by Lewis Thomas
Teach at the outset, before any of the fundamentals, the still imponderable puzzles of cosmology. Let it be known, as clearly as possible, by the youngest minds, that there are some things going on in the universe that lie beyond comprehension, and make it plain how little is known.
Do not teach that biology is a useful and perhaps profitable science; that can come later. Teach instead that there are structures squirming inside all our cells, providing all the energy for living, that are essentially foreign creatures, brought in for symbiotic living a billion or so years ago, the lineal descendants of bacteria. Teach that we do not have the ghost of an idea how they got there, where they came from, or how they evolved to their present structure and function. The details of oxidative phosphorylation and photosynthesis can come later.
Teach ecology early on. Let it be understood that the earth’s life is a system of interliving, interdependent creatures, and that we do not understand at all how it works. The earth’s environment, from the range of atmospheric gases to the chemical constituents of the sea, has been held in an almost unbelievably improbable state of regulated balance since life began, and the regulation of stability and balance is accomplished solely by the life itself, like the internal environment of an immense organism, and we do not know how that one works, even less what it means. Teach that.
Go easy, I suggest, on the promises sometimes freely offered by science. Technology relies and depends on science these days, more than ever before, but technology is nothing like the first justification for doing research, nor is it necessarily an essential product to be expected from science. Public decisions about what to have in the way of technology are totally different problems from decisions about science, and the two enterprises should not be tangled together. The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature. Science may provide us, one day, with a better understanding of ourselves, but never, I hope, with a set of technologies for doing something or other to improve ourselves. I am made nervous by assertions that human consciousness will someday be unraveled by research, laid out for close scrutiny like the workings of a computer, and then, and then! I hope with some fervor that we can learn a lot more than we now know about the human mind, and I see no reason why this strange puzzle should remain forever and entirely beyond us. But I would be deeply disturbed by any prospect that we might use the new knowledge in order to begin doing something about it, to improve it, say. This is a different matter from searching for information to use against schizophrenia or dementia, where we are badly in need of technologies, indeed likely one day to be sunk without them. But the ordinary, everyday, more or less normal human mind is too marvelous an instrument ever to be tampered with by anyone, science or no science.
The education of humanists cannot be regarded as complete, or even adequate, without exposure in some depth to where things stand in the various branches of science, and particularly, as I have said, in the areas of our ignorance. This does not mean that I know how to go about doing it, nor am I unaware of the difficulties involved. Physics professors, most of them, look with revulsion on assignments to teach their subject to poets. Biologists, caught up by the enchantment of their new power, armed with flawless instruments to tell the nucleotide sequences of the entire human genome, nearly matching the physicists in the precision of their measurements of living processes, will resist the prospect of broad survey courses; each biology professor will demand that any student in his path must master every fine detail within that professor’s research program. The liberal-arts faculties, for their part, will continue to view the scientists with suspicion and apprehension. “What do the scientists want?” asked a Cambridge professor in Francis Cornford’s wonderful Microcosmographia Academica. “Everything that’s going,” was the quick answer. That was back in 1912, and universities haven’t much changed.
The worst thing that has happened to science education is that the great fun has gone out of it. A very large number of good students look at it as slogging work to be got through on the way to medical school. Others look closely at the premedical students themselves, embattled and bleeding for grades and class standing, and are turned off. Very few see science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever undertaken by human beings, the chance to catch close views of things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works. Instead, they become baffled early on, and they are misled into thinking that bafflement is simply the result of not having learned all the facts. They are not told, as they should be told, that everyone else—from the professor in his endowed chair down to the platoons of postdoctoral students in the laboratory all night—is baffled as well. Every important scientific advance that has come in looking like an answer has turned, sooner or later—usually sooner—into a question. And the game is just beginning.
An appreciation of what is happening in science today, and of how great a distance lies ahead for exploring, ought to be one of the rewards of a liberal-arts education. It ought to be a good in itself, not something to be acquired on the way to a professional career but part of the cast of thought needed for getting into the kind of century that is now just down the road. Part of the intellectual equipment of an educated person, however his or her time is to be spent, ought to be a feel for the queernesses of nature, the inexplicable things.
And maybe, just maybe, a new set of courses dealing systematically with ignorance in science might take hold. The scientists might discover in it a new and subversive technique for catching the attention of students driven by curiosity, delighted and surprised to learn that science is exactly as Bush described it: an “endless frontier.” The humanists, for their part, might take considerable satisfaction watching their scientific colleagues confess openly to not knowing everything about everything. And the poets, on whose shoulders the future rests, might, late nights, thinking things over, begin to see some meanings that elude the rest of us. It is worth a try.
