Preaching to the Choir
Curtis White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers
Melville House, 218pp, £16.99, ISBN 9781612192000
reviewed by Joel White
In a recent article written in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s death, Slavoj Žižek lists some of the key characteristics that determined both the success and the danger of Thatcher’s political stance. The most prominent of these characteristics can be summarised by a rather entertaining response that Thatcher once gave when posed the question: ‘What was your greatest political achievement?’ After pausing to think, she simply replied: ‘New Labour.’
The politico-philosophical significance of such a response is that Thatcher’s achievement in crushing the Labour left in Britain was so successful that even her political opponents became enveloped in the centre-right’s ideological sphere, adopting its basic economic policies and much more. The important point to be grasped here is that any field of criticism, be that political, philosophical, religious or purely academic, is in deep crisis if it no longer bases itself in its own ideological precepts but either simply reacts to its opponents’ - or worse, only appeases them by means of watering down their arguments. Curtis White’s The Science Delusion falls prey to this trap. So much so that perhaps if one were to ask Richard Dawkins at the end of his career: ‘What was your greatest accomplishment?’ he might curtly reply, ‘Curtis White.’
Speculation and hyperbole aside, there is much to be said for The Science Delusion in terms of its intent, especially for the well over-due response to the rise of New Atheism and its more than zealous disciples. However, where White falls short is how the book swiftly enters into the dangerous domain of the polemic. The book concentrates on what can be called the ‘politics of philosophy,’ (rather than political philosophy) which includes polemics, controversies, and popular discourses that are both sensational and easily digestible for mass audiences, utilising rhetoric and a form of one-upmanship. Instead of doing philosophy, so to speak, The Science Delusion just argues about its status. Although the book does have its moments of original philosophic clarity, based mostly in a call to Romanticism, it concentrates too disproportionately on the rigour of Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ arguments and not on its own philosophical positions. Furthermore, this early overemphasis on rigour and accuracy rather ironically converges in a moment that would make any good Marxist student wince. White, whilst explaining Althusser’s concept of ‘Interpellation,’ unfortunately spells it wrong. Instead, he writes ‘Interpolation,’ a scientific term that explains the need to estimate data for any given set where certain points are missing from a curve of best fit. A minor point, granted, and it would have been ignored if White’s arguments against New Atheism were not so wanting of philosophical weight.
The further problem with the ‘politics of philosophy,’ versus political philosophy - or any other philosophy for that matter - is that is avoids any real philosophical engagement beyond summary and supplementation. In doing so it puts its own methodological and ideological precepts into crisis and envelops itself entirely into the rhetoric of the opposition, strengthening the opposition at the same time. It does this by simply not doing what it is supposed to be defending. In White’s case this is art and philosophy. Instead of art and philosophy we are presented once again with the offending argument, here Scientism, and little room is left for what White really wants to affirm: Romanticism.
Two of White’s strongest arguments against the over-rationalisation and normalisation of Scientism come, unsurprisingly, from the voices of Friedrich Schiller and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The first, although written as a summary of Schiller’s dialectic from Essays, presents itself as a coherent argument against the stability of nature. The three moments of Schiller’s dialectic start with what he calls ‘an original power,’ usually ‘Nature.’ This Nature then passes through distortion and contradiction due to Culture. It finishes, as all dialectics do, with the establishment of a new power, or ‘new Nature,’ repeating itself in a cycle of distortion and reestablishment. What White fails to do is connect this strong summary of Schiller’s dialectic to an argument against Scientism. To connect the dots, Schiller counsels us that Nature is ‘always what we once were, but are no longer.’
In this case, any attempt to rationalise Nature or hold onto a Nature that is always already past is ultimately futile. There is no original Nature in which to catalogue and rationalise. In fact, even the original Nature that Schiller proposes is truly only the reestablishment of a distorted Nature. Furthermore, it is Culture, or man’s interaction with Nature, that causes its distortion. That is, Science cannot escape the claim that is ultimately cultural, for it cannot exist separate to man. Its existence is even bound to man’s symbolic creation: language. To make a scientific claim, it is necessary to use a form of symbolic language. Due to the cultural dimension of science, one can make the claim that science itself can cause the distortion of the nature it attempts to describe. Carefully followed through with enough time and care, Schiller’s dialectic poses to be an incredibly cogent argument that stands against the bastions of Scientism quite firmly without any need for wasteful banter. In fact, it is a shame this wasn’t a book on Schiller.
