The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Moreover, I regard this genre of popular writing as an essential part of the humanistic tradition, and not as an exercise in discourteous and ultimately distorting gee-whiz simplification. This collective effort of the centuries, after all, includes some truly noble precedents that ought to give everyone hope for a generally successful outcome and enterprise—most notably Galileo’s decision to write his two greatest works, including the Copernican document that hastened his political undoing, as Italian dialogues for ordinary readers, rather than as Latin treatises for university scholars and clerics. (Newton’s Principia, on the other hand, does remain generally unreadable both for its Latin and its mathematics.) We must also honor Darwin’s wise and fair decision to write the Origin of Species as an eminently readable book for the general public, not as a technical monograph for scientists.

  The second issue of science perceived as ugly and immoral, rather than merely arcane and inaccessible, causes even deeper trouble, but actually enjoys a simpler resolution, at least in principle. I do not deny the cardinal observation that any major increase in technological capacity also breeds potential for potent misuse as the evil twin of intended benevolence. A medieval Hitler, armed only with a crossbow, just couldn’t inflict as much damage, or at least not nearly so quickly, as his modern counterpart with a nuclear bomb or a hijacked airplane pressed into ghoulish service as an explosive guided missile. And I cannot deny that science always serves as the main spur for technological growth.

  But we must also emphasize a common distinction that cannot be downplayed as overly fine or self-serving for science, but that represents a proper allocation of ultimate responsibility. (I present here an epitome for the crucial argument that I shall develop more fully in chapter 9.) Science, by its very nature as a quest for factual understanding and explanation, cannot prescribe a moral resolution to any question. All the tragedies falsely laid at the doorstep of science arise from our moral and political failures. I admit, of course, that science impacts our moral discourse in at least two crucial ways. First, several deep dilemmas of morality only existed in abstract form, or never entered our consciousness at all, before science provided the tools for emergence into practicality. One cannot, as an obvious example, advocate the moment of conception as the ethical definition of life’s beginning (there can be no unambiguous factual “beginning” of life in such an unbreakable continuum of biological events) until one understands, and can identify, the biology of conception. In fact, and in the absence of this knowledge, legal and moral authorities, during most of Christian history, accepted the quickening (or movement) of the foetus in the womb as the defining point (and first clear indication) of life’s beginning—and abortion before this advanced moment in pregnancy did not then count as illegal or immoral by theological standards. But no study of the biology of conception and pregnancy can specify the ethical, theological, or merely political “moment” of life’s legal or moral inception.

  Second, the sheer efficacy of science forces our immediate attention, by greatly raising the stakes and the speed of potential destruction, to ethical and political issues that had not intruded themselves into the forefront of our consciousness (however much we understood them as abstractions or potential dangers for the future). In the most obvious example, we knew about anthropogenic extinction, by experience ranging from the death of the dodo in the late seventeenth century to the passenger pigeon at the beginning of the twentieth century. But, as a direct consequence of technology for clearing land and altering environments, the speed and extent of extinction have now quickened to a point where, without hype, we may proclaim our current residence within the sixth great mass extinction of life’s geologic history. And since the motto of the environmental movement—extinction is forever—represents factual reality, not emotional hype, salvation truly becomes a question of now or never. (Species, as unique biological entities, built by evolution through millions of years, cannot be substituted or replaced like worn-out automobile tires. If we lose half the world’s species, we will all be impoverished on a depau-perate planet. A city that supplements its human inhabitants only with pigeons, rats, and cockroaches cannot succor our spirits or honor the magnificent diversity of evolution.)

  But even though the impact of science forces attention to the ethical dimensions of these present dangers, we must firmly reject the common, yet utterly false, inference that science itself, by its very nature, must be irreligious, immoral, or inherently opposed to aesthetic urges and sensibilities. Science operates in the different domain of factual understanding. Any full human life (the hedgehog’s one true way of wisdom) must be enriched by all these independent dimensions, and their fecund interactions: ethical, aesthetic, spiritual, and scientific (the fox’s range of independent and necessary contributions).

  Science, as mentioned several times before in this book, quickly reaches its logical limit when confronting these other magisteria of our full being. Science, for example, can proceed no further than the anthropology of morals. That is, we may document the relative frequencies, and the stated rationales, for various moral beliefs among our diverse cultures. We may even speculate about the evolutionary value of certain common practices in our original Darwinian status as hunters and gatherers on the African savannas. We do want to contemplate this information, if only to learn the limits of human flexibility, and to understand which moral decisions might be hard to institute, and which more easy. But science, in principle, can say nothing about the morality of morals. For even if we can show that a certain belief (in infanticide, or genocide under certain circumstances, for example) arose for Darwinian advantages under natural selection, and still remains acceptable to the majority of human cultures, these factual claims cannot, in any way, impart ethical validity to the behavior. We can only reject such practices by the strength of our moral reasoning. At best, the factual knowledge of science might help us to understand the difficulties we must face in our struggle to reach this proper ethical standard, and might even suggest some useful strategies for winning such general consent.

