What realm of human endeavour is not morally ambiguous? Even folk institutions that purport to give us advice on behaviour and ethics seem fraught with contradictions. Consider aphorisms -haste makes waste; yes, but a stitch in time saves nine. Better safe than sorry; but nothing ventured, nothing gained. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire; but you can’t tell a book by its cover. A penny saved is a penny earned; but you can’t take it with you. He who hesitates is lost; but fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Two heads are better than one; but too many cooks spoil the broth. There was a time when people planned or justified their actions on the basis of such contradictory platitudes. What is the moral responsibility of the aphorist? Or the Sun-sign astrologer, the Tarot card reader, the tabloid prophet?
Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our neighbour as ourselves; and in the Gospels we are urged to love our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations are embedded.
In Joshua and in the second half of Numbers is celebrated the mass murder of men, women, children, down to the domestic animals in city after city across the whole land of Canaan. Jericho is obliterated in a kherem, a ‘holy war’. The only justification offered for this slaughter is the mass murderers’ claim that, in exchange for circumcising their sons and adopting a particular set of rituals, their ancestors were long before promised that this land was their land. Not a hint of self-reproach, not a muttering of patriarchal or divine disquiet at these campaigns of extermination can be dug out of holy scripture. Instead, Joshua ‘destroyed all that breathed, as the Lord God of Israel commanded’ (Joshua, x, 40). And these events are not incidental, but central to the main narrative thrust of the Old Testament. Similar stories of mass murder (and in the case of the Amalekites, genocide) can be found in the books of Saul, Esther, and elsewhere in the Bible, with hardly a pang of moral doubt. It was all, of course, troubling to liberal theologians of a later age.
It is properly said that the Devil can ‘quote Scripture to his purpose’. The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes, from incest, slavery and mass murder to the most refined love, courage and self-sacrifice. And this moral multiple personality disorder is hardly restricted to Judaism and Christianity. You can find it deep within Islam, the Hindu tradition, indeed nearly all the world’s religions. Perhaps then it is not so much scientists as people who are morally ambiguous.
It is the particular task of scientists, I believe, to alert the public to possible dangers, especially those emanating from science or foreseeable through the use of science. Such a mission is, you might say, prophetic. Clearly the warnings need to be judicious and not more flamboyant than the dangers require; but if we must make errors, given the stakes, they should be on the side of safety.
Among the IKung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari Desert, when two men, perhaps testosterone-inflamed, would begin to argue, the women would reach for their poison arrows and put the weapons out of harm’s way. Today our poison arrows can destroy the global civilization and just possibly annihilate our species. The price of moral ambiguity is now too high. For this reason – and not because of its approach to knowledge – the ethical responsibility of scientists must also be high, extraordinarily high, unprecedent-edly high. I wish graduate science programmes explicitly and systematically raised these questions with fledgling scientists and engineers. And sometimes I wonder whether in our society, too, the women – and the children – will eventually put the poison arrows out of harm’s way.
17
The Marriage of
Scepticism and Wonder
Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
Remark attributed to Michael Faraday (1791-1867)
Insight, untested and unsupported, is an insufficient guarantee of truth.
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic (1929)
When we are asked to swear in courts of law that we will tell ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’, we are being asked the impossible. It is simply beyond our powers. Our memories are fallible; even scientific truth is merely an approximation; and we are ignorant about nearly all of the Universe. Nevertheless, a life may depend on our testimony. To swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth to the limit of our abilities is a fair request. Without the qualifying phrase, though, it’s simply out of touch. But such a qualification, however consonant with human reality, is unacceptable to any legal system. If everyone tells the truth only to a degree determined by individual judgement, then incriminating or awkward facts might be withheld, events shaded, culpability hidden, responsibility evaded, and justice denied. So the law strives for an impossible standard of accuracy, and we do the best we can.
In the jury selection process, the court needs to be reassured that the verdict will be based on evidence. It makes heroic efforts to weed out bias. It is aware of human imperfection. Does the potential juror personally know the district attorney, or the prosecutor, or the defence attorney? What about the judge or the other jurors? Has she formed an opinion about this case not from the facts laid out in court but from pre-trial publicity? Will she assign evidence from police officers greater or lesser weight than evidence from witnesses for the defence? Is she biased against the defendant’s ethnic group? Does the potential juror live in the neighbourhood where the crimes were committed, and might that influence her judgement? Does she have a scientific background about matters on which expert witnesses will testify? (This is often a count against her.) Are any of her relatives or close family members employed in law enforcement or criminal law? Has she herself ever had any run-ins with police that might influence her judgement in the trial? Was any close friend or relative ever arrested on a similar charge?
The American system of jurisprudence recognizes a wide range of factors, predispositions, prejudices and experiences that might cloud our judgement, or affect our objectivity, sometimes even without our knowing it. It goes to great, perhaps even extravagant, lengths to safeguard the process of judgement in a criminal trial from the human weaknesses of those who must decide on innocence or guilt. Even then, of course, the process sometimes fails.
Why would we settle for anything less when interrogating the natural world, or when attempting to decide on vital matters of politics, economics, religion and ethics?
If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: we are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically and not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are. Can we conscientiously and courageously follow planetary motion or bacterial genetics wherever the search may lead, but declare the origin of matter or human behaviour off-limits? Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang of scientific reasoning you’re eager to apply it everywhere. However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world. I’m aware that some of the discussion in, say, the preceding chapter may have such a character.
When anthropologists survey the thousands of distinct cultures and ethnicities that comprise the human family, they are struck by how few features there are that are givens, always present no matter how exotic the society. There are, for example, cultures – the Ik of Uganda is one – where all Ten Commandments seem to be systematically, institutionally ignored. There are societies that abandon their old and their newborn, that eat their enemies, that use seashells or pigs or young women for money. But they all have a strong incest taboo, they all use technology, and almost all believe in a supernatural world of gods and spirits, often connected with the natural environment they inhabit and the well-being of the plants and animals they eat. (The ones with a supreme god who lives in the sky tend to be the most ferocious – torturing their enemies for example. But this is a statistical correlation only; the causal link has not been established, although speculations naturally present themselves.)
In every such society, there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the sceptical world of science and the credulous world of religious belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both.