The second coherent argument comes from Hegel. If anyone has read Hegel’s attack on Phrenology in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), it is clear that his arguments present themselves as another set of persuasive attacks against the dangers of pseudoscience and an over-emphasis on dogmatic materialism. Phrenology, which professes to determine almost anything about a given human by the size of their skull, is summarised by Hegel with the proposition: ‘you, your inner being, are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted, which means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man’s reality.’ Something that White manages to successfully argue, albeit through the words of Hegel, is that Empiricism tends to ignore the difficulty in saying what a Self is - that is, beyond just a collection of flesh and bones. The contemporary version of Hegel’s argument is pointed out by White in relation to Sebastian Seung’s Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Allen Lane, 2012). Seung’s assertion, much like a phrenology, is that you can tell all you need to tell about a human just by looking at his connectomes. By creating a computer image of how all the neurons connect Seung states that one can successfully see who one really is. Seung clearly misses the important point that my lived experience already does that. I am who I am before I look at any colourful print out. Our reality therefore is not, as White right argues, just a chemical equation, and if I regard my reality as more than just a chemical equation, it does not mean that I suppose my reality to be divine.
Unfortunately, White does not follow these two strains of thought far enough and their use feels rather secondary to the polemic that runs through the book. What’s more, he really doesn’t hide away from this critique. He openly admits that he writes to the converted, and that he wishes to attempt no attack against popular scientists that may result in changing someone’s mind. He believes this challenge to be futile. In subsequent interviews, White even asserts that his book has been read all wrong, and that his satirical stance - which includes its fair share of bad jokes - was not intended to be offensive. The bad jokes are apparently his own way of writing to his native audience of ‘artists, lefty intellectuals, humanists, and other species of the socially dispossessed.’ However, the fact that White wishes only to play into his audience’s hand is what he gets so dangerously wrong. If The Science Delusion had been nothing other than a well overdue reaffirmation of Romanticism, it would have been all the better for it. It would have been more offensive without being offensive and certainly more radical in its attack against the evident dangers of Scientism.
The Science Delusion is, therefore, a book much like its counterpart: The God Delusion. It remains populist. It is written purely for those that will sit and nod at every sentence. It preaches to the converted. To be further cynical, both even adhere to the same strict marketing rules of the publishing industry. In fact, it could be quite easily argued that the book sales of a polemic discourse are always bolstered by its opposing argument. Both feed off each other, as both form one half of a whole. The Science Delusion, like all other populist books, is neither a piece of philosophy, science, or art, but a piece of pop-philosophy, which is enveloped in the ideological sphere of its opposition. White attempts to explain that science is part of culture, that the questions being asked and the way answers are interpreted are culturally configured and mediated. However, in reality, White repeats the arguments of Scientism without doing much philosophy at all. On the up side, I now have a long list of texts and books by a number of Romanticists that, as White rightfully says, can pose a real threat to the advance of an uninterrogated and all-pervasive ideology of Scientism.
The politico-philosophical significance of such a response is that Thatcher’s achievement in crushing the Labour left in Britain was so successful that even her political opponents became enveloped in the centre-right’s ideological sphere, adopting its basic economic policies and much more. The important point to be grasped here is that any field of criticism, be that political, philosophical, religious or purely academic, is in deep crisis if it no longer bases itself in its own ideological precepts but either simply reacts to its opponents’ - or worse, only appeases them by means of watering down their arguments. Curtis White’s The Science Delusion falls prey to this trap. So much so that perhaps if one were to ask Richard Dawkins at the end of his career: ‘What was your greatest accomplishment?’ he might curtly reply, ‘Curtis White.’
Speculation and hyperbole aside, there is much to be said for The Science Delusion in terms of its intent, especially for the well over-due response to the rise of New Atheism and its more than zealous disciples. However, where White falls short is how the book swiftly enters into the dangerous domain of the polemic. The book concentrates on what can be called the ‘politics of philosophy,’ (rather than political philosophy) which includes polemics, controversies, and popular discourses that are both sensational and easily digestible for mass audiences, utilising rhetoric and a form of one-upmanship. Instead of doing philosophy, so to speak, The Science Delusion just argues about its status. Although the book does have its moments of original philosophic clarity, based mostly in a call to Romanticism, it concentrates too disproportionately on the rigour of Dawkins’ and Hitchens’ arguments and not on its own philosophical positions. Furthermore, this early overemphasis on rigour and accuracy rather ironically converges in a moment that would make any good Marxist student wince. White, whilst explaining Althusser’s concept of ‘Interpellation,’ unfortunately spells it wrong. Instead, he writes ‘Interpolation,’ a scientific term that explains the need to estimate data for any given set where certain points are missing from a curve of best fit. A minor point, granted, and it would have been ignored if White’s arguments against New Atheism were not so wanting of philosophical weight.
The further problem with the ‘politics of philosophy,’ versus political philosophy - or any other philosophy for that matter - is that is avoids any real philosophical engagement beyond summary and supplementation. In doing so it puts its own methodological and ideological precepts into crisis and envelops itself entirely into the rhetoric of the opposition, strengthening the opposition at the same time. It does this by simply not doing what it is supposed to be defending. In White’s case this is art and philosophy. Instead of art and philosophy we are presented once again with the offending argument, here Scientism, and little room is left for what White really wants to affirm: Romanticism.
