Science, Society, and Stability

The various approaches to education differ according to ideology – liberal, communist, and so on – and depending on what discipline is dominant at any given time. So, for example, in the 19th century, there was a time when the struggle for such preponderance was waged between the natural sciences and the humanities, which had ruled the roost for some time. 

Today it is between the technical disciplines (with the natural sciences usually siding with them) and the human sciences (humanities and social sciences taken together). And for decades now, every time this happens, the human sciences are derogated in favour of the technical (and natural scientific) disciplines, with the argument that the human sciences do not contribute to industry, and therefore not to progress. Hand in hand with this, governments are urged to provide less funding to the putatively ‘useless’ disciplines that focus on everything human, in favour of the natural sciences and technology, particularly ‘information sciences.’ 

Returning to the 19^th century, some readers may recall the name of Matthew Arnold, who championed the humanities in his debates with the supporters of natural science, foremost among them T.H. Huxley, the famous populariser of evolutionary science at the time. As Franklin Baumer (whom I have referred to here before) reminds one in Modern European Thought (Macmillan 1977, pp. 259-261; 345-346) Arnold worried that the rapid rise of a scientific culture would undermine the capacity of the humanities to contribute that much-needed element, namely, to put human knowledge – including natural science – in perspective, lest the forest be obscured by the trees, as it were. 

This is something the natural sciences cannot do as such, even if there are natural scientists capable of doing so – such as my friend, the polymath geological scientist, David Bell, whose intellectual pursuits extend to philosophy and other humanities. He is one of the very few natural scientists I know who is able to situate natural science in the larger field of philosophy and cosmology.

But importantly, he is largely able to do this, not because of the kind of scientific education he received at university; it was his own reflective interest that propelled him to place himself as geologist in this encompassing intellectual context. In this regard, it is important to note that the discipline known as the philosophy of science – which I taught at second-year undergraduate level for a long time to students from various faculties, including Natural Sciences – may contribute substantially to helping students orient themselves vis-á-vis the place of their discipline(s) in relation to other sciences.

Returning to Arnold, in his debate with Huxley, he predictably sided with traditional, ‘mainly literary,’ education, while Huxley, as an evolutionist, argued (in a manner pointing forward to what has largely, and increasingly, been the case in the 20^th century and beyond) in favour of granting natural science pride of place in education, at the cost of traditional education. His arguments were much the same as those heard more recently, justifying his claims with reference to the assertion, that a person, or nation, could not compete successfully ‘in the great struggle for existence’ unless they knew ‘the rules of nature.’

Hence, unsurprisingly, he perceived a direct link between scientific education and ‘industrial progress.’ And surprisingly, Huxley insisted on the ‘scientific method’ having ‘ethical significance, because it inculcated a proper respect for evidence’ – clearly something that many so-called scientists have systematically forgotten since the advent of the so-called ‘pandemic.’ 

Unlike C.P. Snow, who posited an unbridgeable chasm between science and the humanities – both of which he nevertheless practiced – in his well-known essay, ‘The Two Cultures,’ Huxley’s grandson, Aldous Huxley (the author of Brave New World), actually made the attempt to cross the divide between science and literature (Baumer 1977, p. 466). Nevertheless, he was not blind to the connection between science, technology, and the barbarism of war – so much so that after the end of World War 2 he put forward a causal link between the growth of natural science and the ‘progressive centralization of power and oppression, and [in] the corresponding decline of liberty, during the twentieth century.’ 

Looking back from our present historical position – where the capacity for such ‘centralization of power and oppression’ has increased a hundredfold (and will be used by unscrupulous globalists, to reach their reprehensible goals)– one can only lament the fact that no one seemed to take heed of his prophetic insights. Needless to say, given their understanding of the potential pitfalls of technology, Huxley and other prescient figures such as Heidegger should be taught at every university. Blind technological development, without the educational means to understand its benefits as well as its dangers, is a roadmap for disaster, as the past few years have unambiguously taught us.  

