Understanding The Present: Science and the Soul of Modern Man

Bryan Appleyard
New York: Doubleday, 1993
269 pp., $23.50 hc

Leonard L. Antal
Independent Scholar

Understanding The Present, written by the London Times Science Editor, Bryan Appleyard, lambasts science, laments the spiritual decline of western culture, and foretells the demise of liberal democracy. A best-seller in England, the book has been acclaimed and condemned, perhaps in part because, as a seasoned journalist, Appleyard has invited controversy, coming up with "in your face" arguments that get one's juices going even as one struggles to understand the terms of the debate.

Appleyard takes issue with those philosophers who look upon science as the highest pursuit of the species. Sagan and Bronowski are particularly targeted for myopic perspectives that magnify science's place in our lives to the exclusion of spiritual values. As a group, these philosophers look upon today's scientific culture as a progressive evolution beginning with the first artisans of the stone and bronze ages, continuing with the mathematical and engineering achievements of the ancient Mediterranean world, and culminating with Newton, a kind of Messiah promised to homo scientifica.

To all of which, Appleyard says HOGWASH!!! What preceded Newton was not "Science" as we know it, but mere technology: agriculture, metallurgy, the management of fire, the invention of the wheel, the use of numbers. These were cultivated by ancient and prehistoric societies as a means of economic advantage and survival--nothing more.

To appreciate the difference between the ancient technology and modern Science, Appleyard takes us back three hundred years. It was then that Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton re-configured an entire cosmos. As Appleyard sees it, when those four men of science put the earth in an orbit around the sun, the solidum of Europe's beliefs quaked before an emergent method of thinking. This "scientific" method rejected the evidence of the senses (which had been the basis for Aristotelean physics and logic) as unreliable and unpredictable, and substituted observation, reason, and mathematics, i.e., the reductive algorithm. Using algorithms, those first scientists minted concepts the like of which never before had currency. They described a world regulated by universal, unalterable, irreducible, and infallible principles--the "laws of physics."

With this new method, "Science" as we know it came to be. These "laws" operate outside and beyond the influence of any moral authority, and depict a mechanical and self-sustaining cosmos existing in dimensions of perfect space and absolute time. The cosmos, Newton taught, functions mechanically, not morally. God needed only to start it up; "laws" took over from there.

What ensued after Newton was an unparalleled turn in humanity's thinking about its world and about itself. This is precisely what Sagan and Bronowski refuse to acknowledge. Unlike Newtonian science, pre-Newtonian technology left intact, and sometimes exalted, humanity's cosmic sense of place and did not uproot or diminish humankind's importance in the cosmic scheme. Pre-Newtonians, the beneficiaries of Aristotle's physics and St. Thomas Aquinas's cosmology, understood themselves to be at the very center of creation, beloved of a benevolent God, on a planet around which the heavenly bodies hovered in a divine ether.

How could a cosmos so spiritually nurturing be replaced by a cold, mechanistic one that made humankind irrelevant? Appleyard concludes that it was science's infallibility that so ruthlessly extirpated the ancient worldview, an infallibility derived from the fact that "science works." Its predictions of events, calculated in advance, always bore out. Its wondrous predictability promised power over nature and great wealth. Who can resist promises like these? But when humanity embraced science, it forever relinquished homocentricity.

The result: moral carnage. Every ethical tradition, convention, or association in western society has been scathed and undercut in the centuries since. Appleyard attributes this directly to inroads made by science into the fabric of the average person's view of reality, truth, and meaning. Because "science works," we use it as a benchmark by which to measure the quality and worth of all other cognition. An opinion or idea finds acceptance to the extent it smacks of being scientific. In this sense, science usurped what historically had been the role of ethics and religion. Science became the new religion, the new theory of everything, the new cosmology. But being amoral, it was, and is, devoid and incapable of moral content.

And being amoral, science gives us a worldview that deprives humankind of importance, purpose, or relevance. We are machines under the dominance of genetic coding; our very thoughts are trivialized as the lambent coefficients of our last meal. Anyone who holds a moral ground must daily fend against internal second guessing from the scientific guru within, just to maintain any public pretense about the "moral" rightness of one's position.

These developments have culminated in a crisis for liberal democratic societies and institutions. Centuries of enlightened skepticism and scientific humanism have put western liberal democracies in irreversible decline. Beset with ethical issues sprung from Newtonian technology, society is morally adrift. Does science provide guidance on abortion? No, it only makes abortion accessible and convenient. Genetic engineering is delivered to our doorstep sans instruction manual.

Is it surprising, then, that issues of technology become increasingly problematic at the very time that democracies are increasingly "liberal" toward other and counter-cultures? Not according to Appleyard. Science preempts us from a moral ground so that to be "liberal" requires that no view on a moral issue have standing over another.

The consequence of this, according to Appleyard, is that democracies are overrun by a plethora of persuasions and fractious politics. Foreclosed irrevocably is a return to the unified moral perception and political ethic that gave birth and sustenance to western society in the first place. Dispute resolution by consensus is increasingly improbable. The toll on institutions is inevitable. Sliding into impracticability, "Democracy" is about to be consigned to the dustbin of history because of modern science's absolute, irreversible, and perpetual corrosion of every moral system or belief. Appleyard predicts the same fate to any society or culture that thinks it can import western technology but avoid western decay.

