentators such as myself to meaningless, marginalised babble. Physics, in the form of information technology, and biology, in the form of genetics, are telling us how our lives must be. Bill Gates called his book on the future of computing The Road Ahead as if there were no other. And even the supposedly neutral British Medical Association entitled its book on developments in biology Our Genetic Future - again as if there were no other.

So we may think that the scientific idealism of the thirties sounds quaint. But we do so while mutely accepting the scientific fatalism, the technological determinism, of our own time. We may no longer believe in science in quite the way that Hogben did, but we certainly don’t believe in the power of anything else to order our world, our lives and our experiences.

It is this ideology of scientific fatalism that is the target of these lectures and, for one reason or another, of most of what I seem to write these days. It is not sufficiently understood as an ideology and it is certainly not appreciated how pervasive it has become. In this first lecture, therefore, I will say something about the philosophical nature of this ideology and, in the second lecture, I shall say something about its effect on the world.

Science, it is said, is the only human activity in which progress is truly made. Philosophy is still struggling with problems posed by Plato and nobody can seriously argue that Damien Hirst is a greater artist than Titian. But our aeronautics is certainly better than Leonardo da Vinci’s and our physics seems to work better than Aristotle’s.

This is a common assertion. Indeed, it underpins much of the prevailing wisdom about liberal democracy. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History argument, for example, hinges on the cumulative and progressive nature of scientific knowledge. And it is probably fair to say that the contemporary idea of progress is entirely constructed on the perception of the scientific method as a series of ever more accurate descriptions of the physical world. The body of evidence for the truth of this idea seems obvious - we no longer die of smallpox and we can travel to New York in the time it would have taken Caesar’s or Napoleon’s armies to travel less than a hundred miles. If progress is health and speed, then we, undoubtedly, progress.

Here I do not wish to deny this idea - though there are, I think, ways in which it must be severely modified - but rather to question the way in which we have come to assume the validity of its application in all areas of human life. It is one thing to say science progresses, quite another to say that therefore human societies or lives progress or must progress. The first uses the word ‘progress’ in a technical sense; the second uses the word in moral, economic, social, political and philosophical senses. Clearly the extrapolation of the scientific idea of progress into the human realm is not a simple or innocent act. Rather it is an act that makes enormous and, you might think as I do, quite incredible claims.

And yet these claims are now commonplace. Let me suggest one rather cynical theory as to why this has happened. The recent success of scientific publishing for the layman has been based on a number of spectacular marketing triumphs. Most obviously there was Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time which was a bestseller for a decade. In addition, there have been hugely successful books from Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and many many others.

I think one can fairly easily imagine the marketing processes at work here. On the one hand there are scientists offering publishers these extraordinary stories, strange tales of the cosmos and the living realm. On the other hand there are the publishers wishing to make sense of these stories in terms the book buyer will understand or find appealing.

The result of this partnership is that the stories invariably have a moral. ‘Then we shall know the mind of God,’ says Hawking at the end of A Brief History. And Richard Dawkins never misses an opportunity to insist that evolution does away with the need for religion. These may appear to be saying different things, but, in fact, they are saying the same thing. They are saying science has the answers, all the answers. And note also that Dawkins called one of his books The Selfish Gene in spite of the fact that the word ‘selfish’ is, in his own terms, quite meaningless. A gene can be neither selfish nor altruistic, it just does what it does. The title is an act of anthropomorphism that subverts the hard science of the book itself.

But ‘Selfish’ in the title or ‘God’ in the conclusion are good marketing devices. Here are a couple of other examples - Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained and Steven Pinker’s How the Mind Works. The first did not explain consciousness and the second did not explain how the mind worked. Never mind, they are good selling titles. But they also extend the claims of science into the moral, religious, philosophical and psychological realms. This is exactly what the publishers wanted because it made the science seem more relevant, more urgent to the lay reader.

It also launched a kind of arms race in which ever larger claims must be made for your science if you are to compete in the book shops. So now we have Consilience by the Harvard biologist E.O.Wilson which promises the unification of all knowledge and Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Immortality which guarantees us an afterlife. There are dozens more. Dimly aware that I write about science - though not what I write about science - publishers now deluge me with ever fatter, ever grander sounding books that announce the impending, glorious resolution of all humanity’s problems on the basis of the latest science. I don’t read any of them unless I must and then I give them bad reviews. It is a point of principle.

