02.01.06
Crisis of the Enlightenment
Michael Ruse invokes the Enlightenment,
I see evolution and creation as very much the top end of the iceberg. It’s a litmus test of this whole red-blue division in America. I’d like to see the left, the Democrats or whatever we call ourselves, be more open to people’s concerns. I mean, it’s not helpful, and certainly not in America, when Richard Dawkins says all religion is evil. We have got to talk about moral values. We people of the left, we people of the Enlightenment, if you like, have got to start talking about broader issues. I would like to see science teaching, including the teaching of evolution, to be part of this, rather than something we isolate.
But who speaks for the Enlightenment? Darwinists? Hold your horses. Now here’s E. O. Wilson:
You will see at once why I believe that the Enlightenment thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries got it mostly right the first time. The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.
Consilience is the key to unification. I prefer this word over “coherence” because its rarity has preserved its precision, whereas coherence has several possible meanings, only one of which is consilience. William Whewell, in his 1840 synthesis The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, was the first to speak of consilience, literally a “jumping together” of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation. He said, “The Consilience of Inductions takes place when an Induction, obtained from one class of facts, coincides with an Induction, obtained from another different class. This Consilience is a test of the truth of the Theory in which it occurs.”
That’s it we need a consilience process here. The problem is, what really is the Enlightenment, and what happened to that?
Wilson is actually drawing on a very narrow spectrum of the total Enlightenment, and the people he claims got it straight were part of a larger process, one aspect of which is the response to the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’, in the ample prophecy of what is now a played out rehash of all that in the Darwin debate.
In the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’ we see the attempt to create a course correction on the momentum of the narrow definition of science soon to swamp the social and biological sciences. But, of course, this gesture did not succeed.
So, Ruse’s impulse is right, and yet it is inevitably the case that Darwinism simply doesn’t represent the Enlightenment, and we are left with the second string, ID types and creationists, the only ones left, apparently, to carry the response to the ‘crisis of the Enlightenment’. They can never manage that, we can be sure, but it might be a reminder that the ‘social variation’ latent in the current secular culture has in principle the correct potential for the situation, save that the tide of Darwin dummies, beside the tide of Creationist superdummies, is actually making the problem worse in the name of solving it.