En god kommentar om dyrkingen av den moderne religionen «vitenskap» og
«fremskritt» blant mange «venstre-»intellektuelle, inkludert
marxister, som korrumperte sosialismen ved å opphøye den til
«vitenskap» (dvs. kvasireligion). Veldig få av disse
vitenskapsdyrkerne legger til grunn en adekvat forståelse av hva
vitenskap faktisk er.
Med dette i minne er det desto mer grunn til å sørge over bortgangen
av en mann som mer enn noen andre arbeidet med stor entusiasme for å
spre kjennskap til vitenskap slik den faktisk er, til et bredt
publikum. Honnør til Knut Johansen og til Klassekampen for nekrologen
over Stephen Jay Gould i dagens avis!
Tony, the scientists' pal
Today the prime minister takes on a new cause, but does he really
understand the subject?
Hywel Williams
Wednesday May 22 2002
The Guardian
In its latest lurch the Blairite revolution tries to drag science into
the big tent. Later on today, in a speech widely trailed, the prime
minister will tell us that he is worried about science - or rather,
its unpopularity. Time, he opines, to speak up for his new ally. For
Blairism, that restless seeker of easy enemies to vanquish, has found
a new foe. Britain's "anti-science fashion" must be taken on and
beaten. The banner is unfurled as Mr Blair's drum beats to a newly
discovered rhythm. Capitalism can't be regulated - but knowledge can.
Unsurprisingly, the sermon has a business angle. Mr Blair's "science"
is hardly a question of voyaging in strange seas of intellectual
delight. His point of departure is research and technology. For
science here means profits and progress. Developing countries, he
fears, which have less time for moral debate about science, will steal
a march on Britain.
The ethical indifference underlying the ethical uplift is a familiar
noise by now. It's a reminder of the neo-colonial patronage which is
the undertow to Blairite internationalism. Africa - an entire
continent which recently became a friend - now seems a bit of a
threat. And Indian business, he tells us admiringly, is alive to the
close links between "enterprise" and science.
Perhaps this is the unique Hinduja contribution to his latest mental
evolution. Science's new friend has an easy credulity about science
and an equally lazy view of sceptics as merely superstitious.
Tut-tutting about anti-science, along with sighs about anti-business
attitudes, are an established feature of British public
debate. Conservatives used to have a franchise on that policy
brand. Which may be why Mr Blair does it. It's lay preaching of the
kind the Duke of Edinburgh used to indulge in when pontificating abut
the need for Britain to pull itself up by the boot straps, and stop
moaning when international markets have to be exploited.
The propaganda about science stands at several removes from science
itself. It has no room for intuition, play, mystery or beauty -
features of science which are basic not peripheral. And the inability
of scientists to communicate those qualities to a wider public is one
reason why anti-science is as widespread as Mr Blair fears.
The idea that science is about regularity, order, categorisation and
abstraction has entered deep into the public consciousness. It
explains the obscure feeling that science is an inhuman affair,
controlling and manipulating, and the preserve of men (and science is
seen as masculine).
What is lost is the picture of science as tentative, driven by
hypotheses and imagination, sometimes sharing the assumptions of an
age, sometimes making a leap beyond the age. It is driven by faith as
much as by rationalism - the faith that an answer can be found.
Popularisation of science packages it for the present and reflects the
contemporary. "The selfish gene" was an unsurprising arrival in late
20th-century Britain. But science itself also reflects the time and
place in which it is done. Ancient Babylon in the second millennium BC
organised vast teams of scholars to examine and exhume livers in a
science of endless sophistication. It was the core science of
Mesopotamia, as atomic physics was for the world in the 20th
century. What counts as relevant and true in science shifts.
Mr Blair's portrayal of science may tell us little about real science
- but it tells us a lot about him and his peculiarly British brand of
progressivism. For the idea that he is some kind of genetic freak in
the body politic is wide of the mark. It's a left-leaning blindness to
describe this scientism as a feature of the right.
For socialism itself eventually came to invest a lot of hope in the
message that it was somehow scientific. The prophetic Marxist message
that the last days were just around the corner mixed eschatology with
social science, hope along with prediction. It was meant to encourage
into action, as well as to show that what had to be would be. But much
was lost in Marx's sneering at non-scientific socialists as mere
utopians, early pioneers who had just arrived too early, as it were,
in the human story.
But the faith in a scientific future had a wider constituency than the
Marxist. English establishment progressivism went for it avidly. And
the liberal progressives who established a dominance in the
parliamentary Labour party were its high priests. This version of
progressivism was about control, order, centralism. Its techniques
were the pamphlet and its method was managerialist bureaucracy. It was
the world of the Fabian Webbs as well as of HG Wells.
But it was also the world of the Liberal Beveridge. It was Lib-Labbery
which then mutated into the SDP. Its accents survive wherever two or
three are gathered together to moan about backward cultures and the
need to remould the world to suit optimistic progressivism. It
preaches easily and condescendingly, and has little sense of human
variety. It is intolerant of superstition, while being innocent about
its own prejudices. It wants clean lines in its design for living.
To be self-consciously avant-garde and on the side of progress is the
liberal dream. But that progress is a self-serving conceit. When the
native cultures of Africa were discovered by European artists in the
early 20th century they were acclaimed as an inspiration for a culture
grown feeble. The "primitive" was celebrated as a life force,
something vital and free. Listen to Stravinsky's Firebird and we still
sense that celebration of energy.
But it was of course a discovery which was thoroughly colonial in
cultural terms. The image of the African as sensuous and free was a
nasty bit of barbarism - something that could be worked up for the
next artistic commission. When Mr Blair preaches about Africa he does
so in the spirit of that same avant-garde.
In his speech Mr Blair will show the genealogy of his morality. He is
the progressivist centrist, the latest specimen of that English
liberalism so relentless in its bourgeois uplift, so convinced of its
own good will, so confident in its cadences and narrow in its
assumptions. On the other side of the divide stands an older nobler
tradition of the British left. Those early socialists such as Robert
Owen, castigated by Marx, were no control freaks.
The semi-intellectual talk of science and progress was remote to them,
as was the idea that there was a controlling plan wired into
history. Theirs was the language of trade unionism, of the cooperative
movement, of congregations brought together by belief, suffering and
community. And they walked by faith in humanity, in things largely
unseen but sometimes glimpsed and felt in the heart. They acted rather
than preached and were generous not starchy.
Theirs was the fabric of humanity. They made the Labour party. That
organisation's sole purpose now, it seems for Mr Blair, is to act as a
benchmark. It is something against which he can measure himself in his
endlessly inventive chameleon's dance.
-- We are guilty of the grossest, and most narrow partiality, and make ourselves the model of the universe ... What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole Universe. - David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 11-07-02 MET DST