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

  As the Encyclopaedia Britannica succinctly states: “In 1671, he was elected to the Académie Française, which soon was sharply divided by the so-called quarrel between the ancients and moderns. Perrault supported the modern view that as civilization progresses, literature evolves with it, and that therefore ancient literature is inevitably more coarse and barbarous than modern literature.” In his 1687 poem Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (The Age of Louis the Great), brother Charles explicitly praised his colleague Molière as an example of literary grace and perfection that had not, and could not have, been achieved by the writers of Antiquity.

  And thus, from life breathed into dead camels (and attained by mortal sacrifice in reverse), to the quenching flow of rainwater, to the grand awakening of a sleeping beauty in our mental aptitude for novelty, these three brothers, spanning the full range of science and the humanities, spoke in equal fraternity for the Modern liberty to move on, and not always to look back.

  DICHOTOMOUS PERILS IN FOUR SEQUENTIAL STAGES

  From the dawn of recorded human rumination, our best philosophers have noted, and usually lamented, our strong tendency to frame any complex issue as a battle between two opposing camps. Around A.D. 200, for example, Diogenes Laertius cited the dictum of his illustrious forebear Protagoras from the fifth century B.C., a statement already boasting a pedigree of some seven hundred years: “There are two sides to every question, each exactly opposite to the other.” Our standard epitomes for the history and social impact of science—with the relationship between science and the humanities as the particular instance highlighted in this book—have consistently followed this preferred mental scheme of dichotomization, although the chosen names and stated aims of the battling armies have changed with the capricious winds of fashion and the evolving norms of scholarship. In Part I, I listed several sequential versions of this supposed dichotomy between the goals of science and the opposing beliefs and practices of humane learning and social convention. In this part I return to these four putative skirmishes in a phantom war—as I try further to expose and understand this false, destructive, and deeply entrenched habit of ordering our categories as oppositional pairs (rather than seeking the virtues of e pluribus unum by hybridizing the fox and the hedgehog).

  I regard this apparently ineluctable human propensity to dichotomize—the only reason, in my view, that we ever developed a model of opposition between science and the humanities in the first place—as too pervasive and powerful to represent a mere social convention, favored at certain times and by certain types of cultures. I also doubt that anyone would ascribe our predilection for dichotomy to nature’s objective factuality—as if our strategy of naming equal and opposite halves expresses an inherently “correct” principle of order for subdividing most classes of objective natural phenomena. I do not deny, of course, that some admittedly basic aspects of our lives suggest a natural parsing into two contrasting clumps, despite some well-recognized fuzziness at the boundaries—with night and day, and male and female, as the primal dichotomies of our external and internal order respectively. (Edmund Burke, the great British statesman, and supporter of America’s Revolution despite his generally conservative view of life, remarked sardonically that although no one can draw a sharp line of division—for dawn and twilight designate short zones of intermediary—light and darkness are, on the whole, tolerably distinguishable.)

  But, as we consider the totality of similarly broad and fundamental aspects of life, we cannot defend division by two as a natural principle of objective order. Indeed, the “stuff” of the universe often strikes our senses as complex and shaded continua, admittedly with faster and slower moments, and bigger and smaller steps, along the way. Nature does not dictate dualities, trinities, quarterings, or any “objective” basis for human taxonomies; most of our chosen schemes, and our designated numbers of categories, record human choices from a cornucopia of possibilities offered by natural variation from place to place, and permitted by the flexibility of our mental capacities. How many seasons (if we wish to divide by seasons at all) does a year contain? How many stages shall we recognize in a human life?

  I strongly suspect that our propensity for dichotomy lies deeply within our basic mental architecture as an evolved property of the human brain—and not as a particularly adaptive trait, either, at least at this point in our history. Claude Levi-Strauss and his school of French structuralism have developed their theory of human nature and social history under the premise that we have evolved an innate propensity for dichotomous classification as our basic cognitive tool for ordering the complexities of both nature and culture. We may begin with empirically defendable divisions of male versus female and night versus day. But we then extend these concrete examples into greater and more subjective generalities of nature versus culture (“the raw and the cooked” of Levi-Strauss’s famous book), or spirit versus matter (of philosophical dualism), or the beautiful versus the sublime (in Burke’s theory of aesthetics); and thence, and now tragically, into ethical valuation, anathematization, and, sometimes, warfare and mass destruction. For when we add the weight of conscious judgment—another uniquely (and often dangerously) evolved peculiarity of our species—to a simple division by appearance, we turn a formal dichotomy into a moral distinction of good and bad, a transition that can easily slip further into political tragedy, or even genocide, as good and bad intensify into the godly who must prevail versus the diabolical, ripe for burning.

  One can speculate about the putative evolutionary basis of such a strong tendency for dichotomization. I rather suspect that this innate propensity represents little more than “baggage” from an evolutionary past of much simpler brains built only to reach those quick decisions—fight or flight, sleep or wake, mate or wait—that make all the difference in a Darwinian world of nonconscious animals. Perhaps we have never been able to transcend the mechanics of a device built to generate simple twofold divisions, and have had to construct our greater complexities upon such a biased and inadequate mental substrate.