This rather eccentric and probably now declining publishing phenomenon may not be the heart of the matter, but it is a clear example of the process I am trying to describe. It is a process whereby the doctrine of scientism - the belief in the ultimate competence of science in all areas - has made a dramatic come back, in this case largely because of the competitive demands of the marketplace.

Now, to go back to Lancelot Hogben, one of the striking aspects of Science for the Citizen is its insistence on the linkage between science and technology. Indeed, he thinks science becomes more futile the more ‘pure’ it gets. For Hogben the whole point of science is its application to human society and politics. The very title makes the point: science is for the citizen. And the implication of that is that science is the servant of society. There are two distinct realms - science and non-science and the former is subservient to the latter.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, for any of these contemporary science writers to say this in quite these terms. First, they would have the problem of the scientific catastrophes that have occured since 1938 - nuclear weapons, ecological destruction, Chernobyl, numerous misguided attempts to bring the ‘soft’ human sciences into the realm of ‘hard’ science and so on. Secondly, they don’t believe it anyway. The new scientism is far more radical than Hogben and it certainly doesn’t accept the idea that science is subservient to anything.

When, for example, I appeared on a television discussion with Lewis Wolpert about my book Understanding the Present, his opening gambit was to insist, with embarrassing passion, that I had no right or qualifications to criticise science. No layman, apparently, had. It was, in fact, a gambit that misfired because it alienated his supposed ally in that discussion, the geneticist Steve Jones. But all Wolpert was doing was making explicit an assumption that was implicit in the writings of himself and many others - we, the scientists, are not like teachers, doctors, lawyers or journalists. We, unlike them, cannot be criticised. We are different. So much for the idea of science for the citizen. Science is now for itself and any benefits are incidental.

While I am on the subject of Wolpert, I would like to turn to his book The Unnatural Nature of Science. This is not a very good book - you would expect me to say that - but it does illustrate the kind of contortions necessary to make some kind of sense of the new scientism. Wolpert writes:

I would almost contend that if something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science. The reason, again, is that the way in which the universe works is not the way in which common sense works: the two are not congruent (Wolpert, 1992, p. 11).

This is, I think, an essentially rhetorical point designed to overcome a certain kind of lay scepticism. When, for example, a physicist talks of time going backwards or the phenomenon of nonlocality or a biologist talks of the beginning of life in replicating molecules, he may dazzle the layman but he also might provoke the response: ‘So what?’ These things do not obviously impinge on our sense of our selves or the world, they amaze and then leave us unchanged. The clear danger here is that such scepticism would lead to science becoming marginalised, a form of arcane knowledge that had little to do with the real world and, therefore, was undeserving of public support and respect.

Wolpert, being somewhat power mad about the place of science in society, cannot tolerate this possibility. So his tactic is, first, to make it clear that science does offend against common sense. That’s just the way it is and, if you want the benefits of science, you had better accept it. Science is not made less credible by this fact. Secondly, he insists on the moral and political primacy of the scientific method. Because science works by free and open discussion, by a commitment to the truth as opposed to the partisan claims of any particular individual or group, it represents a model of human organisation.

Rather startlingly, he then enlists the American philosopher Richard Rorty in this argument. Rorty has, indeed, said something like this. But he has also said some things that Wolpert would find very unpalatable indeed.

In his essay Science as Solidarity Rorty writes:

Worries about ‘cognitive status’ and ‘objectivity’ are characteristic of a secularized culture in which the scientist replaces the priest. The scientist is now seen as the person who keeps humanity in touch with something beyond itself (Rorty, 1991, p. 35).

And he adds:

So truth is now thought of as the only point at which human beings are responsible to something nonhuman.

Rorty admires the institution of science, but not as the priesthood of truth in which Wolpert believes. Indeed, he sees the truth as a damaging metaphysical delusion. What counts is the movement towards something else - something, we hope, better - not the movement towards truth. Except in a superficial sense, Rorty is, in fact, utterly opposed to Wolpert. Nevertheless, Wolpert uses this idea to leap to his conclusion:

The main reason is that the better understanding we have of the world, the better the chance we have to make a just society (Wolpert, 1992, p. 164).

