For most of the century, science set the agenda for other academic disciplines, for politics, and even for religions. Whereas previously scientists had responded to the demands of patrons or populace, developments in science now drove change in every field, without deferring to any other agenda. Scientists’ disclosures about life and the cosmos commanded admiration and radiated prestige. As we saw in the last chapter, however, counter-currents kept scepticism and suspicion flowing: a new scientific and philosophical climate eroded confidence in traditional ideas about language, reality, and the links between them. Nonetheless, ever larger and costlier scientific establishments in universities and research institutes guided their paymasters – governments and big business – or gained enough wealth and independence to set their own objectives and pursue their own programmes.
The consequences were equivocal. New technologies raised as many problems as they solved: moral questions, as science expanded human power over life and death; practical questions, as technologies multiplied. Science seemed to replace genies with genes. Primatology and genetics blurred the boundaries between humans and other animals; robotics and AI research battered the barriers between humans and machines. Moral choices dwindled to evolutionary accidents or surrendered to genetically determined outcomes. Science turned human beings into subjects of experimentation. Ruthless regimes abused biology to justify racism and psychiatry to imprison dissidents. Scientism denied all non-scientific values and became, in its own way, as dogmatic as any religion. As the power of science grew, people came to fear it. ‘Science anxiety’ almost qualified as a recognized syndrome of neurotic sickness.26
Increasingly, under the impact of these events, science proved strangely self-undermining. Ordinary people and non-scientific intellectuals lost confidence in scientists, downgrading expectations that they could solve the problems of the world and reveal the secrets of the cosmos. Practical failures further eroded awe. Though science achieved wonders for the world, especially in medicine and communications, consumers never seemed satisfied. Every advance unleashed side effects. Machines aggravated wars, depleted environments, and darkened life under the shadow of the bomb. They penetrated the heavens and contaminated the Earth. Science seemed superb at engineering destruction, and inconsistent in enhancing life and increasing happiness. It did nothing to make people good. Rather, it expanded their ability to behave worse than ever before. Instead of a universal benefit to humanity, it was a symptom or cause of disproportionate Western power. The search for underlying or overarching order seemed only to disclose a chaotic cosmos, in which effects were hard to predict and interventions regularly went wrong. Even medical improvements brought equivocal effects. Treatments intended to prolong the survival of patients boosted the strength of pathogens. Health became a purchasable commodity, exacerbating inequalities. Costs sometimes exceeded benefits. Medical provision buckled, in prosperous countries, under the weight of public expectations and the burden of public demand. ‘Life is scientific’, says Piggy, the doomed hero of William Golding’s novel of 1959, Lord of the Flies. The rest of the characters prove him wrong by killing him and reverting to instinct and savagery.
Toward the end of the twentieth century, divisions – sometimes called culture wars – opened between apologists of science and advocates of alternatives. Quantum science encouraged a revival of mysticism – a ‘re-enchantment’ of science, according to a phrase the American theologian David Griffin coined.27 An antiscientific reaction arose, generating conflict between those who stuck to Piggy’s opinion and those who returned to God, or turned to gurus and demagogues. Especially in the West, scepticism or indifference trumped the appeal of all self-appointed saviours.
Environmentalism, Chaos, and Eastern Wisdom
Environmentalism, despite its reliance on scientific ecology, was part of this reaction against scientistic complacency. Malign effects of science, in the form of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, poisoned people and polluted land. As a result, environmentalism turned into a mass movement with relative suddenness in the 1960s. As an idea, however, it had a long pedigree. All societies practise what we might call practical environmentalism: they exploit their environments and fix rational norms to conserve such resources as they know they need. Even idealistic environmentalism, which embraces the idea that nature is worth conserving for its own sake apart from its human uses, has been around for a long time. It forms part of ancient religious traditions in which nature is sacralized: Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, for example, and classical Western paganism. Sacred ecology – to coin a term – in which humans accepted an unlordly place in nature and deferred to and even worshipped other animals, trees, and rocks – was part of some of the earliest thinking we can detect in humans and hominids (see here). In modern times environmental priorities resurfaced in the sensibilities of late-eighteenth-century romantics, who revered nature as a book of secular morality (see here). It developed in the same period among European imperialists awestruck at the custodianship of far-flung Edens.28
The mood survived in the nineteenth century, especially among lovers of hunting who wanted to preserve grounds for killing and species to kill, and among escapees from the noxious towns, mines, and factories of early industrialization. Love of ‘wilderness’ inspired John Wesley Powell to explore the Grand Canyon and Theodore Roosevelt to call for national parks. But global industrialization was too greedy for food and fuel to be conservationist. Madcap consumerism, however, was bound to provoke reaction, if only in anxiety at the prospect of exhausting the Earth. The twentieth century experienced ‘something new under the sun’ – environmental destruction so unremitting and extensive that the biosphere seemed unable to survive it.29 An early monitor or prophet of the menace was the great Jesuit polymath, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, little known and hardly echoed. By then scientific publications were beginning to reveal causes for concern, but environmentalism had a bad reputation as a quirk of dewy-eyed romantics, or – what was worse – a mania of some prominent Nazis, who nourished bizarre doctrines about the relationship of mutual purity of ‘blood and soil’.30 To animate politics, raise money, launch a movement, and wield some power, environmentalism needed a whistle-blower with gifts as a publicist. In 1962, she emerged: Rachel Carson.
Industrialization and intensive agriculture were still spreading across the world: enemies of nature too familiar, to most people, to seem threatening. Two new circumstances combined to exacerbate menace and change minds. First, decolonization in underexploited parts of the world empowered elites who were anxious to imitate the industrialized West, and to catch up with the big, bloated economic giants. Second, world population was hurtling upward. To meet increased demands new farming methods saturated the fields with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Silent Spring (1962) was Carson’s denunciation of pesticide profligacy. She directly addressed America, but her influence reached around the world, as she imagined a spring ‘unheralded by the return of the birds’, with ‘strangely silent’ dawns.
Environmentalism fed on pollution and throve in the climate debate. It became the orthodoxy of scientists and the rhetoric of politicians. Mystics and cranky prophets espoused it. Ordinary people recoiled from exaggerated, doom-fraught predictions. Interests vested in environmental damage, in fossil fuels, agrochemicals, and factory farms, sprayed scorn. Despite efforts by activists and academics to interest the global public in deep – that is, disinterested – ecology, most environmentalism remains of a traditional kind, more anxious to serve man than nature. Conservation is popular, it seems, only when our own species needs it. Yet some harmful practices have been curtailed or arrested, such as dam building, ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions, unsustainable forestry, unregulated urbanization, and inadequate testing of chemical pollutants. The biosphere seems more resilient, resources more abundant, and technology more responsive to need than in the gloomiest scenarios. Dire oracles may come true – catastrophic warming, a new ice age, a new age of pla
gue, the exhaustion of some traditional sources of energy – but probably not as a result of human agency alone.31
The erosion of popular confidence in any prospect of scientific certainty climaxed in the 1960s, partly thanks to Carson and partly in response to the work of the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn. In 1960, in one of the most influential works ever written about the history of science, he argued that scientific revolutions were not the result of new data, but were identifiable with what he called paradigm shifts: changing ways of looking at the world and new imagery or language in which to describe it. Kuhn gave the world a further injection of a sceptical serum similar to Poincaré’s. Like his predecessor, he always repudiated the inference that most people drew: that the findings of science depended not on the objective facts but on the perspective of the enquirer. But in the world of shifting paradigms, further uncertainty softened the formerly hard facts of science.32
Chaos theory unleashed more complications. Scientists’ oldest aim has been to learn ‘nature’s laws’ (see here and here) so as to predict (and maybe therefore to manage) the way the world works. In the 1980s, chaos theory inspired them with awe and, in some cases, despair by making unpredictability scientific; the predictability quest suddenly seemed misconceived. Chaos stirred first in meteorology. The weather has always eluded prediction and subjected practitioners to anguish and frustration. The data are never decisive. A fact they disclose, however, is that small causes can have huge consequences. In an image that captured the imagination of the world, the flap of a butterfly’s wings could set off a series of events leading ultimately to a typhoon or tidal wave: chaos theory uncovered a level of analysis at which causes seem untraceable and effects untrackable. The model seemed universally applicable: added to a critical mass, a straw can break a camel’s back or a dust particle start an avalanche. Sudden, effectively inexplicable fluctuations can disrupt markets, wreck ecosystems, upturn political stability, shatter civilizations, invalidate the search for order in the universe, and invade the sanctuaries of traditional science since Newton’s day: the oscillations of a pendulum and the operations of gravity. To late-twentieth-century victims, chaotic distortions seemed to be functions of complexity: the more a system depends on multifarious and interconnected parts, the more likely it is to collapse as a result of some small, deeply imbedded, perhaps invisible changes. The idea resonated. Chaos became one of the few topics in science most people heard of and might even claim to understand.
In science the effect was paradoxical. Chaos inspired a search for a deeper or higher level of coherence at which chaos would resemble one of the short stories of José Luis Sampedro, in which a galactic traveller, visiting Madrid, mistakes a football match for a rite in imitation of the cosmos, in which the interventions of the referee represent random disturbances in the order of the system. If the observer had stayed for long enough, or read the rules of football, he would have realized that the ref is an important part of the system. Similarly, rightly understood chaos might be a law of nature, predictable in its turn. On the other hand, the discovery of chaos has raised the presumption that nature really is ultimately uncontrollable.
Other recent discoveries and speculations incite the same suspicion. As the Nobel Prize winner Philip Anderson has pointed out, there seems to be no universally applicable order of nature: ‘When you have a good general principle at one level’, you must not expect ‘that it’s going to work at all levels … Science seems self-undermined and the faster its progress, the more questions emerge about its own competence. And the less faith most people have in it.’33 To understand the pace of evolution, for instance, we have to acknowledge that not all events have causes; they can and do occur at random. What is random, strictly speaking, precludes explanation. Random mutations just happen: that is what makes them random. Without such mutations, evolution could not occur. Other observations abound that are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge. Quantum physics can only be described with formulations that are strictly self-contradictory. Subatomic particles defy what were formerly thought to be laws of motion. What mathematicians now call fractals distort what were once thought to be patterns – such as the structures of snowflakes or spiders’ webs or, indeed, of butterflies’ wings: engravings of M. C. Escher seemed to predict this impressive fact.
