Breaking the Spell

by Daniel C. Dennett

  Consider the curious problem of drawing a straight line. A really straight line. How do we do it? We use a straight-edge, of course. And where did we get it? Over the centuries we refined our techniques for making straighter and straighter so-called straightedges, pitting them against one another in supervised trials and mutual adjustments that have kept raising the threshold of accuracy. We now have large machines that are accurate to within a millionth of an inch over their entire length, and we have no difficulty in using our current vantage point to appreciate the practically unattainable but readily conceivable norm of a really straight edge. We discovered that norm, the eternal Platonic Form of the Straight, if you like, through our creative activity.2

  Whether we date the beginning of science to early Egyptian geometry (literally, earth-measuring) or follow the transformation of religious fascination with “heavenly bodies” and calendar cycles into astronomy, science began to take on its self-critical concern for evidence and rigorous argumentation only a few thousand years ago. Religion is much older, of course, although organized religion—with creeds and hierarchies of ecclesiastical officials and codified systems of prohibitions and requirements—is roughly contemporaneous with organized science, and with writing. This is unlikely to be a coincidence. It takes a lot of record-keeping to overcome the memory limitations of the human brain—a topic considered in more detail in chapters 5 and 6.

  Astronomers and mathematicians collaborated with priests at the outset, helping each other with difficult questions: How many days till we can have our winter-solstice ritual? When will the stars be in the right position for the most effective and proper sacrificial ceremony? So, without the question-posing by religion, science might never have found the funding it needed to get off the ground. More recently, of course, these specialists’ perspectives have diverged into competing worldviews, a divorce made public and irrevocable at the dawn of modern science in the seventeenth century. The evolution of warfare also played a significant role in the development of science, as literal arms races paid for the R & D of new weapons, vehicles, maps, navigational devices, systems of human organization, and much more. Swords before plowshares, no doubt, and catalogues of plunder before bird lists and taxonomies of flowers. Agriculture, manufacturing, and trade—every project of human civilization has generated questions that needed answers, and over time the techniques for systematic and reliable question-answering evolved, by cultural, not genetic, evolution.

  Thus was science born out of religion and civilization’s other projects, a very recent cultural phenomenon but one that has transformed the planet like nothing else in the last sixty-five million years. The visionary engineer Paul MacCready has made an arresting calculation: Ten thousand years ago, human beings (plus their domestic animals) accounted for less than a tenth of 1 percent (by weight) of all vertebrate life on land and in the air. Back then, we were just another mammalian species, and not a particularly populous one (he estimates eighty million people worldwide). Today, that percentage, including livestock and pets, is in the neighborhood of 98! As MacCready (2004) puts it:

  Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life—complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly we humans (a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature), have grown in population, technology, and intelligence to a position of terrible power: we now wield the paintbrush.3

  So science, and the technology it spawns, has been explosively practical, an amplifier of human powers in almost every imaginable dimension, making us stronger, faster, able to see farther in both space and time, healthier, more secure, more knowledgeable about just about everything, including our own origins—but that doesn’t mean it can answer all questions or serve all needs.

  Science doesn’t have the monopoly on truth, and some of its critics have argued that it doesn’t even live up to its advertisements as a reliable source of objective knowledge. I am going to deal swiftly with this bizarre claim, for two reasons: I and others have dealt with it at length elsewhere (Dennett, 1997; Gross and Levitt, 1998; Weinberg, 2003), and, besides, everybody knows better—whatever people may say in the throes of academic battle. They reveal this again and again in their daily lives. I have yet to meet a postmodern science critic who is afraid to fly in an airplane because he doesn’t trust the calculations of the thousands of aeronautical engineers and physicists who have demonstrated and exploited the principles of flight, nor have I ever heard of a devout Wahhabi who prefers consulting his favorite imam about the proven oil reserves in Saudi Arabia over the calculations of geologists. If you buy and install a new battery in your mobile phone, you expect it to work, and will be mightily surprised and angry if it doesn’t. You are quite ready to bet your life on the extraordinary reliability of the technology that surrounds you, and you don’t even give it a second thought. Every church trusts arithmetic to keep track accurately of the receipts in the collection plate, and we all calmly ingest drugs from aspirin to Zocor, confident that there is ample scientific evidence in support of the hypothesis that these are safe and effective.