This is an entirely unsupported assertion and it is, in fact, meaningless. Why just? Healthier maybe. Richer maybe. Faster, smarter maybe. But more just? Why? Say, for example, we found, as some claim we already have, that blacks are genetically predisposed to be less intelligent and more prone to anti-social behaviour than whites. What conception of justice would that serve? In fact, only by accepting the non-scientific proposition that all men are created equal could we combat the injustice of the scientific proposition. Only, in short, by having a pre- or extra-scientific culture would we hope to deal with the power of science.

The absurdity of Wolpert’s position becomes clear when he then reverses Hogben’s argument. Where Hogben sees science and technology as inseparable, Wolpert insists they are two quite different things. Technology is, like politics, the way in which science is used by the non-scientific world. He writes: ‘It is with technology and politics that the real responsibility lies.’ (Hogben, 1938, p. 171).

Science pursues its pure truth and it is up to the rest of us not to make a mess of its findings. So science is the only way of making a just society; on the other hand the making of society is nothing to do with science. This is having your cake and eating it on a grand scale.

Wolpert is not an isolated absurdity. Something like this argument appears in the work of most of the new advocates of scientism. Biology in particular, because of its new status as the most exciting and relevant science, is prone to combining a statement of its own purity and its ability to explain and improve the human realm. Edward O.Wilson is the most eloquent defender of the possibility of a truly scientific understanding of the realms of psychology and sociology and of the idea of science as a new unifying myth which, he points out, has the advantage over previous myths of being true. And Richard Dawkins is repeatedly blurring the lines between scientific and cultural insight, most obviously in his idea of memes - cultural ideas that propagate by essentially Darwinian methods.

These scientists are, in fact, committing the precise sin that Rorty warned against - they are turning themselves into a priesthood of the truth. And they are doing so successfully because of science’s apparently limitless powers of mystification.

Let me give you an example. Recently Channel 4 ran a rather daft television series in which various supposedly authoritative types, led by the ex-Labour minister Roy Hattersley, were charged with listing the 300 most powerful people in the land. Science, it was agreed, must be represented in such a list. So the scientist Susan Greenfield presented a filmed argument for including the Oxford physicist Roger Penrose. The film said almost nothing about Penrose’s work on the possibility of machine replication of human consciouness except that it was somehow significant. It did not, most importantly, point out that Penrose is, as far as mainstream science in this area is concerned, a dissident. And it did not deal with the strange ambiguities in his ideas which are essential to understanding the significance of what he is saying. Yet, sagely, the committee nodded, agreed this was science and, therefore, tremendously important. There was no attempt to challenge Greenfield’s assertions nor even to ask what they meant.

It was a grotesque spectacle. Here were these grand, sober representatives of our culture who were incapable of engaging in any kind of debate about science, the most powerful force in that culture. More to the point, they did not even want to engage in debate. They even took a perverse pride in their inability to do so. Paralysed by some malign combination of class-consciousness, prissy amateurism, anti-intellectualism and downright stupidity, they wallowed in their ignorance.

Now I suspect that, if seriously challenged about their complacency, their defence would have gone something like this: we don’t pretend to understand these ideas because we can’t and, anyway, they are not really that important. They are unlikely to change our lives significantly, they are too abstract. It is the kind of thing most people say. It represents an implicit acceptance of Wolpert’s division between science and technology because it creates a realm of incomprehensible ‘pure’ science which will only be worth discussing once the technological applications appear. If, for example, Susan Greenfield had produced a film about a scientist who had found a way of making robots that would decide which babies should be aborted and which old people terminated - an entirely plausible scenario - then there would have been a lively discussion. But, of course, that discussion would, by then, be too late to make any difference. If science is to be subordinate to human culture - as I think it must be - then it must be prevented from escaping into these purist mystifications. Penrose’s ideas are no more difficult than those of Marx and considerably less difficult than the novels of James Joyce or the poetry of T.S.Eliot. Yet it is socially desirable to be ignorant of the former and socially disastrous to be ignorant of the latter. What a strange and dangerous state of affairs.

