Americans tend to shake their heads in astonishment at the Soviet experience. The idea that some state-endorsed ideology or popular prejudice would hogtie scientific progress seems unthinkable. For two hundred years Americans have prided themselves on being a practical, pragmatic, nonideological people. And yet anthropological and psychological pseudo-science has flourished in the United States – on race, for example. Under the guise of ‘creationism’, a serious effort continues to be made to prevent evolutionary theory – the most powerful integrating idea in all of biology, and essential for other sciences ranging from astronomy to anthropology – from being taught in the schools.
Science is different from many another human enterprise – not, of course, in its practitioners’ being influenced by the culture they grew up in, nor in sometimes being right and sometimes wrong (which are common to every human activity), but in its passion for framing testable hypotheses, in its search for definitive experiments that confirm or deny ideas, in the vigour of its substantive debate, and in its willingness to abandon ideas that have been found wanting. If we were not aware of our own limitations, though, if we were not seeking further data, if we were unwilling to perform controlled experiments, if we did not respect the evidence, we would have very little leverage in our quest for the truth. Through opportunism and timidity we might then be buffeted by every ideological breeze, with nothing of lasting value to hang on to.
15
Newton’s Sleep
May God keep us from single vision and Newton’s sleep.
William Blake,
from a poem included in a letter to Thomas Butts (1802)
[I]gnorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
Charles Darwin, Introduction, The Descent of Man (1871)
By ‘Newton’s sleep’, the poet, painter and revolutionary William Blake seems to have meant a tunnel vision in the perspective of Newton’s physics, as well as Newton’s own (incomplete) disengagement from mysticism. Blake thought the idea of atoms and particles of light amusing, and Newton’s influence on our species ‘satanic’. A common critique of science is that it is too narrow. Because of our well-demonstrated fallibilities, it rules out of court, beyond serious discourse, a wide range of uplifting images, playful notions, earnest mysticism and stupefying wonders. Without physical evidence, science does not admit spirits, souls, angels, devils or dharma bodies of the Buddha. Or alien visitors.
The American psychologist Charles Tart, who believes the evidence for extrasensory perception is convincing, writes:
An important factor in the current popularity of ‘New Age’ ideas is a reaction against the dehumanizing, despiritualizing effects otscientism, the philosophical belief (masquerading as objective science and held with the emotional tenacity of born-again fundamentalism) that we are nothing but material beings. To unthinkingly embrace anything and everything labeled ‘spiritual’ or ‘psychic’ or ‘New Age’ is, of course, foolish, for many of these ideas are factually wrong, however noble or inspiring they are. On the other hand, this New Age interest is a legitimate recognition of some of the realities of human nature: People have always had and continue to have experiences that seem to be ‘psychic’ or ‘spiritual’.
But why should ‘psychic’ experiences challenge the idea that we are made of matter and nothing but? There is very little doubt that, in the everyday world, matter (and energy) exist. The evidence is all around us. In contrast, as I’ve mentioned earlier, the evidence for something non-material called ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ is very much in doubt. Of course each of us has a rich internal life. Considering the stupendous complexity of matter, though, how could we possibly prove that our internal life is not wholly due to matter? Granted, there is much about human consciousness that we do not fully understand and cannot yet explain in terms of neurobiology. Humans have limitations, and no one knows this better than scientists. But a multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. At least some of the mysteries of today will be comprehensively solved by our descendants. The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the Sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones. And if the world does not in all respects correspond to our wishes, is this the fault of science, or of those who would impose their wishes on the world? All the mammals – and many other animals as well – experience emotions: fear, lust, hope, pain, love, hate, the need to be led. Humans may brood about the future more, but there is nothing in our emotions unique to us. On the other hand, no other species does science as much or as well as we. How then can science be ‘dehumanizing’?
Still, it seems so unfair: some of us starve to death before we’re out of infancy, while others – by an accident of birth – live out their lives in opulence and splendour. We can be born into an abusive family or a reviled ethnic group, or start out with some deformity; we go through life with the deck stacked against us, and then we die, and that’s it? Nothing but a dreamless and endless sleep? Where’s the justice in this? This is stark-and brutal and heartless. Shouldn’t we have a second chance on a level playing field? How much better if we were born again in circumstances that took account of how well we played our part in the last life, no matter how stacked against us the deck was then. Or if there were a time of judgement after we die, then – so long as we did well with the persona we were given in this life, and were humble and faithful and all the rest – we should be rewarded by living joyfully until the end of time in a permanent refuge from the agony and turmoil of the world. That’s how it would be if the world were thought out, preplanned, fair. That’s how it would be if those suffering from pain and torment were to receive the consolation they deserve.
So societies that teach contentment with our present station in life, in expectation of post mortem reward, tend to inoculate themselves against revolution. Further, fear of death, which in some respects is adaptive in the evolutionary struggle for existence, is maladaptive in warfare. Those cultures that teach an afterlife of bliss for heroes – or even for those who just did what those in authority told them – might gain a competitive advantage.
Thus, the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue on which we might anticipate widespread scepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meagre to nil. True, brain lesions can make us lose major segments of our memory, or convert us from manic to placid, or vice versa; and changes in brain chemistry can convince us there’s a massive conspiracy against us, or make us think we hear the Voice of God. But as compelling testimony as this provides that our personality, character, memory – if you will, soul – resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence.
And if there are powerful social institutions insisting that there is an afterlife, it should be no surprise that dissenters tend to be sparse, quiet and resented. Some Eastern, Christian and New Age religions, as well as Platonism, hold that the world is unreal, that suffering, death and matter itself are illusions; and that nothing really exists except ‘Mind’. In contrast, the prevailing scientific view is that the mind is how we perceive what the brain does; i.e., it’s a property of the hundred trillion neural connections in the brain.
There is a strangely waxing academic opinion, with roots in the 1960s, that holds all views to be equally arbitrary and ‘true’ or ‘false’ to be a delusion. Perhaps it is an attempt to turn the tables on scientists who have long argued that literary criticism, religion, aesthetics, and much of philosophy and ethics are mere subjective opinion, because they cannot be demonstrated like a theorem in Euclidean geometry nor put to experimental test.
There are people who want everything to be possible, to have their reality unconstrained. Our imagination and our needs require more, they feel, than the comparatively little that science teaches we may be reasonably sure of. Many New Age gurus – the actress Shirley MacLaine among them – go so far as to embrace solipsism, to assert that the only reality is their own thoughts. ‘I am God,’ they actually say. ‘I really think we are creating our own reality,’ MacLaine once told a sceptic. ‘I think I’m creating you right here.’