Platt,
GLENN:
I find it interesting that you guys keep bringing up examples
showing how scientists and mathematicians used intuition,
creativity, and morals in their work. I keep agreeing and yet you
find more examples and I still keep agreeing. What gives?
PLATT:
What gives is you�re attack on Pirsig for having a �personal
vendetta against science� which is simply untrue.
I don't see how this is your reason for pointing out that scientists and
mathematicians use intuition, creativity, and morals in their work. It
sounds like you are just changing the subject.
PIRSIG:
But scientific truth has always contained an overwhelming
difference from theological truth: it is provisional. Science always
contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight
could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself.
Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of
continuous, evolutionary growth . . . That�s the whole thing: to
obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously. If you don�t have
the static patterns of scientific knowledge to build upon you�re
back with the cave man. But if you don�t have the freedom to
change those patterns you�re blocked from any further growth.
(Lila, Chap. 17)
Yes, I'm pleased he says this. As I've said in recent posts, he's not out
to discredit science completely. He's not that foolish. I've also said
he respects science, as is made plain by the quote above, but he
respects it in a way that an adversary would. He says amoral science
has declared morals "illegal" and is the "champion" of the common criminal,
which to me is below-the-belt language and indicates to me his true feelings.
I say he has a personal vendetta because of the draconian methods
(electro-shock treatment) medical science used to treat his mental illness,
and because he and science disagree on the interpretation of mental
illness. You can tell he's hot-under-the-collar discussing the "scientific
reality" platypus:
PIRSIG (ch. 8)
*Should* reality be something that only a handful of the world's most
advanced physicists understand? One would expect at least a majority of
people to understand it. Should reality be expressible only in symbols
that require university-level mathematics to manipulate? Should it be
something that *changes* from year to year as new scientific theories
are formulated? Should it be something about which different schools of
physics can *quarrel* for years with no firm resolution on either side?
If this is so then how is it fair to imprison a person in a mental
hospital for life with no trial and no jury and no parole for "failing
to understand reality"? By this criterion shouldn't all but a handful
of the most advanced physicists be locked up for life? Who is crazy
here and who is sane?
This quote is filled with such rhetoric that I can't believe he's
all that serious, but people *do* talk like this when they're seriously
angry. Note his disparaging remark about how science's version of reality
"*changes* from year to year" and contrast this to the quote above, which
lauds the provisional quality of science.
There are other reasons he wants to partially discredit science. He
wants to expand reality to include things proposed by unorthodox
science, and mainstream science is the institution standing in his way.
He says science should be subservient to social morality, and unless you
can find more examples in Lila, it is the only one he cites that goes
against the grain of the moral hierarchy between the social and
intellectual levels. This in itself is telling.
He also wants people to take on faith the idea that Dynamic
Quality is the basic stuff of the universe, and to do this he needs to
raise doubts about science, since faith isn't scientific.
PLATT:
What Pirsig objects to is the attempt by anthropologists (and
intellectuals) to use the scientific paradigm of amoral objectivity to
understand and change society.
Attempting to apply the methods of science to society is where the
trouble began, according to Pirsig. Common moral values are
what holds a society together. But science doesn�t recognize
moral values. Science is objective.
In my opinion, the problem with the scientific method applied at
the social level is a practical one, as I've described in my petri
dish passage. There's nothing wrong with the scientific method here
in principle. You still want researchers to be objective. It's
perfectly legitimate for researchers to *understand* the morals and values
of people and societies they study, but what you *don't* want is the
researcher's private morals to colour the results.
The NY Times article you mentioned is a good example of a cross-cultural
experiment. While the researchers' methods weren't discussed in the NY
Times article in any great detail, they should be included by the authors
in the article they write for the journal Psychological Review. The hope
is they followed sound experimental procedure as dictated by the scientific
method. For example, the instructions given to eastern and western students
that set up an experiment should be identical. It's also important,
however, that the researchers understand rival intellectual values. For
example, they need to know what constitutes an analytical response from a
student and what constitutes a dialectical response. What the researchers
shouldn't do is comment on which kind of response is better, based on their
own opinions. A researcher should never say, for example, that his
experiment shows why the American way of thinking is superior since
Americans are more advanced technologically. The researchers did comment a
little beyond the data, but they saved themselves by judging each way of
thinking as having merits. It's not the researchers' place to state
conclusions that aren't justified by the data. Let readers of their work
make those judgments if they feel it necessary.
In a sense, scientists' responsibilities are similar to those of police.
Both professions involve collecting evidence and making a case for
something based on that evidence. The judging, however, is done by other
people.
PLATT:
Lest there be any doubt about
the moral-free nature of science as held by its practioners, here is
part of a conversation that arose during a panel discussion on
consciousness, as reported on the Web at www.closertotruth.com:
ROBERT (a brain researcher and author, acting as moderator)
But doesn�t your argument confuse morality with reality? My
opinion�which I do give from time to time�is that it doesn�t
matter what science produces. Results are irrelevant; truth is
amoral.
CHARLES (professor of psychology emeritus, University of
California)
You�re putting me in a box where I�m not going to let you put me,
Robert. I have nothing against science, and I don�t attribute bad
things in the world to science�I never have. What people do with
the truths discovered by science is a matter of morality and
intelligence.
