No one has ever set forth the issue more incisively, albeit in extreme form, in nearly three hundred years of subsequent writing. Most thoughtful people come down somewhere between the bee and the spider, but extremists on both sides still invoke the same arguments. Current partisans of the spider claim that the “great books” of traditional learning (now including such former Moderns as Swift and his Gulliver’s Travels) have become both unreadable and irrelevant for modern students—and might as well be dropped (or lightly retained as a few excerpts for a lick and a promise) in favor of direct engagement with modern literature and science. At worst, they may actively disparage the old mainstays as nothing but repositories of prejudice written by that biased subset of humans called dead white European males (or DWEMs for short).
Current partisans of the bee can dispense worthy platitudes about upholding standards and retaining a canon universally validated by endurance through so much time and turmoil. But these good arguments are often accompanied by blindness, or actual aversion, to the scientific and political complexities that permeate our daily lives and that all educated people must understand in order to be effective and thoughtful in their professions. Moreover, defense of the “great books” too often becomes a smokescreen for political conservatism and maintenance of old privileges (particularly among folks like me—white professors past sixty who don’t wish to concede that other kinds of people might have something important, beautiful, or enduring to say).
How can we resolve this ancient debate from the youth of our modern time? In one sense we can’t, at least to anyone’s clear victory—for both sides present good arguments, following Bacon’s paradox that once epitomized the ongoing struggle. But an obvious solution stares us all in the face, if only we could overcome the narrowness and parochiality that leads any partisan to fortify his barricade. The answer has been with us since Aristotle—in the form of the “golden mean.” The solution speaks to us by compelling attention to good points on both sides. This answer lies embodied in the famous epigram of Edmund Burke (1729–1797), once a Modern in the original battle, but now an archconservative among the DWEMs: “All government—indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act—is founded on compromise and barter.” We must hybridize the bee and the spider—and then, in good Darwinian fashion, select for the best traits of both parents in a rigorous program of good breeding (education). The spider surely prevails in extolling the technical beauty of his web, and the absolute need for all contemporary people to understand both the mechanics and aesthetics of its structure. But the bee cannot be faulted for insisting that fields of well-distilled wisdom await our entirely benign exploitation for enjoyment and enlightenment—and that we would be utter fools to bypass such a rich storehouse.
I can argue the virtues of both sides, but since I live in the world of science, and experience its parochialities on a more sustained and daily basis, I feel more impelled to advance the bee’s cause. Distillation may be biased, but anything that endures for hundreds or thousands of years (at least in part by voluntary enjoyment rather than forced study) must contain something of value. No one celebrates diversity more than evolutionary biologists like myself; we love every one of those million beetle species, every variation in every scale on a butterfly’s wing, every nuance in the coloration of each feather on a peacock. But without some common mooring, we cannot talk to each other. And if we cannot talk, we cannot bargain, compromise, and understand. I am sad that I can no longer cite the most common lines from Shakespeare or the Bible in class, and hold any hope for majority recognition. I am troubled that the primary lingua franca of shared culture may now be rock music of the last decade—not because I regard the genre as inherently unworthy, but because I know that the language will soon change and therefore sow more barriers to intelligibility across generations. I am worried that people with inadequate knowledge of the history and literature of their culture will ultimately become entirely self-referential, like science fiction’s most telling symbol (from E. A. Abbott’s Flatland, published in 1884 and in print ever since)—the happy fool who lives in the one-dimensional world of pointland, and thinks he knows everything because he forms his own entire universe. In this sense, the bee criticizes the spider properly—an ephemeral cobweb “four inches round” can only provide a paltry sample of our big and beautiful world. I can’t do much with a student who doesn’t know multivariate statistics and the logic of natural selection; but I cannot make a good scientist—though I can forge an adequate technocrat—from a person who never reads beyond the professional journals of his own field. Any genuinely wise person will have to know and appreciate the truly different ways of the sciences and humanities in order to achieve an integral excellence. Bee plus spider; the fox’s way to become an optimal hedgehog. Difficult—but surely possible in our new age of genetic engineering!
I give the last word to Swift. When the bee and the spider finish their argument, Aesop steps up and praises both parties, who have “admirably managed the dispute between them, have taken in the full strength of all that is to be said on both sides, and exhausted the substance of every argument pro and con.” But he then, as befits his station and status, supports the bee. A person who ignores accumulated wisdom perishes in his own thin web:Erect your schemes with as much method and skill as you please; yet if the materials be nothing but dirt, spun out of your own entrails (the guts of modern brains) the edifice will conclude at last in a cobweb: the duration of which, like that of other spider webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a corner.
Aesop ends by praising the bee and inventing a proverb based upon one of the loveliest conjunctions in English. And thus did the phrase “sweetness and light”—as direct properties of honey and wax—enter our lexicon of sayings as the culmination of Swift’s defense, via Aesop, for the extended hive of our greatest intellectual traditions.As for us, the Ancients; we are content with the bee, to pretend to nothing of our own, beyond our wings and our voice: that is to say, our flights and our language; for the rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite labor, the search and ranging through every corner of nature: the difference is, that instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chose to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light.