I need now to provide a cliffhanger to prepare you for the next lecture. Let me try this. There is, as I have tried to show, a new scientism abroad which is preying on a weak and deracinated culture. This scientism claims the capacity for complete knowledge of human affairs and yet refuses any responsibility. It provides a superficially convincing narrative for a civilisation that has lost the plot. So the cliffhanger is: how much worse can the twenty-first century be than the twentieth and who will be its Marx?

Science Versus the Citizen II

The New Marx

Bryan Appleyard

I would like to start with another quotation from the American philosopher Richard Rorty. I apologise for its length and slightly technical air. Its meaning is, in fact, quite simple. He writes:

The fact that human beings can be aware of their psychological states is not, on this view, any more mysterious than that they can be trained to report on the presence of adrenalin in their bloodstreams, or on their body temperature, or on a lack of blood flow in their extremities. Ability to report is not a matter of ‘presence to consciousness’ but simply of teaching the use of words. The use of sentences like ‘I believe that p’ is taught in the same way as that of sentences like ‘I have a fever’. So there is no special reason to cut off ‘meant’ states from ‘physical’ states as having a metaphysically intimate relation to an entity called ‘consciousness’. To take this view is, at one stroke, to eliminate most of the problematic of post-Kantian philosophy (Rorty, 1991, p. 121).

This is a commonly advanced idea of immense significance, as Rorty indicates by that last sentence. Rorty is addressing the belief that there is something odd about human consciousness. He is saying that this apparent oddity is really no more than a social construction. It is not mysterious, it is merely the way we use language. Once we understand this, he says, we free ourselves of many of the complications of contemporary philosophy. This is an idea that liberates us from metaphysics.

A broadly similar, though not identical, argument appears in the works of Daniel Dennett and others. Rorty wants to free us from a baffling technicality. But, in the hands of Dennett, the argument is a calculated act of demystification designed to show that there can be nothing beyond the reach of science. Those who disagree or find the idea inadequate are usually dismissed as ‘mysterions’, lovers of the comforting complexities of mystery rather than the hard simplicity of truth.

Rorty’s attempt to eliminate metaphysics and Dennett’s attempt to eliminate the possibility of a realm beyond the capacity of science may be the same thing, but the intentions are somewhat different. Rorty does not intend to establish a realist conception of truth, quite the opposite, he wishes to free us into a realm where truth is unnecessary. But Dennett wants realism. He wishes to say that the truth of the world is, in essence, physics and nothing else. Consciousness, therefore, cannot be a mystery, it must be part of the same legible narrative of cause and effect which is the subject matter of science.

Dennett must argue this in philosophical terms because, so far, it has not been proved scientifically. The problem with human consciousness is that it has so far evaded scientific analysis. The human sciences - sociology and psychology - have attained nothing like the exactitude of physics and suffer from persistent conceptual problems. Meanwhile, computer science has been promising us artificial intelligence for fifty years or more and has, so far, achieved almost nothing. Much was made of the fact that the IBM chess computer Big Blue finally beat Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest ever human chess player. But, in truth, that minimal achievement did more to draw attention to the broken promises of artificial intelligence than to its triumphs. Chess, in spite of the claims of its fans, is not remotely like life.

Clearly these failures represent a serious problem for the ideology of scientism. Science has so successfully dispersed so many mysteries that it is routinely assumed that dispersing any few that remained was just a matter of time. Indeed, it had to be just a matter of time if science is, as claimed, omnicompetent.

But the argument suffers from a conceptual problem of its own. For what would we mean when we say we have ‘explained’ human consciousness? We may account for its evolutionary function, we may even account for its biochemistry. But what would that mean? My answer is: nothing and that the arguments of both Rorty and Dennett are simplistic. I am, I suppose, a mysterion.

But, really, I am not being that mysterious. For the argument that human consciousness is different is not necessarily some hangover of vitalism or the residue of the Christian doctrine of the soul - though it can be both of these things - rather it is an entirely legitimate logical proposition. It is put most famously by Thomas Nagel in his book The View from Nowhere. At its simplest - I don’t think I am qualified to put it any other way - this states that the experience of being me is not definable, describable or explicable in physicalist terms. The question was originally put in the form: what is it like to be a bat? The answer is that it is clearly like something but that something is not something we can know. It is a different type of thing to the structure of the atomic nucleus or the sequence of DNA. Consciousness is of the world but it is not in the world in the same way that rocks, trees and quarks are. It is not a fact like any other.

