Let me start with a brief quote, not from Dick Taverne's book, but from an essay unpromisingly titled “Constructivism in the works of Gibson” by (allegedly) Stephen McElwaine of Harvard and John Geoffrey of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A warning: you may find it hard going. But stay with me—it's only a paragraph.
Figure 1.
Dick Taverne
Oxford University Press, £18.99, pp 310 ISBN 0 19 280485 5
Rating: ★★★⋆
“If one examines precultural narrative, one is faced with a choice: either accept postmaterialist textual theory or conclude that sexual identity has intrinsic meaning. But a number of deappropriations concerning the difference between class and sexuality exist. Baudrillard uses the term `precultural narrative' to denote not theory per se, but subtheory. Therefore, Sontag's model of the postconceptual paradigm of context implies that the raison d'être of the observer is deconstruction.”
Did you understand that? If you think you did, the understanding lies exclusively within your own brain because that passage—and the essay from which it came—was the 1 536 888th written by a computer. Each is unique and each was created, on demand via the web, by a program developed at Monash University called The Postmodernism Generator. It may make grammatical sense, but it has no meaning.
Such twaddle could never, of course, be taken seriously, let alone published in a learned journal... or could it? The celebrated hoax of 1996 in which New York physicist Alan Sokal submitted a spoof article to the journal Social Text reveals otherwise. Increasingly irritated by a coterie of social theorists who were persistently sniping at science, Sokal's intention was to show that these particular emperors of radical thought were intellectually naked. His paper—an essay on quantum gravity stuffed full of buzzwords, scientific errors, and fashionable but irrelevant jargon—was accepted and published. Sokal had demonstrated his point.
In The March of Unreason, Dick Taverne quotes the Sokal affair as evidence that science is under attack. And not only from social theorists, who are, in practical terms, the least of his concerns. Animal rights' campaigners, practitioners of alternative medicine, some politicians and clerics, pressure groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and all forms of what he calls “eco-fundamentalism”... these and many others are among the enemies of scientific progress. On account of the nature of science and its reliance on evidence, Taverne sees any attack on it as an attack on reason. And because democracy too depends on evidence rather than authority, anything that suppresses or damages science tends to undermine democracy itself. Momentous stuff.
If, like me, you're sympathetic to science this is all rather frightening. And if, again like me, you find yourself arguing with friends who reject the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, become angry with priests who spread lies about the anti-infective value of condoms, or despair over the quality of debates on genetically modified crops and nuclear power, then you will find yourself largely in sympathy with Taverne. Largely—but maybe not wholly. And here's the problem: the man is so passionate in his cause that he is in danger of setting up a fundamentalist camp of his own—a scientific fundamentalism that seeks to deny all limitations on the pursuit of truth, and especially those limitations favoured by non-scientists.
He would, I'm sure, deny this. And his words are there to support him. He applauds the Royal Society's recommendations for public consultation on the future development of nanoscience; he pays tribute to the well informed Parliamentary debates and public discussions that preceded decisions on embryo research. But the problem is less in the words than in the tone, especially when he lays out the appropriate limits to public involvement.
More public input into science, he claims, would mean more orthodoxy, more political correctness, and more control. And popular or political control over the research that scientists want to pursue has always proved fatal to good science.
Figure 2.
Taverne: too passionate?
Credit: UPPA
Always? The remark appears just half a dozen pages after Taverne's own tribute to the process that gave us our enlightened (his term) rules on embryo research. Far from hamstringing science these rules offer researchers a clear space within which to operate, and serve to defend them from those real enemies who would indeed try to stop the work.
When it comes to relationships with the public, science still has something to learn from medicine. Time was when decisions on what was to be done to and for patients' bodies were matters solely for the physician; the patients' only role in the relationship was to follow instructions. The dilution of medical authority has not been an entirely comfortable experience, and is not without certain drawbacks—for patients as well as practitioners. But the net gain is such that it is difficult to imagine either party wishing to reverse things.
Compared with medicine, the impact of science on our lives is less immediate and less personal, but, in the wider scale of things, no less important. Some people assert their wish to influence the development of science in ways that are bigoted, backward looking, irrational, or just bloody minded. The March of Unreason offers plenty of examples. But simply battening down the hatches to repel each and every boarder is a mite too simple. And it won't work.
Odd how one can agree with so much of the detail of a book, while feeling slightly queasy about its broader perspective.
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