III
A SAGA OF PLURIBUS AND UNUM The Power and Meaning of True Consilience
8
The Fusions of Unum and the Benefits of Pluribus
MY BRIEF FOR THE OBLITERATION OF HARMFUL BOUNDARIES AND mutual suspicion between science and the humanities includes two recommendations that may seem contradictory at first—but no more so than the official motto of our nation: E pluribus unum (one from many). We fought a civil war to keep our diverse themes together, to prove that one nation, strong and democratic, could include a full range of human and natural differences—ethnic, linguistic, climatic, economic, topographical—under a single canopy of mutual respect. So too for our disciplinary domains in a united realm of the human intellect, and especially for the perceived conflict of science and the humanities. We can break these old bonds of recrimination, and become equal partners in unity, if we practice, simultaneously, both sides of a superficial contradiction with a deeper underlying consonance: that is, if we can enjoy our fusion in intentions, motives, and several aspects of creative practice (the hedgehog’s one great way), but also respect our discreteness and separation as guardians of distinct magisteria charged with the exploration of logically different kinds of questions (the fox’s many effective but separate ways).
Two quotations about diversity, one from within and one from without, summarize the case for mutual respect with acknowledgment of defining differences and also a set of likenesses rooted in the commonalities of all intellectual effort. First, and from within, each of the domains or magisteria embodies, inside its own being, so many different methods, concerns, and styles of explanation that no knee-jerk u
nited front could be contrived even if we wanted to wage war under a monistic banner. (This book treats science and the humanities, but the same argument applies to other domains, notably religion.) Each magisterium embraces its own E pluribus unum, and each can only be harmed by struggles for supremacy from within. How, then, could the entire collectivity hope to profit by the same kind of destructive struggle with other distinct collectivities? The anthropologist Clifford Geertz emphasized this practical power of pluralism in a commentary for Science (July 6, 2001, page 53), the leading American journal for professionals in the trade. Interestingly, Geertz invokes the phony “science wars” (discussed herein on pages 95–104) to introduce his important observation about widespread diversity within magisteria:For the most part, “the science wars,” trafficking in tribal jealousies and archaic fears, have produced more heat than light. But in one respect they have been useful. They have made it clear that using the term “science” to cover everything from string theory to psychoanalysis is not a happy idea, because doing so elides the difficult fact that the ways in which we try to understand and deal with the physical world and those in which we try to understand and deal with the social one are not altogether the same. The methods of research, the aims of inquiry, and the standards of judgment all differ, and nothing but confusion, scorn, and accusation—relativism! Platonism! reductionism! verbalism!—results from failing to see this.
Second, and from without, I have long appreciated the wise and, at first glance, paradoxical observation of G. K. Chesterton about art, but equally applicable to the definition of any legitimate discipline. For, in the absence of well-defined boundaries, no organism or institution can maintain sufficient coherence for recognition as a legitimate entity at all. Chesterton (1874–1936), now remembered primarily for his Father Brown series of mystery stories, was a respected essayist and perhaps the most famous literary critic of his time. He wrote: “Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.”
In keeping with my practice throughout this book, I will forgo any further abstract or theoretical discussion in favor of particular examples, not widely known, that strike me as especially apropos or poignant in illustrating the general thesis under discussion. Thus I will pursue my two apparently contradictory, but actually complementary, themes for union and cooperation between the sciences and the humanities (the fusions of unum and the benefits of pluribus) by presenting two examples within each category.
THE FUSIONS OF UNUM
HAECKEL’S “ARTFORMS OF NATURE”—EITHER OR NEITHER? FUSED OR MISUSED?
The power of many important works in the history of Western art and science has been greatly enhanced by a fusion so intimate that inquiries into whether the product should be called “art” or “science” cease to make any sense at all—for “neither” or “both” provide equally cogent answers, thus proving that the question itself has become meaningless because the two putative categories of this false dichotomy do not exist as separate and competing entities.
In my favorite example of maximal fusion, the German biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) also worked as a quite competent painter and graphic artist. (Of course, many scientists have tried their amateur hands at art, but only as “Sunday painters” in the usual dismissive description. Goethe, for example, produced large numbers of eminently forgettable watercolors. But at least two celebrated naturalists also possessed the fortunate gift of genuine artistic skill, and their technical publications, featuring their own illustrations, gain great strength through the conjunction—Ernst Haeckel and the great French naturalist Georges Cuvier.)