  But what about all the controversies in science? New theories are trumpeted one week and discredited the next. When Nobel laureates disagree over a scientific claim, at least one of them is just wrong, in spite of being an anointed prince or princess of the church of science. And what about the occasional scandals of fraudulent data and suppression of results? Scientists are not infallible, nor are they, as a rule, more virtuous than laypeople, but they do submit to a remarkable discipline that keeps them honest in spite of themselves, imposing elaborate systems of self-restraint and review, and to a remarkable degree depersonalizing their individual contributions. So, although it is true that there have been eminent scientists who were racists, or sexists or drug addicts or just plain crazy, their contributions almost always stand or fall independently of these personal failings, thanks to the filters, checks, and balances that weed out the unreliable work. (Occasionally, a scientist or a whole school of scientific research will fall into dishonor or political disrepute, and since serious scientists don’t want to cite those pariahs in their own work, this blocks perfectly good research for a generation or more. In psychology, for example, research on eidetic imagery—“photographic memory”—was stalled for a long time because some of the early work was done by Nazis.)

  Through a microscope, the cutting edge of a beautifully sharpened ax looks like the Rocky Mountains, all jagged and irregular, but it is the dull heft of the steel behind the edge that gives the ax its power. Similarly, the cutting edge of science seen up close looks ragged and chaotic, a bunch of big egos engaging in shouting matches, their judgment distorted by jealousy, ambition, and greed, but behind them, agreed upon by all the disputants, is the massive routine weight of accumulated results, the facts that give science its power. Not surprisingly, those who want to puncture the reputation of science and drain off its immense prestige and influence tend to ignore the wide-angle perspective and concentrate on the clashes of schools and their not-so-hidden agendas. But, ironically, when they set out to make their case for the prosecution (using all the finely polished tools of logic and statistics), all their good evidence of the failings and biases of science comes from science’s own highly vigorous exercises in self-policing and self-correction. The critics have no choice: there is no better source of truth on any topic than well-conducted science, and they know it.

  What about the distinction between the “hard” sciences—physics, chemistry, mathematics, molecular biology, geology, and their kin among the Naturwissenschaften—and the “soft” social sciences (along with history and the other disciplines in the humanities), the Geisteswissenschaften? It is widely believed that the social sciences aren’t really science at all, but, rather, just gussied-up political propaganda of one sort or another. Or at best they are a kind of science (herme
neutical or interpretive science) that plays by different rules, with different goals and methodologies. There is no denying that ideological battles rage within the social sciences over just these issues. What chance is there that the work that passes muster with one camp or another will be worthy of the respectful attention we give to results in the hard sciences? The discipline of anthropology, notoriously, is divided in two, with the physical anthropologists siding with the biologists and other hard scientists and typically unable to conceal their contempt for the cultural anthropologists, who side with the literary theorists and other folks in the humanities and typically express an equally withering contempt for their “reductionist” colleagues in the other camp. This is deplorable. A few hardy anthropologists, such as Atran (2002), Boyer (2001), Cronk et al. (2000), Dunbar (2004), Durham (1992), and—leaping to late in the alphabet—Sperber (1996), try to bridge the gap between evolutionary biology and culture, and they have to deal with an incessant swarm of ideologically driven critics.

  Similar if less extreme divisions can be found in psychology, economics, political science, and sociology. With Freudians and Marxists and Skinnerians and Gibsonians and Piagetians and Chomskians and Foucauldians—and structuralists and deconstructionists and computationalists and functionalists—waging their campaigns, it is undeniable that ideology plays a large role in how these putatively scientific investigations are carried out. Is it all just ideology? While the earthquakes of controversy rage on the jagged peaks, do valuable objective results accumulate down in the valleys that can be used by any school of thought? Yes, and it is quite obvious. Researchers in one school routinely avail themselves of the hard-won results of their opponents, since, if the science is done right, everybody has to accept the results—but not the interpretations put on them. A lot of the valuable work done in these fields consists in confirming the well-gathered data (and replicating the experiments), and then showing that a better interpretation of the results follows from a rival theoretical perspective.

  3 Putting ideology in its place

  Ideology is like halitosis—it is what the other fellow has.

  —Terry Eagleton, Ideology

  That’s the practical answer, but I want to consider a deeper challenge as well. (A philosopher is someone who says, “We know it’s possible in practice; we’re trying to work out if it’s possible in principle!”) In 1998, the Yale legal scholar J. M. Balkin published Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology, a fascinating book that looks at these controversies from a biologically informed perspective. In particular, he attempts to resolve what he calls Mannheim’s paradox: “If all discourse is ideological, how is it possible to have anything other than an ideological discourse on ideology?”(p. 125). Is there—could there be—any ideology-free, neutral standpoint from which to judge these issues objectively? Just what is ideology? Not just any mistaken thinking, but thinking that is pathological or bad for us in some way. After reviewing a variety of representative (and of course highly ideological!) definitions of ideology, Balkin proposes that ideology be identified with ways of thinking that help maintain unjust social conditions.