One may, depending on one’s own predilections in culture – natural science or the human sciences – side with either Arnold or evolutionist T.H. Huxley, and chances are that, given the status of the natural sciences, which are today augmented by informational sciences (‘informatics,’ including computer science and robotics), most people would prioritise the natural science-and-informatics cluster.

But there is no gainsaying the fact that the natural sciences (in relation to technology and industry), given their ever-restless advancement to greater and ‘deeper’ knowledge of (mainly) the physical universe and biological nature (until about 2020, when these sciences were perverted in order to advance a democidal political programme) have a significant destabilising effect on culture and society. This was noted by social thinker and futurologist Alvin Toffler decades ago regarding the disruptive consequences of the constant and rapid stream of novel discoveries and inventions, something which Matthew Arnold already intuited more than a century before. 

Part of this unsettling effect of scientific – and concomitantly industrial – changes (usually termed ‘progress’), amounts to the exacerbation of what Arnold noted in the 19^th century already, to wit, the inability to form a coherent ‘picture’ of reality, or what is usually called a Weltanschauung (a ‘comprehensive view of the world’). It may seem strange, but natural science, given its sustained probing of the nature of ‘reality,’ cannot, in principle, produce such a coherent image. Freud knew this very well, as is evident when he wrote (Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, in Complete Works, p. 4757:

In my opinion, then, a Weltanschauung is an intellectual construction which solves all the problems of our existence uniformly on the basis of one overriding hypothesis, which, accordingly, leaves no question unanswered and in which everything that interests us finds its fixed place. It will easily be understood that the possession of a Weltanschauung of this kind is among the ideal wishes of human beings. Believing in it one can feel secure in life, one can know what to strive for, and how one can deal most expediently with one’s emotions and interests.

If that is the nature of a Weltanschauung, the answer as regards psycho-analysis is made easy. As a specialist science, a branch of psychology – a depth-psychology or psychology of the unconscious – it is quite unfit to construct a Weltanschauung of its own: it must accept the scientific one. But the Weltanschauung of science already departs noticeably from our definition. It is true that it too assumes the uniformity of the explanation of the universe; but it does so only as a programme, the fulfilment of which is relegated to the future. Apart from this it is marked by negative characteristics, by its limitation to what is at the moment knowable and by its sharp rejection of certain elements that are alien to it. It asserts that there are no sources of knowledge of the universe other than the intellectual working-over of carefully scrutinized observations – in other words, what we call research – and alongside of it no knowledge derived from revelation, intuition or divination. It seems as though this view came very near to being generally recognized in the course of the last few centuries that have passed; and it has been left to our century to discover the presumptuous objection that a Weltanschauung like this is alike paltry and cheerless, that it overlooks the claims of the human intellect and the needs of the human mind. 

If one of the leading intellectuals of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries could candidly admit to the shortcomings of natural science (which is always ‘programmatic’), as well as of psychoanalysis as an ever-evolving human science, what about today? Are we as so-called (post-)modern humans doomed to lack what ancient societies such as Greece and Rome, and even the Middle Ages – often (erroneously) depicted as an era of backwardness – possessed, namely a coherent Weltanschauung? 

Those readers who have a grasp of cultural history would recall that, despite the large levels of illiteracy during the medieval period, ordinary people were afforded a glimpse, or ‘spiritual map,’ of the world within which their lives unfolded, by the stained-glass tableaux of the cathedrals and churches of the time – from Byzantine through Romanesque to Gothic – illustrating important episodes from the Christian Bible and from the lives of saints. In this manner, they gained a mental grasp of their place in a divinely engendered world – a kind of map of understanding and faith – which left no uncertainty on their part as to their origin and destiny, as well as the way of life that was commensurate with their understanding. 

In passing I should note the illuminating study of The Bavarian Rococo Church by philosopher Karsten Harries – whom I was privileged to have as mentor during my time at Yale – in which he carefully delineated the gradually progressing, visually perceptible dissolution of the medieval Weltanschauung in the history of this architectural genre, where the increasing abstraction of rocaille registered such dissolution, simultaneously adumbrating the eventual turn to abstraction in art. 