  I freely confess my negative, and somewhat cynical, feelings about the fallacies (and sometimes even the viciousness) of dichotomization as our usual framework for characterizing the never-ending struggles of academic life—often so silly in their pretentious and vainglorious rancor, especially when honest moments force our admission that degree of public recognition, and differential access to parking spaces, rather than serious issues of intellectual content, usually underlie the intensity of expressed feelings. Viewing the question in its historical amplitude, the most persuasive argument against a concept of “natural” and inherent conflict between science and the humanities may well rest upon the peculiar circumstance that not a single episode in the four successive rounds of this supposed struggle provides any decent evidence for genuine dichotomous opposition, but rather illustrates the far greater complexity, artificiality, contingency, and shifting allegiances of our taxonomies for academic disciplines. So if “science” and the “humanities” cannot be construed as sufficiently stable entities locked in tolerably continuous struggle over genuine and persisting differences of intellectual note, then I suspect that our strong impression of lasting conflict only records our simplistic imposition of phony dichotomous models upon a much different, and far more subtle, story of substantial and fruitful interaction amid instances (or even periods) of misunderstanding and occasional strife.

  1. Ancients and Moderns in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I have already discussed at some length how many early leaders of the Scientific Revolution boosted the Modern cause by asserting the power of new knowledge, won by observation and experiment, over the Renaissance penchant for recovering Ancient wisdom as a best recipe for intellectual growth—an argument especially well embodied in Bacon’s paradox and Newton’s aphorism. But the celebrated battle of Ancients and Moderns cannot be read as a dichotomous struggle with an alternative and fully adequate mapping as scientists (Moderns) versus humanists (Ancients)—that is, as an initia
l skirmish in a more extensive and continuing conflict of science versus the humanities. This simplistic double dichotomy fails by any legitimate criterion, as noted at several earlier points of this text. First of all, many of the greatest naturalists of Western history, particularly during the Renaissance heyday of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, followed the Ancient line, with emphasis upon linking modern knowledge of organisms to Aristotle’s and Pliny’s evidently superior but incompletely preserved insights. Gesner and Aldrovandi, who became the “whipping boys” of seventeenth-century empiricists in the Scientific Revolution (see comments of Grew and Ray on pages 39–47), occupy the first rank both as allies of the Ancients and as superb naturalists.

  Second, virtually all leaders of the Scientific Revolution, as befitted general notions of a decent education in those days, learned the standard corpus of Latin and Greek writings, and revered (and liberally quoted) those works, even in their defenses of Modern observational methods. Third, the core of the conventional debate of Ancients and Moderns did not rest upon the argument that new scientific methods could win knowledge heretofore unavailable. Rather, supporters of the Ancients advanced the different and more subtle argument that science’s proper insistence upon novel discovery could not be transferred to a literary claim that, by the same token, Modern forms of writing must also surpass Ancient styles because, as a general principle, everything gets better through time. These literary Ancients, in fact, made a proper distinction between the accumulative character of science and the absence of a similar basis for confidence about improvement in the more subjective domain of literary style.

  The core of the debate between Ancients and Moderns, after all, resided in a literary struggle, not in a contest between science and the humanities. The Encyclopaedia Britannica article notes that Modern literati might have ripped off the successes of science to make an analogistic argument for their humanistic claim, but the basic struggle did not pit science against the humanities:The “ancients” maintained that classical literature of Greece and Rome offered the only models for literary excellence; the “moderns” challenged the supremacy of the classical writers. The rise of modern science tempted some French intellectuals to assume that, if Descartes had surpassed ancient science, it might be possible to surpass other ancient arts. The first attacks on the ancients came from Cartesian circles in defense of some heroic poems . . . that were broadly based on Christian rather than classical mythology. . . . Eventually two main issues emerged: whether literature progressed from antiquity to the present as science did [note the acceptance of purely scientific progress by both sides], and whether, if there was progress, it was linear or cyclical.

  2. The warfare of science and religion: a nineteenth-century invention. The “battle of the books” between Ancients and Moderns, falsely interpreted as an attempt to suppress the early development of modern science, has long faded from public memory and overt influence. But a second episode in the phony war of dichotomies between advancing science and suppressing forces of academic or social convention continues to exert a strong and pernicious influence upon popular culture—the late-nineteenth-century proposal that a “warfare” between science and religion set the primary dynamic of historical change in the Western world. (At least I can assert, speaking personally, that folks of my generation learned this model in the public schools of my youth, although my buddies in parochial school probably received a different line.)