  To understand what is ideological, we need a notion not only of what is true but also of what is just. False beliefs about other people, no matter how mistaken or unflattering, are not ideological until we can demonstrate that they have ideological effects in the social world. [p. 105]

  This brings into the open a major difference between goals and methods in the social sciences and the hard sciences: social sciences are not just about people (so is the molecular biology of HIV and the chemistry of human nutrition) but about how people should live. There are moral judgments implicit in the very setting of the research agendas of these fields, and although these are like the value judgments implicit in such questions as “How can we interfere with HIV replication?” (why would we want to do this?) and “How can we improve human nutrition?” (what standard do we use to measure good nutrition?), the value judgments implicit in the social sciences are less obviously judgments that every sane person would agree on. To call somebody’s thinking ideological is thus to condemn it from a moral perspective that the target may not accept. Much of the controversy is fueled, Balkin observes, by the quite justifiable fear of what he calls imperialist universalism:

  …the view that there are universal concrete standards of justice and human rights that apply to every society, whether pre-or postindustrial, whether secular or religious, and that it is the duty of right-minded people to change the positive norms and institutions of all societies so that they conform with these universal norms of justice and universal human rights. [p. 150]

  Certainly many people in the United States are blithely confident that this is true, and hold that it is our duty to spread the American Way to all the peoples of the world. They think that any culture that finds our message repugnant is just deeply misinformed about how things are and how they ought to be. The only alternative they can see to this is truly shocking, a moral relativism that holds that whatever a particular culture approves of—polygamy, slavery, infanticide, cliteridectomy, you name it—is beyond rational criticism. Since such relativism is intolerable, in their eyes, imperialist universalism must be endorsed. Either we’re right and they’re wrong, or “right” and “wrong” have no meaning!

  Meanwhile, many Muslims—for instance—would agree that moral relativism is beneath contempt, while insisting that they have the only true insight into what ought to be done in the world. Many Hindus think likewise, of course. The more one learns of the different passionately held convictions of peoples around the world, the more tempting it becomes to decide that there really couldn’t be a standpoint from which truly universal moral judgments could be constructed and defended. So it is not surprising that cultural anthropologists tend to take one variety of moral relativism or another as one of their enabling assumptions. Moral relativism is also rampant in other groves of academia, but not all. It is decidedly a minority position among ethicists and other philosophers, for example, and it is by no means a necessary presupposition of scientific open-mindedness.

  We don’t have to assume that there are no moral truths in order to study other cultures fairly and objectively; we just have to set aside, for the time being, the assumption that we already know what they are. Imperialist universalism (of any variety) is not a good way to start. Even if “we” are right, insisting on it from the outset is ultimately neither diplomatic nor scientific. Science is not supposed to have all the moral answers and shouldn’t be advertised as providing them. We may appeal to science to clarify or confirm factual presuppositions of our moral discussions, but it doesn’t provide or establish the values that our ethical judgments and arguments are based on. We who put our faith in science should be no more reluctant to acknowledge this than those who put their faith in one religion or another. Everybody should consider adopting the stable middle ground that Balkin provides: an open-minded (“ambivalent”) stance that permits a rational dialogue to engage the issues between people, no matter how radically different their cultural backgrounds. We can engage in this conversation with some reasonable hope of resolution that isn’t simply a matter of one culture overwhelming the other by brute force. We cannot expect, Balkin argues, to persuade others if we leave no room and opportunity for them to persuade us. Success does depend on the participants’ sharing, and knowing that they share, two transcendent values of truth and justice. What this means is only that both parties accept that these values are inescapably presupposed by human projects that we all participate in, simply by being alive: the projects of staying alive, and staying secure. Nothing more parochial need be assumed, and even “Martians” should be able to agree on this.

  The idea of a transcendent value is rather like the idea of a perfectly straight line—not achievable in practice, but readily comprehended as an id
eal that can be approximated even if it can’t be fully articulated. At first this may look like a dubious dodge—an ideal that we all somehow accept even if nobody can say what it is! But in fact, just such ideals are accepted and inescapable even in the most rigorous and formalistic of investigations. Consider the ideal of rationality itself. When logicians disagree about whether classical logic is to be preferred to intuitionistic logic, for instance, they have to have in mind a prior standard of rationality, by appeal to which one logic could be seen (by all) as better than another, and they have to presume that they share this ideal, but they don’t have to be able to formulate this standard explicitly—that’s what they’re working on. And in just the same spirit, people with radically different ideas about which policies or laws would best serve humanity can—indeed, must—presuppose some shared ideal if there is to be any point in talking it over at all.

  Balkin provides an imaginary dialogue that illustrates the appeal to transcendent values in its simplest form. A marauding army massacres the people and we call them war criminals. They object, saying that their culture permits what they have done, but we can turn their point back on them.