Nicholas
Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to
literature, history, popular culture and the arts. You are free to agree
or disagree with him.
SECULAR SUPERSTITION
Allow
me to set up a straw man and indulge in historical stereotypes for a while.
Here, in the pre-modern Middle Ages, are all
these credulous peasants and unscientific people. They know virtually nothing
about the universe. They think the Earth is at the centre of it. Real astronomy
is still entangled with the nonsense of astrology. Chemistry hasn’t yet freed
itself from alchemy. Medicine relies on the antiquated and untested works of
Galen. As for physics, nothing much has happened since Aristotle and Lucretius.
Most people are illiterate. They are therefore prey to all manner of
superstitions, many fed to them by the Church. Their ignorance has been
institutionalised. Unschooled, they do not have the reasoning power to think
for themselves and therefore they believe what they are told.
But
– fear not! – help is on the way. First the Renaissance, then the
Enlightenment, come along and free the human mind. Real science appears.
Universal education joins with science to create the Modern Age. So now we have
reasoning people, informed by real science and no longer prey to nonsensical
superstitions.
Let
us bid farewell to organised religion while we rejoice in these facts.
Okay,
okay. I’ll stop this nonsense right here.
It’s
great fun setting up a straw man, but usually a dishonest way of arguing. You
are, after all, putting words into your opponent’s mouth just so that you can
have the fun of tearing them apart.
My
straw man is self-evident nonsense (I should know, because I wrote it).
In
the first place, neatly dividing history into discrete periods, and then making
up names for those periods (“the Middle Ages”, “the Renaissance”, “the
Enlightenment” etc.), is something that historians do hundreds of years after
the event. In the process gross simplifications creep in. As I never tire of
telling students, EVERYBODY lives in modern times, because the times we live in
we all perceive as modern. And modern times are always complex, contradictory,
with various currents and trends running through them. We never experience them
as the simplifications in which historians indulge.
In
the second place, while readily acknowledging that science and its specialised
branches have developed enormously in the last 600 or 700 years, and there has
been more than one “paradigm shift” in the way people see the universe, it is
simply untrue to say that there was no scientific discovery and experimentation
(and robust philosophic speculation) in those centuries that are now loosely
called the “Middle Ages”.
But
there is a still more fundamental reason for my setting up a straw man.
It
is to refute that part of this straw man which I believe really is a
widespread, and fallacious, current assumption.
That’s
the part which says that in ancient days, illiterate and uneducated people believed
what they were told about the universe, whereas now we have access to advanced
scientific information and sophisticated reasoning and therefore people are no
longer credulous and superstitious.
The
assumption here is that (a.) people now actually access such information as is
available, and understand it; and (b.) human credulity has declined.
In
reply I would ask – what proportion of people in the modern world are
academically-trained doctors, physicists, biologists, chemists etc? A certain
percentage, of course, but still a small minority when measured against the
population as a whole. Therefore, in matters relating to their view of the
physical universe, what the great bulk of the population believes, it believes
on the authority of the “experts” and takes on trust. For the hypothetical
person-in-the-street, to say something is true because “science” says so is no
more sophisticated or developed a mode of thinking that to take something on
the authority of the Church. If you are going to demean one age with the name
superstition, then you would have to apply the same term to the other age.
Secular
superstition, maybe.
No,
I am not by-passing the obvious fact that real modern scientists have much
accurate information to tell us, and that what they have to say is doubtless a
great advance in describing the physical universe over what was available a
millennium ago. I am reflecting on the reception and understanding (or lack of
thereof) of such information, and I am noting the element of faith and trust
that goes into most people’s conception of what science is.
From
this I decidedly do not draw any
Machiavellian (or Nietzschean) lesson about the gullibility of the masses, and
the need for some “Prince” (or Superman) to dominate them. But I do note that
the mass of us (non-scientists) are in no position to judge when science – the
examination of the physical universe – oversteps its bounds and claims to be an
explanatory philosophy of everything.
When
this happens, science becomes the real superstition of scientism, which is of
course unscientific.
In
writing this, I think of those unscientific readers of polemical best-sellers by Richard
Dawkins et al., who assume that as the man is a scientist he is simply giving
scientific information, rather than building philosophic hypotheses based on
very dodgy premises (and frequently presuming to comment on matters in which he
has no training). Something is not true because a scientist – who is no
philosopher and who has a very limited understanding of history – says so.
On
the wider matter of credulity, I could (but won’t) write a few more pages on
the post-modernist soup of the “information age” in which all things, without
rational discrimination, are believed to be of equal value. If you do not
believe in the widespread credulity of the age we live in, think hard about
which documentaries, “reality” shows and pieces of sensation lap up the
greatest viewership numbers; and how much these things influence the view of
the world that people have.
In
four or five hundred years, when historians have made up a name for the age we
live in, they will certainly have grounds for discussing the superstitions of
our age.
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