In touching upon cultural diversity and multi-culturalism, Appleyard has entered into a debate that has heated up exponentially in the last decade. Appleyard tells us that the scientific method is a major cause, perhaps the very root, for the erroneous ethic of cultural tolerance that condemns the tendency among individuals to prefer and privilege one's own culture and value system above all others.

Appleyard's incrimination of science is in sharp contrast to Jonathon Rauch's apology of it (Kindly Inquisitors: The New Attacks on Free Thought, 1993) and the liberal democratic traditions fostered by the enlightened humanism of the 17th and 18th centuries. Rauch's point is that the ethics of tolerance, or humanitarianism, become troublesome to democratic institutions only when the exclusionary rules of the scientific method are disregarded. These rules would deny authoritative value to those attitudes, practices, and beliefs found wanting under rigorous scientific review. In Rauch's view, exclusion of views that have been scientifically invalidated creates an honest consensus and prevents social disintegration.

Appleyard's objection would be that science is revisionistic, yielding conclusions which tomorrow's discoveries will likely reverse. Thus, no matter how scientifically a judgment is rendered about a minority culture's beliefs, practices, and attitudes, revisionism jeopardizes the review process and engenders discordant views and inconsistent social policies. Moreover, such a judgment can never palliate the sense of injury to those whose views are marginalized or excluded; these will harbor some notion that the "science" against them was tempered or rigged by the personal views of those formulating judgments.

Appleyard is not concerned in the least that other peoples and cultures are excluded. For him, a unified political attitude promotes a much stronger political reality than one ridden with diversity and the attendant impaired sense of purpose and direction. The logic of Appleyard's politics suggests that a sub-culture whose views clash with the ethical traditions and moral institutions of the mainstream should be separately organized under their own morally, not scientifically, adduced cultural and political systems and institutions. Ideologically, Appleyard's politics would tend toward balkanized culture groups and to democracies without dissent.

In fairness to Appleyard, his more earnest participation is in the debate over "Science v. Spirituality" waged among philosophers of science and theologians. There will be no relief from the spiritual crisis set off by the enculturation of Science until there emerges a worldview that restores relevance and cosmic significance in the fact we exist.

Surveying contemporary "isms," Appleyard sees no bona fide opportunity for a return to true spirituality. Ruled out as deadends are environmentalism, a return to orthodox religion, a resurgent "scientism," or a new spirituality based on the post-Newtonian, or quantum, physics.

Appleyard scoffs at those who look upon environmentalism as a scientific form of spiritual fundamentalism. Yes, it is able to garner enthusiasts, but that's because it strikes that warm chord for "good housekeeping." Admittedly, it espouses good sense and responsible habits. This is not, however, the stuff of religion; commitment here does not require adherents to give up their lives in a fight to the death.

Appleyard is disdainful of those who think orthodox religion might make a comeback. Theologians have for the last three hundred years redefined, revised, conceded, and retreated before the onslaught of reasoned skepticism. This pattern will not cease or reverse.

Appleyard dismisses as fanciful any hope that science is capable of engendering its own, unique spirituality. "Spirituality" and "Science" are totally incongruent concepts. The pulse of one's spirituality is not quickened by equations; telescopic revelations of far flung heavens inspire awe, but not reverence.

Modern theories of sub-atomic matter that defy conventional description, that imply a reality beyond comprehension or knowing, cannot be a cornerstone for a new, science-based spirituality. It is the very nature of science to undergo change at its theoretic underpinnings, to move toward explanations that are more effective, far reaching, workable. Thus, any science-based spirituality is endowed with a cruel fragility and faces certain extinction at the inevitable moment when yet another discovery completely overturns the orthodoxy on which it had come to rest.

As to science itself, Appleyard concludes that it is actually dogmatic mysticism masquerading as the "Truth about Everything." It is mysticism, because it can be expressed only in numbers, esoterisms "discovered" by the initiated to exist mysteriously in the reality being observed. And that "reality" is one that exists only in the Newtonian model, which assumes a cosmos of absolute space and time, of fixed points of reference and three dimensions--a reality which in its assumption of absolutes parallels Platonistic idealism.

And is the fact science "works" sufficient justification for the faith men of science place in their results? Appleyard believes the question has never been answered satisfactorily. Undeniably, it works, but science's attempts at explaining why it works is under constant revision without any pretension that an epistemological understanding is possible. Thus, Appleyard argues, to believe it is magic that makes it work is as compelling and complete an explanation as any science provides and, as an answer, magic is a good deal more satisfying if it permits a margin in which myth and spirituality can operate.

Science must no longer be seen as an explanation of everything, as it is incapable of furnishing any answer to humankind's spiritual needs. It has not only impaired man's capacity for spiritual awareness, it has disabled religions from providing comfort to humanity. And religions can not be spun into existence out of the minds of theologians and other deep thinkers. It can come about only when the larger human experience, the total human, and the phenomenon of our existence as a species, is taken into account.

Understanding The Present attacks the perception held by many that science is the fountainhead of our well-being. In questioning its place in our lives, Appleyard invites us to reflect upon what has been lost and throws open to discussion how to restore meaning and importance to living. No one can read this intensely provocative and unsettling book without concern for the future.


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