Our faith in science

Casting doubt upon things you have never believed in, or at least do not now believe in, can be both useful and important - thus, if in the future the possibility of reinstating the death penalty would become a topic in Dutch politics, I would see it as my duty to cast doubt upon that dreadful institution. (Or perhaps just tell people to read L'étranger by Albert Camus, for I am not sure anything I say could be more powerful than his novel.) But casting doubt upon things that you have always believed in, belief in which has, in fact, shaped your existence to a considerable extent - that is something different. That is an existential experience. It is also a step on the path to wisdom. (Which is not at all incompatible with it being a step on the path to one's doom; for wisdom and tranquility do not, pace all too many old philosophers, go hand in hand.)

Recently, I have started doubting science. These doubt are not of an epistemological nature: I do in fact believe that as far as our knowledge falls within the domain of science (and not all of it does), science performs admirably. In fact, I am afraid that it succeeds all too admirably to be comfortable: the time has already come when statistical models are better at predicting whether a prisoner will commit crimes again upon release than humans can, and this leads to dangerous moral questions about how we should decide which prisoners are to be released on parole. (What is good for society seems to clash with out basic individualistic and humanistic intuitions.) The time may come soon when we discover that statistical models are much better at predicting happy and loving marriages than people themselves are, and how could we then defend carrying on along traditional lines? But these are not the doubts I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is a big social question, which is also an existential question for many of my friends and probably most of the people who will ever read this entry. It is the question: why are we doing so much science? In the case of the individual, this becomes the question: should I do science?

Until quite recently, I would have said that science grants us many technological and related benefits; and that on top of that, it is an activity with intrinsic worth. It is the search for truth, and isn't truth right up there with beauty and love among the highest values? And why should I do science? Because it ennobles the mind, uses my capacities to the fullest, allows me to work on the great project of human knowledge, and thus gives me both personal growth and the chance to use my talents to the benefit of humanity.

But is this true?


First, the benefits of science. Let me allow that some inventions in medicine have been very benificial. It is not at all my wish to preach a return to the times before antibiotics and vaccination. One may wonder, however, whether the general effect of medicine has been and is beneficial. If a treatment for cancer cures one in ten patients, but means only more months of agony for the others, is its invention and use a boon to mankind? Could it be that medicine has, in general, made us more afaid of death, less able to accept the whims of fortune and unable to bear the curses laid upon our bodies with grace? Might it not be that, although we have more cures, we nevertheless suffer more?

Perhaps not. Perhaps these questions do not stir up doubts in your soul, as they do in mine. But once we wend our gaze to other fields of science, surely all must agree. What are the benefits of physics? Summing up techonological innovations is easy, and it is the accepted way of defending science: television, radio, computers, airplanes, and so forth. Would we want to live without them? We would not - because we have become accustomed to them. The important question is: would we have been less happy without them? The answer there must be, emphatically, that we would have been just as happy without them. We cannot bear the thought of losing the ability to look up all information on the internet; but we did not miss it when we could, and our lives were different but not less happy. The advent of radio did not make mankind happier. The advent of television did not make mankind happier. The advent of the computer did not make mankind happier. For all of these, we could go on listing advantages and disadvantages for a long time, but in increase of happiness? I doubt it.

As an example, take the mobile phone. Several years ago, nobody had a mobile phone. Now, everyone (except for me) seems to have one, and people are generally very surprised to find out that I do not. But have they become happier? I see no signs of it. They have become used to it; they have become even less able to be alone and silent, less patient, less able to accept that fate may sometimes intervene in their lives - but I do not believe, for an instant, that they have become better friends, that they have somehow become more 'connected' to other human beings in any interesting sense of that word. Technology does not create happiness, it creates demand - and whether the end result is good or bad for humanity is always doubtful.

And these, then, are the inventions that are most obviously useful. Science has also brought us the missile and the atomic bomb, it has brought us pollution and traffic accidents, it has brought us totalitarianism and the Shoa (Holocaust). None of this marks science down as 'evil', but what it does show is that the effect of science on society is neither clearly good nor clearly bad. Science is grey; defending it by pointing to technological innovation is a dubious strategy at best.


Perhaps the benefit of science lies not in technology, but in the accumulation of knowledge itself? Is not this brilliant quest of mankind, to find the truth that lies hidden in the world, one of its highest expressions?

But truly, what use these bits and pieces of knowledge, so far removed from our daily lives, so esoteric, so abundant? The amount of facts and theories that science has discovered and constructed is so mind-bogglingly large, that in a lifetime a man might perhaps be able to form an accurate impression of his own ignorance - but no more than that. We cannot possibly be doing science because we want to know more, because there is so much known that we, personally, do not know, that doing science is the very last thing we should engage in if knowledge was our aim. We should be reading science instead of doing it, and we would never lack for new knowledge to imbue.

Is it, then, that we know a lot, but not the important things? What then are they, the important things? Is it important to know, say, the final building blocks of the universe? A mad quest if ever there was one, finding these, but even if one could successfully complete it - would it lead to happiness, or hope, or love, would it improve our lives or those of others, would it make us better humans? It would not. And even so, the vast majority of scientists is working on problems so obscure that only specialists even understand what they are - why? Surely not because these bits of knowledge are so 'important'?

We want to discover new facts or create successful theories for many reasons: to become famous, to get the respect and admiration of our peers, to be able to publish articles and thus keep our job, to prove ourselves - but not because we like puzzles or desire to test our intellect, because we could do that as easily with old questions - yet these social and psychological reasons are not very noble in themselves. I ask again: why do we do science? What are its so called benefits?


I will rephrase the question in another light. It is a fact that a large part of our intellectual elite, the people with brains and discipline, spend several years of their lives getting a scientific education. Such a scientific education, especially in the later years, is quite akin to being trained for a craft: one learns how to function as a scientist in a particular field. Universities do not wish to impart wisdom, but information and the skills one needs to perform a craft; one gets an education, not Bildung. Afterwards, a large part (and often the most intelligent) of these students go on to become scientists themselves, perform their craft for the rest of their lives.

And the question is: is this a good thing?

Is it a good thing that the best minds of our society do not become artists, do not become political activists, do not become philosophers (in a serious sense of the word, rather than 'someone who publishes articles in philosphical journals'), do not become wise men and women - but become instead craftsmen in a huge, hierarchical, conservative, government- and industry-funded undertaking that will keep them busy for the rest of their lives?

If one asks the question like that, the answer is obvious.

Let's be cynical for a moment. Perhaps academics (and related fields) are tolerated and even encourage by the powers that be, because it is the relatively unimportant field of play set aside for potentially dangerous minds. "We give them money to indulge in their esoteric research," on power that is might say to another, "and they have crafted for themselves a huge and complicated system of honours and prizes. Getting higher up in the academic hierarchy, publishing more papers, being cited more often, becoming famous because of some result or another, the noble prizes - it all works so much better than repression! They keep themselves busy, and all their energy and ambition is directed towards this semi-autonomous, a-political enterprise. The joke is even better, because they see it as their sacred political duty to protect science from intervention by politics and to ensure that we keep funding them - it is as if prisoners wanted to keep the walls of their own prison in good shape! We give them their toys, they are happy playing their games, and we never have to fear that those minds will start to question us... why, even Marx and Foucault, who worried me for a moment, are now merely objects of study. Marx-scholars... it doesn't get funnier than that!"


Why do we have faith in science?

Is it really the best we can be doing with our lives?