Denying this argument is very important to scientistic thinkers like Dennett because consciousness is a very big thing. Indeed, it is, arguably, the only thing. If this escapes our science, then there is a big hole in the structure of scientism.

Their current favourite solution to the problem is to appeal to biology. Consciousness is merely an epiphenomenon of our evolutionary legacy. It provided Cro-Magnon man with an evolutionary advantage that helped him defeat the Neanderthals. But consciousness proved too much for that simple purpose. As well as helping us hunt and produce stable social groups, it enables us to compose symphonies, write novels and build civilisations. But, the evolutionists insist, we should not be fooled by the grandeur of the latter into disregarding the evidence of the former. The phenomenon is natural selection, the epiphenomena are symphonies and civilisations.

This, I have to say, is pretty rich. As far as I am concerned, my consciousness may be an epiphenomenon to you, but it is a phenomenon to me. The very thing that is said to be incidental is, by any rational standards, absolutely central and any attempt to claim otherwise is bound to be inherently implausible.

The key point here is that merely explaining consciousness in general in evolutionary terms - or, indeed, in mathematical or biochemical terms - is not the same as including consciousness in particular in a scientific description of the world. However complete your explanation, I, to myself, will remain unviolated. And I will be driven to agree with Wittgenstein when he says:

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched (Wittgenstein, 1951, p. 187).

In other words, science can describe everything except the one thing that really matters.

This is not a philosophical technicality. And it is not a matter of life and death. It is, as a Liverpool manager once said of football, much more important than that. For the opposing beliefs that science can account for everything and that it can account for nothing of ultimate human significance are the fundamental components of world views that have profound and far-reaching implications in every conceivable area of human life. Which we accept will determine who we are going to be.

At the moment, I have to say, the signs are not good. Some time ago the physicist Steven Weinberg wrote an article in the New York Times claiming that once physics had its Theory of Everything then people would stop reading their horoscopes. He was, basically, trying to get $8 billion out of the Clinton administration to build the Super-Conducting Super-Collider in Texas, a machine that, he believed,would give us our theory. In an NYT article in response I lampooned this idea - how could a set of equations change such a casual and consoling habit as horoscope reading?

Since then the Theory of Everything has receded far into the distant future. The current physical model is, apparently, seriously flawed. Clinton was wise not to build the collider. Physicists are disconsolate and, as I have said, biology has taken over as the big science of the day. I’m sorry but I take some satisfaction from this.

But, in one important sense, Weinberg has been proved right and me wrong. For biology, not physics, has indeed drawn us away from astrology. Where people used to explain some personal habit or failing by saying, ‘It’s in my stars’, now they say, ‘It’s in my genes’. An anatomical determinism has replaced an astronomical. And this, I think, reflects a wider and deeper, though largely unconscious acceptance of scientism throughout society. This has happened in parallel with the triumphs of biology. And it has happened because those triumphs are so much more persuasive and intimate than the equivalent triumphs of physics. The reason why a Theory of Everything wouldn’t alter people’s superstitions is that it is so absurdly remote in every sense. They wouldn’t understand the equations and, in any case, the causal chain that linked those equations to their experience would be so long as to be utterly ignorable. And - perhaps Weinberg hadn’t thought of this - since those causal chains were so long, nobody could be sure they did not, at some point, establish the truth of astrology.

But biology is different. The principle of evolution through natural selection is easily grasped. The idea of heredity is a commonplace of everybody’s experience. And the fact that we are influenced by chemical events within our body is ingrained within all of us - why else would we take aspirin for a headache? As a result, though physicists may thrill with their insights, biologists get personal. People accept their findings and conclusions simply because they are so intimate and easily graspable. And what they accept is scientism.

What is or will be the effect of this acceptance? Well, let me say what I take scientism to be as an attitude rather than a philosophy. It is, essentially, bone rattling. The scientist stands before us with his skeleton or his molecules and says triumphantly: ‘Look this is all you are, a bag of bones, a chance assembly of chemicals.’ He is like Hamlet peering obsessively at Yorick’s skull except that, unlike Hamlet, he sees no problem. Indeed, he is delighted with his deathly insight.

