For better or worse, I’m heavily invested in the unstable, often controversial relationship between science and the humanities. I often don’t know where it will lead me next. In this case, it led me through Wendell Berry’s essay “against modern superstition”- Life is a Miracle. Recommended by one of my biology professors, it is framed as a response to E.O. Wilson’s semi-famous Consilience. I have read very little of E.O. Wilson, his Consilience, and his theories on sociobiology and secular humanism, but Berry’s analysis is framed as a standalone sort of thing so I decided to take it on.
Essentially, Berry favors a return to context in science, among other things. I liked the summary that I found over on MDSF’s blog:
“Berry's premise is that the scientific community is arrogant: considers everything within its grasp, ignores anything that cannot be easily measured, doesn't have a concept of place, expects too much of its practitioners, expects to be taken at its word despite past shortcomings, etc. Berry's life themes, regarding the value of place and community, give him a framework of sorts for his critique.”
Berry’s sentiments are common ones today, but here, as everywhere, they can be carried too far. I’ll begin with the first line that prompted my response.
“But he [Wilson] does not acknowledge that synthesis and integration are merely parts of an explanation, which is invariably and inevitably less than the thing explained. …He is not making whole that which he has taken apart, and he should not claim credit for putting together what was already together. The uniqueness of an individual creature is inherent, not in its physical or behavioral anomalies, but in its life” (40).
It left me wondering: what makes the organism as a whole more inherently valuable than any one of its parts? It seems to me that we create the idea of the whole according to the units in which we perceive it to exist. Give me an objective reason to value, for example, an entire flowering plant more than a single one of its chloroplasts; any distinction appears arbitrary and based in our unique human bias. If dissecting a flower to its cellular components is short-sighted reductionism, why is limiting our sense of value to the flower as a cohesive element not equally limited? Yet Berry uses what he terms pitfalls of reductionism as fuel for his entire essay.
I turn to Lewis Thomas in his classic 1971 work The Lives of a Cell for support.
“Item. A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied."
We are a manifestation of the collective pieces that share, rent, and occupy us. To identify those pieces, even without the context of their function in our existence, is only to move towards another vantage point. I see nothing wrong with valuing the mechanism of a genetic pathway as an entity separate from its connection to my own cells (or to the cells of any organism). I’ll freely isolate it as its own remarkable phenomena, active in myself perhaps, but also in its own ethereal, chemical sphere.
It's counterintuitive to overlook smaller individual units of life (or even physical motion) simply because they are not large, distinctly corporeal forms like human beings, plants, and animals. Berry’s argument confuses itself; humans enact their hubris through science and so belittle life, but the worth of any aspect of life exists only insofar as it presents itself as something cohesive to us. How, Berry urges, can microscopic parts compare to the magnificent, inexplicable presence of whole organisms?
For Berry, we just are, and damn you if you wish to know further. It seems bizarre to me that the simple knowledge of a thing could tarnish the significance of that thing. His arguments border on the teleological and his bitterness towards science approaches useless sentimentality. He’s right that there have been (re: still are) clear cases of massive oversight in man’s scientific progress. But even then, Berry is guilty of reductionism of a method. These things happen not because of narrow focus, but because of reckless narrow focus –focus without ethics, without proper context, etcetera.
Moving quickly on, he attacks the momentum of scientific discovery.
“Devotion to the new enforces a devaluation and dismissal of the old…Can the past be taught, can it even be known, by people who have no respect for it?” (65)
Berry trades the is-ought problem for a has-always-been dilemma. If nothing else, it’s a perfect example of how he uses the force of his gifted rhetoric to sweep you up for a few delightful pages until you finally realize that he has not provided a single example of what, exactly, he even means. What does it mean to respect knowledge of the past, and is it a single and exclusive meaning? Surely it can’t be to stare with a mad, unspoken loyalty at familiar knowledge from behind a piece of glass, afraid to touch. If science is obsessive, clinging to old knowledge is every bit its twin.
He writes on:
“Originality and innovation in science may be a danger to the community, because newness is not inherently good…” (70).
Neither is oldness. We can know the worth of what the transcendentalists described in their poems without preserving the long-ago time in which they wrote them. What a boring thing that would be, to dwell upon a single vantage point! Now we reach my main concern, the reason that I write all of this (aside from the irresistible urge to defend science as a part of myself). It irks me when crowds rail against biotechnology, or genetically modified foods and organisms because they represent something “new” and “unnatural”. There can be no true “natural”, and it certainly doesn’t correspond to “old” or “established”. A lot of fuss over the nothing that is “naturalness” only obscures actual concerns of new developments and the possible over-atomization of parts, which is what Berry and those who agree with him rightly sense as uncomfortable consequences of progress.
Ultimately, I cannot agree that life possesses a value that exists only when its finer points are left unobserved. Life is a miracle of sorts, but not one that must be inexplicably complex in every respect. Existence is beautiful in contexts aesthetic, humanistic, and scientific. Furthermore, we must continue to pursue (scientifically or otherwise) those things which we do not know, even if it is possible that we will never actually be able know them. I will not, cannot accept science as this sinister, unintentionally aloof creature that Berry allows it to be.
Let it also be known that I don’t wish to belittle Berry altogether, even if he takes a heavy, unsympathetic hand to his opposition throughout the length of this essay. It's not that I disagree with his message entirely, because I do believe that reductionism without check is bound to lead us astray (I could, again, point you to Lewis Thomas here). Berry is a superb writer in spite of his opinions, and the things that he values are things that many of us would do well to cherish –sustainability in agriculture and industry, socioeconomic fairness, learning as a lifelong endeavor, and an open-minded existence. It’s just that he tackles them here with the weakness of hazy abstractions and an unfair engagement with Wilson’s ideas. It is my hope that the growing anti-science sentimentality I see in the public will soon fade in intensity, or at least redirect its efforts to a more truthful path.
If you’re still reading after all of that, thank you and I promise that I only have one more thing to tell you. By a stroke of luck, I happened to be reading another book simultaneously. It’s a nice, uncontroversial little piece about soil science and plant-fungi symbiosis called Tales from the Underground (I’d recommend it if that type of thing interests you). But the informal epilogue is the reason I bring it up. Author David Wolfe mentions Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass. He soon finds himself connecting with Berry from a distance, pointing out Whitman’s critique of scientific reductionism, of missing forests for the trees. But then he says something interesting.
“What poetry might Walt Whitman have been inspired to write had he known about the vast populations of extremophile microbes living in the deep Earth? …Or the antibiotics from the soil capable of curing our most deadly diseases? More important, what insight might he bring to our discussion of twenty-first century environmental issues, such as the judicious use of soil microbes in biotechnology…”
and then,
“There is a bit of the poet in each of us, and ultimately that is what we must rely on to form our personal sense of the natural world and our place in it. Perhaps learning about some of the fascinating new discoveries described in this book has already expanded your appreciation for the planet we inhabit. This knowledge has certainly had such an impact on me” (188).
Wolfe finds himself drawn to the side against extreme reductionism, as we all might, but he also recognizes the positive impact that scientific knowledge has had on his life. He expresses hope that we can carry a deeply personal connection with nature into the future while acknowledging that it can exist alongside biotechnology and the newly discovered methods of the present and future. Whitman might not have heard anything of value from the learn’d astronomer, but it doesn’t mean that there wasn’t anything there.
WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
References
Berry, Wendell. Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. New York: Counterpoint, 2000.
Thomas, Lewis. The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass.
Wolfe, David. Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life. Cambridge: Perseus, 2001.
No comments:
Post a Comment