It will be recalled that I previously alluded to the work of Leonard Shlain in Art and Physics, where he showed how breakthroughs in art foreshadow analogous breakthroughs in science; one might also say that the incremental abstraction legible in rocaille decoration of Rococo churches arguably pointed forward to both the increasing abstraction in art, and the high degree of abstractness of modern, post-Newtonian physics. At the same time the erosion of the medieval ‘world picture’ signalled the growing human incapacity to hold the nature of reality – and humanity’s place in it – within a single, encompassing, and persuasive image, as medieval people could still do. The world was becoming too complex for this to remain possible.

Is it at all possible, given this widely acknowledged complexity, to approximate anything remotely similar to the kind of unified Weltanschauung enjoyed by people in antiquity and the Middle Ages? It would have to be an attempt at a holistic synthesis of the knowledge amassed by humankind. I happen to have a friend in America (who must remain nameless for the time being) who is working on the establishment of a college that would provide just such a kind of education. May he succeed, for it would be an antidote to the narrow technicism I see all around me; and it would give young people the kind of intellectual orientation needed to rebuff the globalist cabal’s colonisation of the ubiquitous mainstream media. 

Although most people would laud scientific ‘progress’ as something worth paying the price for not being able to picture our place in the world, this price has been significant, as erstwhile President of the Czech Republic (and a noted intellectual in his own right), Vaclav Havel notes in a piece worth reading in its entirety: 

Classical modern science described only the surface of things, a single dimension of reality. And the more dogmatically science treated it as the only dimension, as the very essence of reality, the more misleading it became. Today, for instance, we may know immeasurably more about the universe than our ancestors did, and yet, it increasingly seems they knew something more essential about it than we do, something that escapes us. The same thing is true of nature and of ourselves. The more thoroughly all our organs and their functions, their internal structure, and the biochemical reactions that take place within them are described, the more we seem to fail to grasp the spirit, purpose, and meaning of the system that they create together and that we experience as our unique ‘self’.

And thus today we find ourselves in a paradoxical situation. We enjoy all the achievements of modern civilization that have made our physical existence on this earth easier in so many important ways. Yet we do not know exactly what to do with ourselves, where to turn. The world of our experiences seems chaotic, disconnected, confusing. There appear to be no integrating forces, no unified meaning, no true inner understanding of phenomena in our experience of the world. Experts can explain anything in the objective world to us, yet we understand our own lives less and less. In short, we live in the postmodern world, where everything is possible and almost nothing is certain.

Compare this with what I wrote above concerning the Middle Ages, and then one can only agree with Havel, that despite our vaunted ‘scientifically and technologically advanced society,’ as far as our philosophical, and generally cultural self-understanding are concerned, we are in a sorry state. One could argue that the recent downturn in global society’s fortunes – as a result of the concerted, and ongoing attempt, to destroy extant society and usher in a technocratic, totalitarian society – has considerably worsened our condition even more. But perhaps it has been a blessing in disguise, as only we ourselves can determine. 

From what I witness around me – people becoming more aware that their societies, and their very lives, are on the brink – it appears that this body blow against our humanity has led (and is leading) to a degree of self-reflection, collectively and individually, that I have seldom seen before. It has been the trigger for a renewed questioning stance, directed at the age-old conundrum, so poignantly addressed in philosophy and the arts: why are we here? 

And as before, one is bound to discover that the answer to this question can only be provided by ourselves, not only in words, but especially through our actions, even if we are guided by certain unshakeable beliefs and musings, which Immanuel Kant famously articulated in these immortal words (in his Critique of Practical Reason): 

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. 

It is striking that the first of these correlates with the purview of the natural sciences and the second with that of the humanities. We need both, to re-inscribe ourselves in an intelligible world. And a fundamental rethink of our approach to education is essential for this to be possible.