  The origin of this influential model can be traced, broadly, to a strong anticlerical movement within late-nineteenth-century rationalism and, more specifically, to two of the greatest success stories in nineteenth-century publishing, despite the entirely different aims of the two books (see page 29 for an earlier citation). In 1874 the physician and amateur historian J. W. Draper published his History of the Conflict Between Science and Religion.6 A generation later, in 1896, Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell University, published his magisterial two-volume work, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

  Draper, following a lamentable tradition in the history of American prejudice, wrote his book as a Protestant “old American,” fearful of Catholic influence, as particularly expressed in the foreign and proletarian origins of most American Catholics. His book, little more than an anti-papist diatribe, argued that the liberal spirit of Protestantism could make peace with the beneficial, and in any case ineluctable, advance of science, whereas dogmatic Catholicism could reach no such accommodation and had to be superseded or crushed.

  Draper expressed this thesis of dichotomous opposition in no uncertain terms:Then has it in truth come to this, that Roman Christianity and Science are recognized by their respective adherents as being absolutely incompatible; they cannot exist together; one must yield to the other; mankind must make its choice—it cannot have both.

  White, in strongest possible contrast, wrote as a friend of science and an even greater champion of religion in its proper spirit and domain. In founding Cornell as a nonsectarian university, White had been frustrated by the opposition of so many local clergy, who could not abide a liberal institution of higher learning in their midst. White, a dedicated and ecumenical theist, therefore wrote his book to persuade his fellow believers that the beneficial and unstoppable advances of science posed no threat to genuine religion, but only to outmoded dogmas and superstition. White stated this thesis in a famous passage:In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science. . . . On the other hand, all untrammeled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science.

  This model of warfare between science and religion—surely the most powerful analog of the conflict between science and the humanities as a false dichotomy for the history of Western knowledge—fails on both possible rationales: as a defendable antithesis in logic, and as an accurate description in history. I have made the general argument in my book Rocks of Ages (Ballantine, 1999), a book that expresses the consensus of a great majority of professional scientists and theologians, not an original formulation from my pen. In briefest summary, no dichotomous opposition can exist in logic because science and religion treat such different (and equally important) aspects of human life—the principle that I have called NOMA as an acronym for the “non-overlapping magisteria,” or teaching authorities, of science and religion. Science tries to record and explain the factual character of the natural world, whereas religion struggles with spiritual and ethical questions about the meaning and proper conduct of our lives. The facts of nature simply cannot dictate correct moral behavior or spiritual meaning.

  The warfare of science and religion fails equally badly as a description of history. First of all, no one could possibly defend such a model for the founders of the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century, as the sincere religious convictions of these men can scarcely be doubted (and genuine atheism enjoyed no popularity at all among scholars of the time). At most, one might entertain a suspicion about Descartes’s private attitudes, as his invocations of God do seem minimal and a bit pro forma (although not necessarily insincere on this account). But I cannot think of another leading seventeenth-century scientist whose life or works convey the slightest doubt about the strength and importance of their theistic beliefs.

  As so many scholars have documented, the standard episodes in the supposed warfare of science and religion are either greatly distorted or entirely fictional. For example, the historian J. B. Russell (Inventing the Flat Earth, Praeger, 1991) devotes an entire book to showing how Draper, White, and other architects of the “warfare” model simply invented the old tale of Columbus’s brave conflict, as a scientifically savvy navigator, against religious authorities who insisted that he would sail off the edge of a flat earth. In fac
t, Christian consensus had never lost or challenged Greek and Roman knowledge of the earth’s spherical shape. Columbus did hold a celebrated dispute with clerics at Salamanca and other places, but no one questioned the earth’s roundness. (His interrogators wore clerical garb because most Spanish scholars at that time were trained, ordained, and employed by the Church, and his adversaries included the best astronomers and geographers of his time and place.) Moreover, his questioners were right, and Columbus entirely wrong. The debaters argued about the earth’s diameter, not its shape. Columbus, as his clerical critics correctly documented, had greatly underestimated the size of the earth and could never have reached the Indies by sailing west. Columbus won his lucky and lasting fame only because a large and previously unknown landmass lay in a convenient halfway position. (Native Americans received the epithet of “Indians” as a consequence of Columbus’s error.)

  Even the canonical tale of Galileo’s forced recantation in 1633 cannot stand as an episode in a war between science and faith. Urban VIII remains a villain, and Galileo a hero, in my book, but Galileo was also a frightfully undiplomatic hothead who brought unnecessary trouble upon his own head. He had, after all, received an official imprimatur for publishing his book on Ptolemy versus Copernicus. Church authorities only required that he present an “honest” debate between the two sides, and that he depict heliocentrism as a mathematical hypothesis rather than as empirical truth—a “polite fiction” that would still have won the day for Copernicus. If Galileo had so proceeded, the Copernican view would have triumphed by the inherent character of its superior arguments. Instead, Galileo couldn’t resist his urge to ridicule the Ptolemaic opposition by awarding the defense of this position to a character named Simplicio, and by providing him with arguments that matched his name in acumen. No monolithic “church” condemned Galileo, and the considerable cadre of ecclesiastical scientists mostly deplored, if necessarily in silence, the fate of a dear colleague who, as they well knew, had spoken truly and with no antireligious intent. (See Galileo Courtier by Mario Biagioli, University of Chicago Press, 1993, for a subtler view of the Galileo affair.)