This bone rattling can be found in all the big popularisers of science. Daniel Dennett is particularly fond of producing big books designed to prove simply that there is nothing but a bag of bones. Richard Dawkins is a thrilling writer, but it’s still just bone rattling. And Peter Atkins positively wallows in the sheer boniness of it all.

The point here is not the insight, for that is familiar. Everybody, from time to time, is struck by the irony of the fact that all that we are seems dependent on a few bones and a tub of guts. What is important is, first, the idea that the bag of bones is all there is and, second, the pleasure these people take in announcing the fact.

The first idea is, as I have indicated, simply wrong. You do not have to be a vitalist to know that the realm of our minds is not explained away by these insights. However much we may discover about the physical nature of this realm, we will discover nothing about its ultimate nature which is the freedom and creativity of my experience of myself. The point is simply that we do not live among molecules, we live where we appear to live - in the real world of things and people as we perceive them. We live in a totality of which the story of physical causes and effects is one small part. This totality is scientifically untestable because, as Isaiah Berlin put it: ‘T]he total texture is what we begin and end with’ (Berlin, 1978, p. 114).

What we really are is really irreducible. And, as for the pleasure the bone rattlers take in rattling, well, that is a kind of morbid delight in destroying what they believe to be our illusions. It indicates that they believe there is a moral force in the insistence on the blank amorality of our being. They think it proves something more than a mere causal system. It proves that there really is nothing more than bones and guts.

If this is generally accepted - and, as I have said, it already has been to a large extent - then it will tend to encourage certain obvious attitudes. Most obviously it will encourage nihilism. All culture, value and civilisation will be seen to be based on the meaningless void of physical causation. We will be seen simply as part of a process. Nothing will be of value in itself, only as a passing incident in that process. There will be nothing worth retaining or conserving, there will only be the road ahead, leading nowhere.

People have said such things about science before. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is one obvious example - it portrays a world in which the technological control of reproduction has rendered all previous values redundant. When, in that book, The Savage confronts Mustapha Mond with his need for the old feelings and values, Mond simply asks: why, they cause only suffering? And, of course, he has a point. It is difficult to defend suffering as such.

But such anxious visions have always previously been based on what might happen. I think now we have to face the fact that it is happening. In the case of the advance of reproductive technology, we are now entering the brave new world. The old feelings and values associated with sex and reproduction are fast fading. Why should we bother with them when the new ways are so much more convenient? What precisely is the value of the suffering associated with reproduction?

Some see a brave new scientific world as merely improbable. We needn’t be pessimistic - there is no reason why science and culture should not co-exist. This, I think, is the view of Stephen Jay Gould, perhaps the best of contemporary science writers. In his superb essays he evokes a warm, humane culture of science and values living in harmony. And he goes out of his way to refute those hard, bone rattling Darwinists who insist that they have the solution to everything. For Gould there is no such solution and, anyway, it is not desirable. He wants science to be the same as poetry or art, a form of continuous and complex human expression, rather than a race to a final theory.

But his vision is utopian. He assumes that people will not be persuaded by the hard scientific radicals. But they are being persuaded. How can they not be when nobody else is trying to persuade them of anything? All that is set against science are various forms of utilitarianism. We may recoil from some process in, say genetics, but the only way we can justify our revulsion is by setting up an ethics committee that invariably ends up applying a simple utilitarian calculus. There seems to be no other way in a radically plural society such as ours. Pluralism, libertarianism and the elevation of the economic principle of the free market to the level of a universal moral panacea all create a vacuum of values in which the certainty of science seems to be the only certainty. We are, in this sense, already a fully scientific culture, the world is already brave and new.

And let me be clear about my belief that a scientific culture is really no culture at all. As Roger Scruton has put it:

[T]here can no more be a scientific culture than there can be a scientific religion; culture, like religion, addresses the question which science leaves unanswered: the question what to feel (Scruton, 1998, p. 16).

A culture consists not of a network of causalities but of understanding. We know who we are by imaginative acts of sympathy with others, not through experiment and observation.

The truth of science is a simple statement about the natural world; the truth of ourselves is an irreducible awareness. It is this kind of truth which G.K.Chesterton evoked when he said: ‘You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.’ In other words: we must be who we are prior to and beyond the reach of any logical, causal explanation.