In 1904, Haeckel published a magnificent volume of exactly one hundred plates, titled Kunstformen der Natur, or Artforms of Nature. The title itself explicitly states an intention to treat the two great domains together. But the content of the plates realizes this goal to a degree never before attained in the history of scientific illustration—unleashing the paradox that such a superb realization also extinguished the category of “scientific” illustration, thus so outstandingly treated! From 1899 to 1904, as Haeckel produced his plates in ten installments of ten each, Art Nouveau, called Jugendstil in Germany, reigned as the height of fashion in the fine and decorative arts. In rough epitome, the Encyclopaedia Britannica states that “the distinguishing ornamental characteristic of Art Nouveau is its undulating, asymmetrical line, often taking the form of flower stalks and buds, vine tendrils, insect wings, and other delicate and sinuous natural objects; the line may be elegant and graceful or infused with a powerfully rhythmic and whiplike force.”
If we approach the plates of Kunstformen der Natur with the conventional question—is this art or science?—we scarcely know how to respond. Haeckel does depict real creatures that actually exist, so the plates, in one sense, promote science. But both the individual organisms themselves, and their layout on each plate, rigorously obey all the key conventions of Art Nouveau, with sinuously extended curves everywhere—so the plates, in another sense, embody the prevailing artistic style of the time.
Consider just three examples (I would love to reproduce all one hundred plates—and in color; but my publisher would demur, and the work does remain in print, in a mediocre reproduction of the plates by Dover Books). The squid and octopuses of figure 24 do exist, and we know that these creatures grow long and numerous tentacles. But I doubt that any of their natural poses include such conformity to the preferred swirls of Art Nouveau. For the glass sponges of figure 25, Haeckel does show the angular symmetry of the nearly microscopic spicules building the internal skeleton of silica. But the mixed tableau of several species in their entirety (at the bottom of the plate) might have been commissioned by an art teacher as the instruction manual for a favored style then honored as the height of fashion. And when Haeckel doesn’t merely gang together a group of individual organisms, but attempts to construct a “natural” scene of numerous species in their habitats (as in figure 26 of reef-building corals), the ensemble looks more like a unified phantasmagoria of Art Nouveau curvatures than an array of separate and living organisms.
I find Haeckel’s spare commentary, presented as introductory and closing statements about the plates, particularly revealing in expressing both his satisfactions and his disquiet. He clearly states, as the fusion of his title proclaims, that he wished to unite both artistic and scientific goals in a single series of illustrations (my translations from his German):
Figure 24.
The primary purpose of my Artforms of Nature was aesthetic: I wanted to provide an entry, for a wider circle of people, into the wonderful treasures of natural beauty hidden in the depths of the sea, or only visible, as a consequence of small size, under the microscope. But I also wanted to combine these aesthetic concerns with a scientific goal: to open up a deeper insight into the wonderful architecture of the unfamiliar organization of these forms.
Figure 25.
But Haeckel could not rest content in this love-fest of fusion—for he knew that he faced a problem with his scientific colleagues (Haeckel’s primary day job, after all) who would surely pounce in derision upon any distortion of biological accuracy, presumably, indeed especially, for art’s sake. In fairness, one cannot accuse Haeckel’s colleagues of narrow parochialism in their strict scrutiny of his work. For decades Haeckel had been justly criticized for his cavalier attitude toward accuracy, even in his technical publications for taxonomic specialists. In particular, he often “improved” the geometric symmetries of radiolarian skeletons and sponge spicules, confecting forms of unerring regularity and beauty to replace actual creatures only slightly less attractive in their not-quite-perfect symmetry. More important, Haeckel had been roundly and rightly rebuffed for his frequent practice of drawing idealizations for his textbooks, and claiming them as actual specimens. In the most notorious example, exposed almost immediately by several colleagues (see my article on Louis Agassiz’s reaction in I Have Landed, Harmony Books, 2002), Haeckel supported his favorite hobbyhorse—the so-called
“biogenetic law” of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—by simply drawing the same figure three times as a supposed illustration of the near identity in early embryonic form among vertebrate species of highly disparate adult design! (Following the old dictum about persistence of bad pennies, modern creationists have re-exhumed this more-than-twice-told, and well-castigated, tale in a rearguard action to cast doubt on evolution because a distinguished colleague misbehaved in this manner more than a century ago.)
Figure 26.
I would, however, criticize Haeckel’s colleagues for cynically invoking the parochial ploy that Haeckel’s flouting of scientific norms flowed from an “artistic” bent, thereby distorting his commitment to scientific accuracy. Why should an artist be any less concerned about veracity than a scientist? Such stereotypes, unfortunately all too familiar and persistent in our times as well, can only poison the pluralism and respect sought by all people of goodwill. Haeckel’s failures lie at the doorstep of his own inadequacies, and cannot be fobbed off on the general practice of any larger group counting him among its membership.
Haeckel therefore exposed his own fears in a gender-bending version of “the lady doth protest too much, methinks,” defending himself vociferously, on an issue that might otherwise have passed in silence, by insisting that all his plates depicted actual animals in detailed accuracy. Yet, in the Kunstformen, Haeckel had, more than ever before (but justifiably for once, given the intention of the work), consistently distorted his organisms by arranging their parts in unnatural swirls, and by conflating creatures into impossible conjunctions based on felicity of design—all, and obviously, to match the reigning sensibilities of Art Nouveau, and not because such scenes ever existed in nature.