Two of White’s strongest arguments against the over-rationalisation and normalisation of Scientism come, unsurprisingly, from the voices of Friedrich Schiller and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. The first, although written as a summary of Schiller’s dialectic from Essays, presents itself as a coherent argument against the stability of nature. The three moments of Schiller’s dialectic start with what he calls ‘an original power,’ usually ‘Nature.’ This Nature then passes through distortion and contradiction due to Culture. It finishes, as all dialectics do, with the establishment of a new power, or ‘new Nature,’ repeating itself in a cycle of distortion and reestablishment. What White fails to do is connect this strong summary of Schiller’s dialectic to an argument against Scientism. To connect the dots, Schiller counsels us that Nature is ‘always what we once were, but are no longer.’
In this case, any attempt to rationalise Nature or hold onto a Nature that is always already past is ultimately futile. There is no original Nature in which to catalogue and rationalise. In fact, even the original Nature that Schiller proposes is truly only the reestablishment of a distorted Nature. Furthermore, it is Culture, or man’s interaction with Nature, that causes its distortion. That is, Science cannot escape the claim that is ultimately cultural, for it cannot exist separate to man. Its existence is even bound to man’s symbolic creation: language. To make a scientific claim, it is necessary to use a form of symbolic language. Due to the cultural dimension of science, one can make the claim that science itself can cause the distortion of the nature it attempts to describe. Carefully followed through with enough time and care, Schiller’s dialectic poses to be an incredibly cogent argument that stands against the bastions of Scientism quite firmly without any need for wasteful banter. In fact, it is a shame this wasn’t a book on Schiller.
The second coherent argument comes from Hegel. If anyone has read Hegel’s attack on Phrenology in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), it is clear that his arguments present themselves as another set of persuasive attacks against the dangers of pseudoscience and an over-emphasis on dogmatic materialism. Phrenology, which professes to determine almost anything about a given human by the size of their skull, is summarised by Hegel with the proposition: ‘you, your inner being, are so and so, because your skull-bone is so constituted, which means nothing else than that we regard a bone as the man’s reality.’ Something that White manages to successfully argue, albeit through the words of Hegel, is that Empiricism tends to ignore the difficulty in saying what a Self is - that is, beyond just a collection of flesh and bones. The contemporary version of Hegel’s argument is pointed out by White in relation to Sebastian Seung’s Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are (Allen Lane, 2012). Seung’s assertion, much like a phrenology, is that you can tell all you need to tell about a human just by looking at his connectomes. By creating a computer image of how all the neurons connect Seung states that one can successfully see who one really is. Seung clearly misses the important point that my lived experience already does that. I am who I am before I look at any colourful print out. Our reality therefore is not, as White right argues, just a chemical equation, and if I regard my reality as more than just a chemical equation, it does not mean that I suppose my reality to be divine.
Unfortunately, White does not follow these two strains of thought far enough and their use feels rather secondary to the polemic that runs through the book. What’s more, he really doesn’t hide away from this critique. He openly admits that he writes to the converted, and that he wishes to attempt no attack against popular scientists that may result in changing someone’s mind. He believes this challenge to be futile. In subsequent interviews, White even asserts that his book has been read all wrong, and that his satirical stance - which includes its fair share of bad jokes - was not intended to be offensive. The bad jokes are apparently his own way of writing to his native audience of ‘artists, lefty intellectuals, humanists, and other species of the socially dispossessed.’ However, the fact that White wishes only to play into his audience’s hand is what he gets so dangerously wrong. If The Science Delusion had been nothing other than a well overdue reaffirmation of Romanticism, it would have been all the better for it. It would have been more offensive without being offensive and certainly more radical in its attack against the evident dangers of Scientism.
The Science Delusion is, therefore, a book much like its counterpart: The God Delusion. It remains populist. It is written purely for those that will sit and nod at every sentence. It preaches to the converted. To be further cynical, both even adhere to the same strict marketing rules of the publishing industry. In fact, it could be quite easily argued that the book sales of a polemic discourse are always bolstered by its opposing argument. Both feed off each other, as both form one half of a whole. The Science Delusion, like all other populist books, is neither a piece of philosophy, science, or art, but a piece of pop-philosophy, which is enveloped in the ideological sphere of its opposition. White attempts to explain that science is part of culture, that the questions being asked and the way answers are interpreted are culturally configured and mediated. However, in reality, White repeats the arguments of Scientism without doing much philosophy at all. On the up side, I now have a long list of texts and books by a number of Romanticists that, as White rightfully says, can pose a real threat to the advance of an uninterrogated and all-pervasive ideology of Scientism.