  Similarly, our sincere acknowledgment that factual science cannot intrude upon spiritual questions about the meaning and value of life, as properly asked by theologians, frees us from enmity in two important ways. First, and logically, this separation of the factual from the spiritual allows a proper pursuit of appropriate expertise in each magisterium, without anger inspired by poaching, and with a prospect for effective dialogue based upon mutual respect.

  Second, and practically, science can only lose in contemporary America if we falsely claim a decisive voice in ethical or theological debates. For reasons that I do not pretend to understand, America stands alone among Western nations in the testimony of an overwhelming majority of citizens that belief in a fairly conventional form of Supreme Being occupies a central position in their lives. (I confess that I see little sign of any practical impact for such a conviction, as expressed in any superior moral consciousness or seriousness of purpose in commitment to helping one’s fellows. But I do not doubt the sincerity of the stated conviction for an instant. If people insist that such a belief occupies a central position in their lives, then, by God, it does.) Given this firm sociological fact, if religious people then come to believe that science stands in intrinsic opposition to their spiritual convictions, then, if I may lapse into the vernacular, science is screwed. Our best strategy—and the intellectually soundest and most honest position in any case, by the first argument—therefore requires genuine respect for these religious convictions (which a high percentage of scientists also share), and continual insistence that science cannot pose any threat to these central pillars of life’s emotional support.

  In short, and to express the “sound bites” of my three arguments, science needs the humanities to teach us the quirky and richly subjective side of our own enterprise, to instruct us in optimal skills for communication, and to place proper boundaries upon our competencies—so that we can all work together, for the best of human
ity, uniting our factual skills with our ethical wisdom to form a shield and weapon in this age of immediate danger.

  7

  Sweetness and Light as Tough and Healing Truth

  TO CLOSE THIS PART OF THE BOOK WITH A STORY FROM ITS BEGINNING, I wish to return to the late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century debate between Ancients and Moderns, and give a last word to the “other” side. I discussed the best argument and healing hand of the scientific Moderns in presenting Bacon’s paradox about the old age (and consequent wisdom) of our present; and Newton’s aphorism, admitting the puny status of an infant called science by arguing that we can now see farther only because we stand upon the shoulders of Ancient giants. But I cannot cash out my argument for mending the ancient breach between science and the humanities both by stressing the commonalities and by merging the different strengths of both sides, unless I also give a fair hearing to the best polemic from the Ancient side—if only to show that the cogency of a good case can prevail even in pugnacity, and that even such a vigorous defense leaves abundant space for the joining and healing here proposed.

  My choice of a closing tale also emerges from another motive, at the same time both highly specific and entirely general. The phrase “sweetness and light” resides in my earliest memories, because my mother loved the image, and frequently cited the verbal conjunction. But I confess that, while approving the sentiments, I always viewed the epigram as wimpish and rather meaningless, however warm the feelings so invoked for purely personal reasons. What, after all, could be more vague and less than a favoring of something so obviously virtuous as good taste and bright vision?

  But then, as an adult pondering the issue of disciplinary divisions, I discovered the source of this apparently innocuous and universal phrase. (I hadn’t even supposed, I confess, that the phrase had a specific origin—for something so evidently virtuous need only “be,” and need not claim a specific point of invention.) But then I discovered that “sweetness and light” not only boasted an interesting inception, but had also been devised as a motto to represent something quite partisan and specific, not merely to express a bland and obvious eternal verity. For the phrase explicitly cited the best human uses of two substances manufactured by bees—honey and wax, yielding sweetness (still in vigorous supply) and light (at least before Mr. Edison). And the bee responsible for the phrase emerged from the decidedly bitter pen of a master satirist and champion of the Ancients: Jonathan Swift, who invented this particular creature as a metaphor to carry the case of the Ancients against the Moderns, the latter epitomized in the same fable by a spider. So sweetness and light summarizes the brief of classical humanism against the new world of science in its pugnacious infancy. And if Mr. Swift’s posthumous (and undoubtedly still pugnacious) self will excuse the metaphysical expropriation, I would also like to apply his famous phrase to describe the summum bonum that would arise from the careful (see the last line of this book’s preface) and achievable joining, in respectful independence, of the sciences and humanities by using the different (and equally excellent) stratagems of the fox and hedgehog.

  We no longer take sides, but must find a way to mediate and merge these two great and truthful ways. In other words, we must generate sweetness and light from the totality of the bee and the spider, and not hold this prize as a weapon of one side against the other. But to grasp the power of this expansion, we must first know the true story of sweetness and light,12 presented in the fundamental source, Jonathan Swift’s celebrated satire of 1704, “A Full and True Account of the Battle Fought Last Friday Between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library,” usually called, for short, the “Battle of the Books.” All might have been well had the two parties made a concordat, and kept to their own proper spaces. But the librarian had fostered discord by intemperate mixtures in shelving: “In replacing his books, he was apt to mistake, and clap Descartes next to Aristotle; poor Plato had got Hobbes . . . and Virgil was hemmed with Dryden.”