In the decades that followed the Second World War, while scientism unravelled, the West rediscovered other options: ‘Eastern wisdom’, alternative medicine, and the traditional science of non-Western peoples. Traditions that Western influence had displaced or eclipsed revived, weakening Western preponderance in science. One of the first signs occurred in 1947, when Niels Bohr chose a Taoist symbol for the coat of arms he acquired when the King of Denmark knighted him. He adopted the wave-shaped division of light and darkness by double curve, interpenetrated by dots, because, as a description of the universe, it seemed to prefigure the quantum physics of which he was the leading practitioner. ‘Opposites’, according to the motto on his coat of arms, ‘are complementary.’ At about the same time, in a West disillusioned by the horrors of war, Oppenheimer, whose case we encountered above (see here), was only one of many Western scientists who turned eastward, to ancient Indian texts in Oppenheimer’s case, for consolation and insights.
Then, in another case of a book momentous enough to change minds, came a real shift in Western perceptions of the rest of the world – especially of China. The author was a biochemist with a strong Christian faith and a troubled social conscience: Joseph Needham, who had served as director of scientific co-operation between the British and their Chinese allies during the Second World War. In 1956 he began to publish, in the first of many volumes, Science and Civilisation in China, in which he showed not only that, despite the poor reputation of Chinese science in modern times, China had a scientific tradition of its own, but also that Westerners had learned from China the basis of most of their achievements in technology until the seventeenth century. Most, indeed, of what we Westerners think of as Western gifts to the world reached us from China or depended on originally Chinese innovations or transmissions. Contemplate some key instances: modern communications relied on Chinese inventions – paper and printing – until the advent of electronic messaging. Western firepower, which forced the rest of the world into temporary submission in the nineteenth century, relied on gunpowder, which Chinese technicians may not have invented but certainly developed long before it appeared in the West. Modern infrastructure depended on Chinese bridging and engineering techniques. Western maritime supremacy would have been unthinkable without the compass, rudder, and separable bulkhead, all of which were part of Chinese nautical tradition long before Westerners acquired them. The Industrial Revolution could not have happened had Western industrialists not appropriated Chinese blast-furnace technology. Capitalism would be inconceivable without paper money, which astonished Western travellers to medieval China. Even empiricism, the theoretical basis of Western science, has a longer and more continuous history in China than in the West. Indian scientists, meanwhile, made similar claims for the antiquity – if not the global influence – of scientific thinking in their own country.
In the first half of the twentieth century, the rest of the world could only endure Western supremacy or attempt to imitate it. In the 1960s, the pattern shifted. India became a favoured destination for young Western tourists and pilgrims in search of values different from those of their own cultures. The Beatles sat at the feet of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and tried to add the sitar to their range of musical instruments. So assiduous were the bourgeois youth of Western Europe in travelling to India at the time that I felt as though I were the only member of my generation to stay at home. Taoist descriptions of nature provided some Westerners, including, in one of the more fanciful representations, Winnie the Pooh,34 with ‘alternative’ – that was the buzzword of the time – models for interpreting the universe.
Even medicine was affected, the showpiece science of Western supremacy in the ear
ly twentieth century. Doctors who travelled with Western armies and ‘civilizing missions’ learned from ‘native’ healers. Ethnobotany became fashionable, as the pharmacopoeia of Amazonian forest dwellers, Chinese peasants, and Himalayan shamans surprised Westerners by working. A remarkable reversal of the direction of influence accompanied the vogue for ‘alternative’ lifestyle in the late twentieth century. Alternative medical treatments turned Western patients toward Indian herbalism and Chinese acupuncture, just as at the beginning of the century, under the influence of an earlier fashion, Asian students had headed west for their medical education. Now, Chinese and Indian physicians were almost as likely to travel to Europe or America to practise their arts as to learn those of their hosts. In the 1980s, the World Health Organization discovered the value of traditional healers in delivering healthcare to disadvantaged people in Africa. Governments eager to disavow colonialism concurred. In 1985 Nigeria introduced alternative programmes in hospitals and healthcare centres. South Africa and other African countries followed.
Political and Economic Thought after Ideology
Science was not the only source of failure or focus of disenchantment. Politics and economics failed, too, as surviving ideologies crumbled and confident nostrums proved disastrous. Ideologies of the extreme right, after the wars they provoked, could only attract crackpots and psychotics. But some thinkers were slow to abandon hope on the extreme left. The British master spy Anthony Blunt continued to serve Stalin from deep inside the British establishment until the 1970s: he was keeper of the Queen’s art collection. The iconic historian Eric Hobsbawm, who survived into the twenty-first century, would never admit he had been wrong to put his faith in Soviet benevolence.
Out of Our Minds Page 47