ON MATTERS OF DOUBT
The “two-cultures” controversy of several decades back has quieted down some, but it is still with us, still unsettled because of the polarized views set out by C. P. Snow at one polemical extreme and by F. R. Leavis at the other; these remain as the two sides of the argument. At one edge, the humanists are set up as knowing, and wanting to know, very little about science and even less about the human meaning of contemporary science; they are, so it goes, antiscientific in their prejudice. On the other side, the scientists are served up as a bright but illiterate lot, well-read in nothing except science, even, as Leavis said of Snow, incapable of writing good novels. The humanities are presented in the dispute as though made up of imagined unverifiable notions about human behavior, unsubstantiated stories cooked up by poets and novelists, while the sciences deal parsimoniously with lean facts, hard data, incontrovertible theories, truths established beyond doubt, the unambiguous facts of life.
The argument is shot through with bogus assertions and false images, and I have no intention of becoming entrapped in it here, on one side or the other. Instead, I intend to take a stand in the middle of what seems to me a muddle, hoping to confuse the argument by showing that there isn’t really any argument in the first place. To do this, I must try to show that there is in fact a solid middle ground to stand on, a shared common earth beneath the feet of all the humanists and all the scientists, a single underlying view of the world that drives all scholars, whatever their discipline—whether history or structuralist criticism or linguistics or quantum chromodynamics or astrophysics or molecular genetics.
There is, I think, such a shared view of the world. It is called bewilderment. Everyone knows this, but it is not much talked about; bewilderment is kept hidden in the darkest closets of all our institutions of higher learning, repressed whenever it seems to be emerging into public view, sometimes glimpsed staring
from attic windows like a mad cousin of learning. It is the family secret of twentieth-century science, and of twentieth-century arts and letters as well. Human knowledge doesn’t stay put. What we have been learning in our time is that we really do not understand this place or how it works, and we comprehend our own selves least of all. And the more we learn, the more we are—or ought to be—dumbfounded.
It is the greatest fun to be bewildered, but only when there lies ahead the sure certainty of having things straightened out, and soon. It is like a marvelous game, provided you have some way of keeping score, and this is what seems to be lacking in our time. It is confusing, and too many of us are choosing not to play, settling back with whatever straws of fixed knowledge we can lay hands on, denying bewilderment, pretending one conviction or another, nodding our heads briskly at whatever we prefer to believe, staying away from the ambiguity of being.
We would be better off if we had never invented the terms “science” and “humanities” and then set them up as if they represented two different kinds of intellectual enterprise. I cannot see why we ever did this, but we did. Now, to make matters worse, we have these two encampments not only at odds but trying to swipe problems from each other. The historians, some of them anyway, want to be known as social scientists and solve the ambiguities of history by installing computers in all their offices; the deconstructionists want to become the ultimate scientists of poetry, looking at every word in a line with essentially the reductionist attitude of particle physicists in the presence of atoms, but still unaware of the uncertainty principle that governs any good poem: not only can the observer change the thing observed, he can even destroy it. The biologists have invaded all aspects of human behavior with equations to explain away altruism and usefulness by totting up the needs of genes; the sociobiologists are becoming humanists manqué, swept off their feet by ants. The physicists, needing new terms for their astonishments, borrow “quarks” from Joyce and label precisely quantitative aspects of matter almost dismissively with poetically allusive words like “strangeness,” “color,” and “flavor”; soon some parts of the universe will begin to “itch.”
We have, to be sure, learned enough to know better than to say some things, about letters and about science, but we are still too reticent about our ignorance. Most things in the world are unsettling and bewildering, and it is a mistake to try to explain them away; they are there for marveling at and wondering at, and we should be doing more of this.
I do not mean to suggest that we are surrounded by unknowable things. Indeed, I cannot imagine any sorts of questions to be asked about ourselves or about nature that cannot sooner or later be answered, given enough time. I do admit to worrying, late at night, about that matter of time: obviously we will have to get rid of modern warfare and quickly, or else we will end up, with luck, throwing spears and stones at each other. We could, without luck, run out of time in what is left of this century and then, by mistake, finish the whole game off by upheaving the table, ending life for everything except the bacteria, maybe—with enough radiation, even them. If you are given to fretting about what is going on in the minds of the young people in our schools, or on the streets of Zurich or Paris or Sydney or Tokyo or wherever, give a thought to the idea of impermanence for a whole species—ours—and the risk of earthly incandescence; it is a brand-new idea, never before confronted as a reality by any rising generation of human beings.
I have an idea, as an aside. Why not agree with the Russians about just one technological uniformity to be installed, at small cost, in all the missiles, theirs and ours: two small but comfortable chambers added to every vehicle before firing, one for a prominent diplomat selected by the other side, one for a lawyer selected at random? It might be a beginning.