It seems to me obvious, therefore, that in ceding control - or even according too much respect - to the bone rattlers, we are courting the destruction of our humanity. And, in the wake of that destruction, there will be no safeguard against new moral catastrophes to match the old ones of Nazism and communism. So to resolve the first part of the cliffhanger at the end of my first lecture: how much worse can the twenty first century be than the twentieth? Well, it can at least be just as bad.

And, to resolve the second part: who will be the next century’s Marx? Simple: Charles Darwin. For it is his thought that is now proving most effective at creating both a popular and metropolitan, bien-pensant form of scientism. It is now routine to hear the best and the brightest - Ian McEwan is one of the latest converts - speak of the possibility of a totality of explanation arising from evolutionary theory. Over the past decade Darwin has been raised to the level of cultural icon. He became the most influential figure of the nineties and continued as such into the new century. His is the face of scientism. I hope it does not become the face of tyranny in the twenty-first century.

At this point I am usually asked: what, then, is to be done? You have shown us the problem, what is the solution? In general this means what should we do about some specific issue - should, for example, human cloning be banned? And, in general, this is the sort of debate in which I find myself engaged. People, these days, want soundbites.

However, I’m not sure questions like that are the point. Inevitably we end up trying to balance the demands of irreconcilably absolute positions and, therefore, we are driven back to some form of utilitarian calculus. But my concern - and, I think, my task - is not to indulge in such banalities, but to defend certain forms of language that would raise all such arguments above the quotidian effort of making ever more feeble compromises with pluralism. And, since these lectures are supposed to be about science and education, let me put my case in those terms.

The problem of a technophiliac society is that it is all means and no ends. We know how to do many things but we do not know why we should do them. The process becomes everything. But this is only a movement towards the next movement. Insofar as there is an end, it is an end defined by its role as an aspect of the process. Where does The Road Ahead of Bill Gates lead? To the Information Superhighway. And where does that lead? And so on. There is no resting place, a point at which we can say we have arrived.

The only ethic of such a system is change. The power of this ethic is already clear. Some while ago I saw Jamie Lee Curtis being interviewed on leaving her seat in the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament. Asked about the impending dissolution of the house, she said: ‘I believe in change.’ Politicians - particularly in our present government - routinely say the same kind of thing. Change is seen as an absolute good. Obviously such an idea is mad. How can change of itself be good? Bad change is just as likely as good change.

But the reason people spout such nonsense is clear - the whole culture has now accepted the Gatesian idea of the highway into the future, the continuous construction of which is the only human project on which we can all agree. This is a quite fantastic piece of reductionism that is, I believe, exactly co-extensive with the reductionist ambitions of scientism. It is the most glaring piece of evidence that we have, indeed, entered the brave new world in which the past has become simply a realm of irrational and unnecessary suffering.

This is a terrifying ideology in which people’s lives are constantly devalued simply by the passage of time. If change is so good, then what we are at any given moment is doomed to imminent annihilation by what we are told to be at the next moment. And it is, of course, the ideology of consumption because it makes us as temporary and unreal as the objects we are these days required to consume. People believe in change because they have been told by Microsoft how necessary it is to change their computer or their operating system at regular intervals. If we are computers, as the advocates of artificial intelligence say we are, then, like computers, we are disposable.

The way to combat this in educational terms is to teach the possibility of inherent value rather than the value of mere process. Things must be shown to be worth having in themselves rather than as contributors to a perpetual movement forward. This may be difficult because it amounts to a moral affront to the ideal of constant becoming that is so characteristic of our age. It challenges the basis of every powerful force in the world today from multinationals to Peter Mandelson. It does so because it says that we are not simply slaves of the future and our pasts are not be as lightly discarded as last year’s version of Windows.

It is also difficult because it involves taking a metaphysical step in a world that is resolutely anti-metaphysical. But, if that step is not taken, then I see no hope whatsoever. The ethic of change - which is, as I say, the ethic of scientism - is the ethic of oblivion. It is a suicidal superstition. Science is now indeed versus the citizen. I suggest it is time for a very quiet, very gentle and very patient citizens’ revolt.