  Early in the text, both sides use Bacon’s paradox to advance their respective arguments:Discord grew extremely high, hot words passed on both sides, and ill blood was plentifully bred. Here a solitary ancient, squeezed up against a whole shelf of moderns, offered fairly to dispute the case, and to prove by manifest reasons, that the priority was due to them, from long possession. . . . But these [the moderns] denied the premises, and seemed very much to wonder, how the ancients could pretend to insist upon their antiquity, when it was so plain (if they went to that) that the moderns were much more the ancient of the two.

  The bulk of Swift’s text describes the actual battle, with his own sympathies for the Ancients scarcely hidden—as in this passage, where Aristotle misses Bacon and kills Descartes instead (as the greatest French Modern falls into a vortex of his own theory):Then Aristotle, observing Bacon advance with a furious mien, drew his bow to the head, and let fly his arrow, which missed the valiant modern, and went hizzing over his head; but Descartes it hit. . . . The torture of pain, whirled the valiant bowman round, til death, like a star of superior influence, drew him into his own vortex.

  Swift introduces the actual battle with a verbal curtain-raiser—a three-page gem that forms one of the greatest extended metaphors in Western literature: the dispute of the spider (representing the Moderns) and the bee (the Ancients). In the library, a spider dwells “upon the highest corner of a large window.” He is fat and satisfied, “swollen up to the first magnitude, by the destruction of infinite numbers of flies, whose spoils lay scattered before the gates of his palace, like human bones before the cave of some giant.” (Swift, I assume, did not know that males of most orb-weaving spiders are small and do not build webs—and that his protagonist was undoubtedly a “she.” So, for that matter, come to think of it, is the industrious bee, also called “he” in this text.)

  Swift clearly identifies the allegiances of his protagonists. The spider, spinning such a mathematically sophisticated web from his own innards (not relying on any external source of succor), is a scientific Modern:The avenues to his castle were guarded with turnpikes, and palissadoes, after all the modern way of fortification [Swift’s own italics]. After you had passed several courts, you came to the center, wherein you might behold the constable himself in his own lodgings, which had windows fronting to each avenue, and ports to sally out upon all occasions of prey and defense. In this mansion, he had for some time dwelt in peace and plenty.

  A bee then flies through a broken pane and happens “to alight upon one of the outward walls of the spider’s citadel.” His weight breaks the spider’s web, and the convulsions of the resulting tumult awaken the spider, causing him to run out in fear “that Beelzebub with all his legions, was coming to revenge the death of many thousands of his subjects, whom the enemy had slain and devoured.” (A nice touch. Beelzebub, a popular name for the devil, is literally “lord of the flies.”) Instead he finds only the bee, and curses in a style that has been called Swiftian ever since: “A plague split you . . . giddy son of a whore. . . . Could you not look before you, and be damned? Do you think I have nothing else to do (in the Devil’s name) but to mend and repair after your arse?”

  The spider, calming down, now takes up his intellectual role as a Modern and excoriates the bee with the crucial argument from his side: You advocates of the Ancients operate as pitiful and unoriginal drones who create nothing yourselves, but can only forage among other people’s antique insights (the flowers in the field, including nettles as well as objects of admitted beauty). We Moderns build new intellectual structures from the heart of our own genius and discovery: What art thou, but a vagabond without house or home, without stock or inheritance? Born to no possessions of your own, but a pair of wings, and a drone-pipe. Your livelihood is an universal plunder upon nature; a freebooter over fields and gardens; and for the sake of stealing, will rob the nettle as readily as a violet. Whereas I am a domestic animal, furnished with a native stock within myself. This large castle (to show my improvements in the
mathematics) is all built with my own hands, and the materials extracted altogether out of my own person.

  The bee then responds for all devotees of ancient learning: I borrow, but cause no harm in so doing, and I transmute what I borrow into new objects of great beauty and utility—honey and wax. But you, while claiming to build only from your own innards, must still destroy a hecatomb of flies for the raw material. Moreover, your vaunted web is weak, temporary and ephemeral, whatever its supposed mathematical beauty (while the distillation of ancient knowledge endures forever). Finally, how can you claim virtue for a product of your own spinning if the material be poison based on your own gall, and the effect thereof destruction?I visit, indeed, all the flowers and blossoms of the field and the garden, but whatever I collect from thence, enriches myself, without the least injury to their beauty, their smell, or their taste. . . .

  You boast, indeed, of being obliged to no other creature, but of drawing and spinning out all from yourself; that is to say, if we may judge of the liquor in the vessel by what issues out, you possess a good plentiful store of dirt and poison in your breast; and, tho’ I would by no means, lessen or disparage your genuine stock of either, yet, I doubt, you are somewhat obliged for an increase in both, to a little foreign assistance. . . . In short, the question comes to this; whether is the nobler being of the two, that which by a lazy contemplation of four inches round; by an overwhelming pride, which feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom; produces nothing at last, but fly-bane and a cobweb: or that, which, by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgment, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax.