February 17, 1987

         Thoushts on Art, Science, and Politics

   The title of this talk covers such a broad range of human
activities that I could hardly hope to cover it in a single

lecture.  What I wish to do is to examine the relationship
among these activities, all of which are part of the search of

humankind for knowledge of the world and for a set of

principles on how to behave in the world.

   I shall take my starting point from a poem -- one of the
best known poems by the American poet Wallace Stevens, The

Idea of Order at Kev West.

  The poem begins with a line of great poetic power:   "She
sang beyond the genius of the sea" followed by lovely lines
that contrast human voice with the voice of the ocean.

   Meaninq, the poem tells us, comes into nature by and only
by the activity of the human spirit.

   The noise of the sea becomes something more than just
noise because we hear it and we interpret it.

   Likewise,  I would add, plants and animals and the

heavenly bodies acquire significance for us because human
understanding envisions in them an 'Vorder,lV that is, a pattern

of relations.

    Later,  in Stevens' poem the key line appears: "She was
the sinqle artificer of the world/in which she sang."

   The concept is now more precisely expressed:   creation is

the result of human activity, of human performance.


  Order in the world emerges from active human involvement,

from the unraveling of h:-'=
               &-ken relations between objects and

events.

   Thus is the music revealed that is hidden underneath the

noise of nature: and thus the story concealed in the strata of

rocks and the layers of fossil bones becomes manifest.

  This is the creation I wish to talk to you about, the

adventure of the human spirit:   an adventure whose essence is

communication, shared knowledge, shared emotion, and shared

activity.

  This venture has been made possible by the unique
qualities of human nature, by the evolution of human brain,

human language,  and human consciousness out of our animal

past.

  It is this adventure that gives meaning and even purpose
to individual human beings -- a purpose here and now, not'a

purpose there and beyond; a purpose distinct from the pursuit
of personal success as well as from the pursuit of personal

salvation, because its meaning comes from participation in a
collective enterprise, not from preparation for a personal

afterlife.

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  The central feature of this adventure is understandinq --
the search for meaning in the structures, events, and
relationships that we encounter and perceive.
  Understanding is not a simple or unique operation, and

the paths that lead to it can be diverse.

   We seek understanding through science, which seeks
explanations for the regularities of the material world.
  We seek understanding through art, which by creating
forms and designs and abstractions expresses and crystalizes

our emotions, revealing the hidden harmonies in our souls and

making them sharable.

  And we seek understanding through history and philosophy,
which explore our human past and our thinking processes.

  Within each of these realms -- science, art, and

humanities-- there are diverse modes of understanding,
different devices, each with a long history and each with a
distinct entitlement within the tradition of thought.
   I shall call these modes the 8frational,vt the
llirrational,tt and the Qnrational" modes, which differ in
their methods, their appeals,  and their contributions.

  The rational mode searches for order, structure, and
predictability.

It does so by reasoning, as in philosophy and

mathematics, and by experimentation, as in modern science.

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  It attempts to weed out the irrational and to be on guard
egalnst mixing rational with unrational.

  The unrational mode is the search for emotional

experience, either creative or responsive experience.   It is

preeminently esthetic and artistic.

  It does not seek order and reproducibility but rather
intensity and singularity of experience.
  It responds to our quest for emotional fulfillment by
revealing associations, and awakening resonances whose content
cannot be rationalized or put into words.

  This is true of music, or poetry, and of all those
artistic activities that convey satisfying or provocative
relations of form or color or pattern.
  But the unrational mode plays another and more important
role in human life.  It is the realm of choices, of decision
making, of commitments to attachments and ideals.  It is the .
unrational search for understanding that provides a major
source of our motivation in personal and social activity.
  If we were to act only when we have reached a complete
scientific understanding of a situation we would be almost

always paralyzed.

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   What allows us to act more-or-less consistently in

different situation is that in the course of our lives, we

make commitments to certain sets of values, commitments

dictated mainly by unrational elements:  rooted in part in the
biological endowment of humankind in part in the web of

personal experiences from infancy to adulthood - in the

process of growing up in the human community.  Through a set
of such commitments each of us builds a self, a conscious

instrument for judgment and for decision, which makes it
possible for us to act in a more-or-less consistent way in

day-by-day life.

   We must distinguish between what I have called

commitments, with their examined mixture of rational and

unrational content, from what I shall call beliefs, which

belong to the realm of the irrational.  Beliefs may range all
the way from trivial superstitions, such as a belief in
personal luck at a roulette table or a belief in horoscopes
such as appear in most daily newspapers, to the belief in
reincarnation or to to the more dangerous delusions such as
the belief in national destiny, or in racial superiority, or
in one's right to profit at the expense of others.   Such

irrational beliefs tend to generate a core of irrationality
that substitutes itself for the consciously examined self of

which I spoke earlier.

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   And yet, the role of irrational beliefs is not hard to

understand. They provide an easy, if false, certainty in the
place of self-examination.  They substitute a trigger for
automatic action for the searching choices that lead to
personal commitments.

  An illuminating area is that of religion, which involves
a remarkable admixture of unrational and irrational elements.
   Historically, the function of religion has been the
provision of comfort to the human beings, who seeks for
meaning in life and who struggles against the sense of
futility and the terror of death -- what existentialist
philosophers call the absurd feature of human destiny:  the
tension between human consciousness and the awareness of
personal transience.

The unrational, esthetic contribution of religion is to

help fight despair by inventing for human life a presumption
of metaphysical significance: either the gift of election
stemming from special creation or the promise of salvation as
reward after death.  Religion offers both an excuse and a
purpose for human existence.  And religion also provides
emotional comfort by immersing the individual in communal
rites and shared esthetic experience.

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   Yet, in attempting to invent meaning and purpose for

human life, religion often has taken over illegitimate

changes.  It has claimed to be a source of knowledge and not

only of spiritual comfort.  Religion has endorsed specific
cosmologies and specific versions of natural history, and has
backed them with its spiritual authority against the rational

claims of science and philosophy.

   The current controversy between creation science and
biological evolutionary science is only one well publicized

example.  In terms of the present discussion, the essence of

the conflict is the opposition of belief against commitment --

the attempt to substitute the assertion of the literal truth
of biblical texts for the commitment to learning from

observation and experiment -- the commitment inherent in

modern science.  And the conflict has profound political

implications:  revealed religion becomes the handmaidens of

special conservative interests in opposition to freedom of

inquiry.  This is very dangerous indeed:  burning of books has

always been the prelude to the burning of heretics, from 17th

century New England to 20th century Nazi Germany.

xxx

  Before the rise of modern science, the deliberate pursuit
of rationality in the intellectual sphere was the prerogative
of geometry and philosophy and history.

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   Greek philosophers were more concerned with searching

into the human mind and exploring the human conditions then

with explaining lightning or earthquakes.  Their model for the

world was the order of geometry rather than the physical order

underlying natural phenomena.

   What the humanities provided was an alternate comfort

than that of religion, a more objective sense of human life --

a commitment to the proposition that the human condition, is

potentially explainable through the study of human thoughts

and actions.

   When science and the accompanying intellectual freedom

developed in the modern world, the authority of religion was
undermined by the discoveries of science and, the hope for

religious salvation came to be seen as hollow.   For several

centuries humankind trusted to science and technology as the

ways to a better future, a vision of rational progress, a

world of justice and freedom.

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  But the realities of society showed the limitations of

this optimistic vision.  Within the last half century the most
advanced and democratic nations of the world have become
engaged in two destructive and futile world wars in defiance
of the prediction of social philosophers and statesmen.   And
in the place of optimism and equality and solidarity,  we seem
now to live a world of irrational nationalism and unbridled

individualism.  In this atmosphere, existential despair has
become widespread: the despair of human beings who have lost
hope of personal salvation without achieving faith in a
meaningful collective future.

  One of the most terrifying visions of human despair and
futility that literature can convey is Samuel Beckettls story
"The Lost Ones," presumably an allegory of the human

condition.

  A throng of individuals is imprisoned in an immense


cavern.

   They have no implements but a set of ladders.

   One by one, without any organized plan, the lVlost ones'V
climb any ladder that becomes available, even struggling for
possession of one, and seek to find escape by digging into
blind tunnels none of which has ever led to a breakthrough.
  What is most frightening is that the lost ones never

cooperate.

  The exploration done by one of them never has any meaning

for the others.

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   All their efforts yield nothing and mean nothing.

   The picture of life that Beckett conveys is one of

solipsistic futility.

   In The Lost Ones Beckett raises the question of personal

meaning and personal salvation, and, finding none, sinks into

utter despair.

   But, what Beckett fails to convey, or rather conveys by

contrast,  is that meaning and salvation are not personal

categories: they comes only from participation in shared

activities,  in the collective enterprise of mankind.

   They come from commitments to shared values, communality,

morality, and justice.
   The optimism of the Greek philosophers and of those in

the Enlightenment came from the vision of societies dedicated

to communal values.

   The sense of personal meaning comes from our shared

responses to the Parthenon, to Sophocles' tragedies, to

Whitman's and Shakespeare's verses, to Mozart's music, and to

Monet's paintings.  And also, from our sharing with others,

past and present, the understanding of geometry and natural

science, and the shared enjoyment of work and companionship.

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   The artists and the scholars of the past whose work has

meaning Zor us saw human life as an adventure:   not the

adventure of preparation for an afterlife, but the adventure

of understanding, expressing, and delighting in the world in

which we live.

   Meaning and salvation come to us because we are

adventurers -- not lonely adventurers seeking a personal

Shangri-La, but adventurers committed to searching for shared

experience -- shared within family, within community, within

humanity as a whole.  Such a personal life makes the awareness
of biological death tolerable as just another incident in the

adventure of being.

  And the lasting part of the shared experience is the
contribution that each of us makes to the collective

adventure.

   Today I wish to limit my comments to the contributions of
a certain subset of adventurers, those whom people think of as

scientists:  who are committed to discovering and clarifying
reproducible patterns in the events of the material world

which they choose to explore.

   Modern science, starting in the sixteenth century when
Galileo, Descartes and Newton introduced the experimental
method of exploration and verification, set itself a novel
task, profoundly different from the geometry and the

philosophy of the ancients.

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   The goal was understanding of a new kind:  to explain
phenomena and events in terms of experimentally testable
hypotheses rather than of ideal concepts.
  The first triumph was the explanation of planetary motion
by Newton using Kepler's measurements and Galileo's

experimental method coupled with Descartes' analytical

geometry.

   In place of the ideal circles and geometrical

speculations of the ancients,  Newtonian mechanics introduced

measurement and reduction to simple,  generalizable statements
-- mathematical equations -- dealing with forces, objects, and

their motion.

   Science, as it has grown since Newton's time, is founded

on two main tenents.

  The first is the assumption that the human mind processes
are in principle congruent with the structure of the natural

world,  including the structure and function of the human brain

itself.   This includes into modern science the scientific

study of society and of the human mind.

  The second tenet of modern science is that no explanation
should be taken as even tentatively correct unless it has been

submitted to adequate tests, that is,  tests whose results

could actually or potentially disprove the explanation once

and for all.

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  An expressive way to put this is to say that modern

science -- in fact, science altogether -- is perennially on
guard against wishful thinkinq.

   Wishful thinking has to be examined and uncovered not

only in its crudest forms,  such as the belief in the
efficiency of prayer in causing rain or the belief that a
horse shoes on the wall can bring good luck, but also in its

more subtle ways.  In fact,  the progress of science often
depends on uncovering within the body of science certain

unexamined, intuitive common-sense assumptions.
  Einstein's crucial contribution to physics, for example,

was to catch within the edifice of Newtonian physics the
hidden common-sense belief that simultaneity between two
events could be established beyond any limit -- a seemingly
reasonable assumption, yet, as it turned out in relativity
theory, an unjustified one.

   More generally, the path of modern science has consisted
in going beyond the intuitive levels of explanation.   Science
proceeds by challenging intuition and advances by further and
more subtle reexaminations of assumptions whenever new

evidence demands it..

  It does not perversely question the edifice it has built,
but when difficulties arise it reviews its hypotheses in

search of hidden flaws.

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  This is what happened when the science of electromagnetic


waves caused Einstein to explore critically the hidden
assumptions of Newtonian theory.

   And, in both Newtonian and Einsteinian advances the
effectiveness of the new solutions was coupled with a kind of

esthetic beauty, a revelation of pleasurable pattern and

order, and the confidence in the ability of the human mind to
expand beyond the limitations of our sense-limited intuitions.

  Esthetic beauty and the quest for intellectual order are
not the only driving forces in science, however.   The course
of scientific discovery is profoundly influenced by social

forces.  The demand for new technology provided the main
impetus for the progress of science in the 18th to 19th

centuries, and more recently economic factors have influenced

the course of scientific research.
  This creates a two-fold pull in the direction of science.

On one hand, the internal structure of the subject that
dictates the direction more fertile of intellectual advance.
   Scientists explore problems that arise in the course of
their work and seem soluble at a given time with the means at
hand, whether the means happen to be Cartesian geometry for

Newton, or fruitflies or bacteria for 20th century

geneticists, or synchronous or linear accelerators.

   In Peter Medawar's words, science is the "art of the

soluble.tt

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   On the other hand, the call for technology influences the

direction of scientific research.

   All findings of science,  all advances in scientific

knowledge, are potentially sources of power over natural

phenomena and can therefore have (and do have) profound impact
on human affairs and not only on human understanding.   The

content of science may, to a certain extent at least, be

value-free.  But, science does not exist in a vacuum - it

exists in a human society permeated with values -- in fact,

contradictory sets of values.

   In the earliest days of the scientific revolution one of

its strongest proponents, Francis Bacon, wrote the fateful

words:  "Knowledge is power."  He clearly thought of the newly
emerging science in terms of power -- abstract power over the

forces of nature as well as political power in the society he

as a statesman was bent on ruling.

   The ambiguity of his statement must not have been as

evident in the early seventeenth century as it is in the

nuclear age.

   The tie between understanding and power, between science

and technology, tends to blur the profound difference between

science -- the search for understanding of natural phenomena -

- and technology -- the use of science for practical purposes.

   In principle, science is indifferent to technological

applications.

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  The landing of an astronaut on the moon or of a space
vehicle on Mars had, for example,  little to do with science.

   These exploits even used a minimum of science:  they
required only Newton's laws, transistor physics, and

thermodynamics.

  The rest was technology -- superbly sophisticated

technology but not science.

   What the planetary exploration achieved in terms of
scientific understanding was relatively little -- a few facts
of interest to geologists and astronomers but no new synthesis
about the universe or the origin of life.

   Planetary exploration fulfilled the emotional wish of
humankind to spring free from earthbound limitation.

   It enlarged the feeling of power over the forces of

nature.  It caught the imagination of the television public as
a great musical comedy or a great football game might do.
  But it also added incentive to the fantasies of space

wars, not only in the minds of film makers but also in those

of our political leaders.

  Whether in space or in other spheres of activity, science
generates sources of power by making technologies possible.
  How the technologies are employed, their use (or absence
of use) and the purposes to which they are put, are not in the

hands of the scientists.

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   They are in the hands of society, that is, of those

groups of individuals who have or seek the decision-making

power in social affairs.

   In the case of the atom bomb, the physicists had turned

over to Government their skills in service of a grand new

technology.

   And it was the Government that made the decision to use

the bombs.  That is,  is was society as represented more or

less distantly by elected officials more familiar with the

manipulations of power than with the process of understanding.

   Once a technology becomes available, the decisions are

made by a society dominated by a mixture of impulses:

rational calculations, unrational visions, and irrational

drives to power and control.  In other words, the decisions

are made not in the world of science but in the world of

politics.

   And today,  in a world living under an apparently

permanent threat of nuclear war, the simple belief in

beneficial technology is giving place to widespread

skepticism.

   Each scientific advance that can generate new technology

is being feared as a potential danger.

   Let me take as an example my own field, that of molecular

biology,

It has generated technologies with vast possibilities in

applied biology.

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   Genetic engineering, the methodology for reshuffling

genes within and between organisms, promises new understanding

of life processes as well as new approaches to medicine and

agriculture.

   We can visualize a whole range of applications, from
production of cheap hormones to correction of certain
congenital defects and to production of superior food plants.

  All this sounds wonderful, just as the electric motor or

the cotton gin were wonderful one century ago,
   Yet, even before the first applications of genetic

engineering

serious and

of possible

become visible, we hear voices -- some of them

thoughtful voices -- warning us of dangers ahead:

accidents, of environmental catastrophes, of

corruption of scientists if they become,drawn into the service

of industrial enterprises.

  And the consequences of genetic technology, we are told,      .

may be more subtle than the construction of bombs or the

alteration of the physical quality of life.

  They may intrude into social relations at the level of

mutual respect and social justice, as when eugenists preached

the superiority of one human group over another or the
inevitability of behavioral differences between sexes.   And

they may raise novel ethical issues, as in the well known case

of Baby M.

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  The misgivings extend not only to technology but to

science itself.

  Since science is the source of technology, and technology
can generate potentially dangerous applications, we hear
critics say, shouldn't science be limited, or constrained, or
even stopped in its path?

  Isn't scientific research an altogether evil pursuit of

power?

  Before we dismiss these criticisms and misgivings too
lightly, we should realize that, behind criticism of science

as an enterprise, there is often a protest against the
structure and functioning of society, a revulsion against
injustice.

  There is a revulsion against social systems in which the
fruits of science, like those of labor, are directed to
selfish gain or private profit or to the preservation of power

structures.

   Every environmentalist, every critic of technology, is
consciously or unconsciously something of a radical,  that is,
a person who questions the power relations within society.
  The central question radicals ask is, who in society
makes the decisions and in whose interest?

Who calls the game and how is the deck stacked?

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   Sorting out rational and irrational in scientific

research may help protect the scientific enterprise from its

radical critics.

   For example, the science of genetics has been the object

of suspicion on the part of critics who see it as a source of

racism and sexism.

   But what these critics faulted was not the solid content

of genetics:  it was a superstructure of distortions

consciously or unconsciously advocated by a few socially

biased geneticists.

   Yet, for scientists to dismiss the question of
responsibility for the impact of science on society leaves
them in an ambiguous position, somewhere between that of
philosophers and poets on the one hand and that of handgun

manufacturers on the other hand.

  How elaborate must the feedback loop of responsibility be

before its signals become irrelevant noise?

  Can we press indifferently any computer key without
asking whether one of them may activate an electric chair or a

nuclear warhead?

   Awareness of the forces that operate in society becomes

important.

The ivory tower has windows for us to look out from as

well as doors for delivery of knowledge.

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   And what we see encourages, or rather compels, our

participation.

What form should such participation take?

   I recognize the importance for scientists to inform the

public of the advances of science so that elected officials

will be chosen with better understanding of the landscape of

available knowledge.

   And I recognize the importance for scientists to act as

advisors to officials in the formulation of policy.

   But, beyond such formal corporate service by scientists,

there remains a serious question of responsibility to which

science itself provides no answer.

Science in principle deals with "how come@t and not "what

for."  It deals with good or bad theories and good or bad

experiments, not with Itgood or bad!' actions.   But the

neutrality of science ends at the intersection with

technology.

The '*ceremony of innocence" stops here, where we enter

the field of morality.

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   And yet, personal morality -- the rules of behavior among
individuals in day-to-day interactions -- does not clearly
prescribe any specific pattern of responsibility with regard
to the social consequences of newly acquired knowledge. In
thousands of years of Western philosophy no one has come up
with any better prescription than the Golden Rule,

irrespective of how different philosophers have justified it.

   But what direction does the Golden Rule provide in a

world of complex social and economic relations?

   Economic realities introduce conflicts between personal

morality and social ethics,  conflicts that underlie the entire

history of human society and become more acute in

individualistic societies.

  Attempts to resolve such oppositions on a philosophical
plan have obscured the essential conflict, between the

virtuous commitments of the individual and the drive to

survive and prosper in a world where the supply of rewards is

insufficient to satisfy all wants,  let alone all desires.

   The philosopher Isiah Berlin has expressed this dilemma

in a provocative form, in terms of a Christian and a pagan

ethical system -- one personal, the other communal --

struggling with one another within society.

  Again, the ethicist Alasdair McIntyre has suggested that

our ethics is incoherent because it is a mosaic of ethical

fragments of the past:  relics of principles that were

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functional in earlier societies with different forms of

communal organization but have now become dystunctional.

   According to McIntyre, principles like the Golden Rule

could be operational only in societies such as the

hypothetical polis of Aristotle,  in which citizens identify --

at least formally -- with a communal system of virtues.

   In individualistic modern society, the personal and

communal systems of virtues are not congruent with each other.

Competitive individualism interferes with the virtuous life.

   Conflict reigns, or, to put in in Mcintyre's own words,

politics becomes  "civil war carried out with other means."

   What does this mean in terms of personal responsibility?

   Should we accept passively the divergence between

personal morality -- our sense of responsibility -- and the

chaotic values of our complex society?

   What philosophers tell us is simply that the practice of

the Golden Rule cannot be expected to prevail automaticallv in

the affairs of society.

   If it is to become operative it must, like any other

goal, be actively worked for.

   It must be a consciously chosen, actively nurtured

prescription for relations among citizens just as for

relations between individuals.

   In other words in must become a political soal.

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   An efficient ethics in society can come into being only

when individual choices become political commitments, and

individual commitments become collective commitments.

   The hope for a more just society where the output of

science and all understanding may be used for purposes

collectively agreed upon -- a society with true political

lesitimacv -- must first become a political commitment on the

part of individuals to make it become so.

   Unfortunately,  commitment to active political

participation,  especially at the national level, has been weak

in our country.  In fact, more extremely so than in any of the

other democracies.  Little more than one half of the eligible

voters register to vote,  and little more than half of those

registered cast their votes.  Indifference to politics is

compounded by skepticism of the political process and even

contempt concerning politicians.   The roots of this situation

are deep and complex.  They go back at least to the 1830's,

when Jacksonian democracy converted the electoral process into

a spoils system, destroying the sense of political community

that had animated the founding fathers and their successors

for half a century.

   Now more than ever our complex society requires

commitment to communal goals on the part of its citizen.   And

this need for commitment to active political participation

applies to scientists as well as to everyone else -- more so,

perhaps,  because as I said earlier, scientists are

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collectively the source of so much of the power that underlies

modern technological scjziety.

   Whatever the personal choices of scientists may be,

whatever side they may take, their voices need to be heard,

not just at the ballot box but throughout the process where

choices are made.

   If scientists, the purveyors of rational understanding of
the world, exile themselves from the arena of social struggles

and seek refuge in the ivory tower, they objectify themselves

-- they turn themselves into instruments --- and society loses

some of its more valuable members.

   By this, I do not mean that scientists should politicize

science.

  On the contrary, politically committed scientists may
bring to politics some of the approaches that have made

science honest and successful.

   In the third Canto of the Inferno, Dante relegates.the

souls of the uncommitted, who in life had deserved neither

blame nor praise, to the no-man land at the entrance of Hell,
where the punishment is to be forever among others like

themselves.

   They have lived passively, doing their chores but

contributing nothing to the collective process of guiding and

perfecting the community.

   Dante, the political poet,  calls on us to be the

artificers of the world we live in,  not only by understanding

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it, as in Wallace Stevens' poem, but by a commitment to

participation.

  There is nothing new in this way of looking at politics
as social morality in action.
  Rousseau and other philosophers have seen the
impossibility of a moral life lived without active concern for
the legitimacy of the surrounding society.
  If personal morality and social organization will become

more congruent, they will not do so through any fatally
prescribed historical process.
  They will converge only as a result of deliberate,  active
personal and collective activity.  To think otherwise is to
indulge in wishful thinking, not unlike a belief in astrology
or in miracles.

  To serve as political activists,  or at least as committed
citizens, is not as easy a task as it is to follow the pursuit
of science and understanding in libraries or laboratories:
and it offers little promise of short-range success and

reward.

  But it is a task that provides hope rather than despair,
and purpose through shared commitment.

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