Here’s a list of things, taken more or less at random, that we do not understand:
I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet—worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about; consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others. I can say that bird song is the music made by songbirds for their own pleasure, pure fun, also for ours, and it is only a piece of good fortune that the music turns out to be handy for finding mates for breeding or setting territorial markers. I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs; the individual termite is a mobile neurone. This would mean that there is such a phenomenon as collective thinking, which goes on whenever sufficient numbers of creatures are sufficiently connected to one another, and it would also mean that we humans could do the same trick if we tried, and perhaps we’ve already done it, over and over again, in the making of language and the meditative making (for which the old Greek word poesis is best) of metaphors. I can even assert out loud that we are, as a species, held together by something like affection (what the physicists might be calling a “weak force”) and by something like love (a “strong force”), and nobody can prove that I’m wrong. I can dismiss all the evidence piling up against such an idea, all our destructiveness and cantankerousness, as error, error-proneness, built into our species to allow more flexibility of choice, and nobody can argue me out of this unless I choose to wander off to another point of view.
I am inclined to assert, unconditionally, that there is one central, universal aspect of human behavior, genetically set by our very nature, biologically governed, driving each of us along. Depending on how one looks at it, it can be defined as the urge to be useful. This urge drives society along, sets our behavior as individuals and in groups, invents all our myths, writes our poetry, composes our music.
It is not easy to be a social species and, at the same time, such a juvenile, almost brand-new species, milling around in groups, trying to construct a civilization that will last. Being useful is easy for an ant: you just wait for the right chemical signal, at the right stage of the construction of the hill, and then you go looking for a twig of exactly the right size for that stage and carry it back, up the flank of the hill, and put it in place, and then you go and do that thing again. An ant can dine out on his usefulness, all his life, and never get it wrong.
It is a different problem for us, carrying such risks of doing it wrong, getting the wrong twig, losing the hill, not even recognizing, yet, the outline of the hill. We are beset by strings of DNA, immense arrays of genes, instructing each of us to be helpful, impelling us to try our whole lives to be useful, but never telling us how. The instructions are not coded out in anything like an operator’s manual; we have to make guesses all the time. The difficulty is increased when groups of us are set to work together; I have seen, and sat on, numberless committees, not one of which intended anything other than great merit, feckless all. Larger collections of us—cities, for instance—hardly ever get anything right. And, of course, there is the modern nation, probably the most stupefying example of biological error since the age of the great reptiles, wrong at every turn, but always felicitating itself loudly on its great value. It is a biological problem, as much so as a coral reef or a rain forest, but such things as happen to human nations could never happen in a school of fish. It is, when you think about it, a humiliation, but then “humble” and “human” are cognate words. We are smarter than the fish, but their instructions come along in their eggs; ours we are obliged to figure out, and we are, in this respect, slow learners.
The sciences and the humanities are all of a piece, one and the same kind of work for the human brain, done by launching guesses and finding evidence to back up the guesses. The methods and standards are somewhat different, to be sure. It is easier to prove that something is so in science than it is to make an assertion about Homer or Cézanne or Wallace Stevens and have it stand up to criticism from all sides, harder
still to be Homer or Cézanne or Stevens, but the game is the same game. The hardest task for the scientists, hardly yet begun, is to find out what their findings may mean, deep inside, and how one piece of solid information, firmly established by experimentation and confirmation, fits with that unlike piece over there. The natural world is all of a piece, we all know this in our bones, but we have a long, long way to go before we will see how the connections are made.
If you are looking about for really profound mysteries, essential aspects of our existence for which neither the sciences nor the humanities can provide any sort of explanation, I suggest starting with music. The professional musicologists, tremendous scholars all, for whom I have the greatest respect, haven’t the ghost of an idea about what music is, or why we make it and cannot be human without it, or even—and this is the telling point—how the human mind makes music on its own, before it is written down and played. The biologists are no help here, nor the psychologists, nor the physicists, nor the philosophers, wherever they are these days. Nobody can explain it. It is a mystery, and thank goodness for that. The Brandenburgs and the late quartets are not there to give us assurances that we have arrived; they carry the news that there are deep centers in our minds that we know nothing about except that they are there.
The thing to do, to get us through the short run, the years just ahead, is to celebrate our ignorance. Instead of presenting the body of human knowledge as a mountainous structure of coherent information capable of explaining everything about everything if we could only master all the details, we should be acknowledging that it is, in real life, still a very modest mound of puzzlements that do not fit together at all. As a species, the thing we are biologically good at is learning new things, thanks to our individual large brains and thanks above all to the gift of speech that connects them, one to another. We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just the few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go. Get us through the next few years, I say, just get us safely out of this century and into the next, and then watch what we can do.
