New Year, New Truths?

I wrote earlier in 2005 about the danger of science without mystery. It is a grave danger, this certainty before all the facts are in, and it is a pit that the scientific method must lead its followers toward. Racial science and the eugenics craze is the classic historical instance of that error, and we, of course, do not know what are the contemporary examples, though judging from the smug tone to many pronouncements from the particle mill, they surely exist.

Before the New Year carries away our brain cells, here is another, subtler danger to truth to consider. We might call it progressive dogmatism. It works like this -- much progressive, socially liberal thought follows a revolutionary belief system. If the world is changed in this way, it will be better. The sister to this belief is that the revolution can never be reversed. Social change accumulates into a heap of blessings. This is bad logic. Not to speak against the belief in human progress -- I see more sign of broad melioration in human affairs than of a great wheel that will break our aspirations in the dust. Yet I also believe that such melioration is potential rather than necessary. We can sit in ignorance and want for millennia -- the Egyptians never invented dentistry, even for their god-kings. We can also regress, as the terror of the German holocaust exemplifies. People can get things wrong. This should not be controversial, especially when arguing that social norms are in error. To refuse to look back at groundbreaking social decisions is simply to privilege decisions that one feels good about having made; it is the worst kind of special pleading and blinkered thinking. Yet when this obvious error in thought goes hand in hand with science, it comes to seem respectable. Science looks like a cumulative pile of knowledge, as ideas like phlogiston and the bodily humours are thrown aside for electromagnetism and leucocytes. So progressives like to see by analogy their social agenda as a scientific discovery, a newly-revealed truth we hadn't come far enough to see yet. So animal rights is an extended awareness of animal nature, communism of history or socialism of social organisation.

The trouble is they claim this argument by analogy and not by subjecting their theses to rigorous scientific analysis. "We have done this, we have begun to think this, therefore it is an implacable advance." Science happily, is no respecter of pride or politics and is as happy to return to old ideas if they improve the picture as to bring in new ones. Two recent examples are the rehabilitation of Einstein's cosmological constant, an 'ugly fudge' which he saw as his greatest error and is now seen to be at the heart of our picture of the universe. The second is the much-derided doctrine of Lamarck, that animals can pass on attributes acquired in their lifetimes. The new science of epigenetics is finding that gene expression can indeed be affected by life experience and passed on through the generations.

Science can make these somersaults because it has an interest in truth (if too scant an acquaintance with mystery). Progressives just want to win the argument and like to give their conclusions cod-scientific weight, as if to think again or study the consequences of a social revolution were absurd. To argue for the revolution and then refuse to discuss whether the revolution has borne out your arguments, or has been brought into question by new evidence is sharp practice and argument in bad faith.

Progressive, rightly understood, is an insult. An intelligent person, interested in the truth, armed with the scientific method, must always look both ways. Not Lenin, but Janus, the god of the New Year and the old, and image of truth-seekers across the millennia.