PLATT
Of course, science is no more moral-free than any other
intellectual pattern. (A built-in assumption of any pattern is that it�s
better than another.) But as seen above, if you�re of a scientific
mind, you�ll try like the devil to keep morality and the discovered
truths of science (indeed, reality itself) eternally apart. You must
take umbrage (as Charles does) at the slightest hint that you
might be judgmental.
Well, being judgmental beyond what the data says taints the conclusions.
How else would you want a scientist to act? Maybe it would be instructive
to look at another example where a scientist might be tempted to voice
his personal morals about his research. I saw a Nova episode about the
Incas and how the children of chieftains were sacrificed, according to
accounts of Spanish conquistador historians, as offerings to mountain
gods in the Peruvian Andes. There were some questions about the validity
of these accounts until mummified remains, along with sacred artifacts to
be taken into the spirit world, were found buried in tombs at the peaks of
these mountains. Most of the mummies had skull fractures, suggesting the
children were knocked out or killed prior to being entombed. Now, the
archaeologist who made this discovery could have said "The Incas were
at best misguided souls who unnecessarily bludgeoned their own children to
death because of some false god they believed in, or at worst they were
murderers." Or the archaeologist could explain, as best he could from the
evidence, why the Incas did this
(see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/peru/worlds/sacrifice1.html).
Indeed, in order to appreciate the latter explanation, you'd have to
respect cultural relativism. And why not?
PLATT
Little harm was done to society so long as science kept it�s
assumed separation of �morality from reality� restricted to studying
the physical and biological realms. But when amoral scientific
objectivity was used by intellectuals to battle and ultimately defeat
Victorian morality, the result was the whirlwind we are reaping
today.
Let's look at this a little closer.
PIRSIG (Ch. 22)
The gulf existed between between Victorian evolutionists and twentieth
century relativists. The Victorians such as Morgan, Tyler, and Spencer
presumed all primitive societies were early forms of "Society" itself
and were trying to "grow" into a complete "civilization" like that of
Victorian England.
Cultural relativists held that it is unscientific to interpret values in
culture B by the values of culture A... Cultures are unique historical
patterns which contain their own values and cannot be judged in terms of
the values of other cultures.
Pirsig goes on to explain how Ruth Benedict's "Patterns of Culture" and
Margaret Mead's "Coming of Age in Samoa" became best selling
anthropological documents.
PIRSIG
These books were legitimate anthropological documents but they were
also political tracts in the new shift from social to intellectual
dominance, in which the reasoning ran: "If we have seen scientifically
that they can have free sex in Samoa and it doesn't seem to hurt
anybody, then that proves we can have it here and not hurt anybody
either. We have to use our intellect to discover what is right and
wrong and not just blindly follow our own past customs." The new
cultural relativism became popular because it was a ferocious
instrument for the dominance of intellect over society.
For all her fame, Margaret Mead has been roundly criticized for the
accuracy of her field work. Worse, her outspoken criticisms of American
society for secretly shrouding sexuality from its youth is not proper
behavior for a scientist. It would be impossible for her data to "prove"
such a thing, contrary to what Pirsig says (these "quotes" are his, not
hers. If she claimed this, why not quote her directly?). She is not just
presenting the facts of Samoan culture, she is making her own moral
judgements public and targeting them against another culture,
something a cultural relativist like her is *not* supposed to do. She
was hugely influential, yes, but not because she was objective, as Pirsig
says. Here is a scientist who speaks her mind morally, the very thing
Pirsig would like to see more scientists do, and he lambastes her as one
of those objective types. Well, which way does he want it? Could it be
he just doesn't like her politics?
PIRSIG
When people asked, "If no culture, including a Victorian culture, can
say what is right and what is wrong, then how can we ever *know* what
is right and what is wrong? the answer was, "That's easy. Intellectuals
will tell you. Intellectuals, unlike people of studiable cultures,
know what they're talking and writing about, because what *they* say
isn't culturally relative. What they say is absolute. This is because
intellectuals follow science, which is objective. An objective observer
does not have relative opinions because he is nowhere within the world
he observes.
Pirsig is saying this with tongue in cheek (I think), because his next
paragraph calls it hogwash. He's saying the general public is gullible
and will believe anything scientists say because scientists arrive at *all*
their conclusions objectively, so how could scientists be wrong? Pirsig is
saying people will fall for a subjective conclusion because they mistake
it for one derived objectively. Well, this might fool *some* people, but I
don't think it explains the *huge* appeal of Mead's book. The Victorian
age was ending for many reasons, and Pirsig mentions them, and people
were ripe to accept anything contrary to Victorian prudeness, whether
this knowledge was gained objectively or not.
PLATT
What �whirlwind?� Funny you should ask , for just yesterday a
syndicated column appeared in our local paper written by Leonard
Pitts, Jr., an African-American liberal pundit:
PITTS, JR:
If it�s true that Elvis� hips represent a victory by the forces of
progress, amity and good rockin� tonight, it�s also perversely true
that we�ve been hobbled by that victory ever since. More to the
point, that victory is part of the reason pop culture fell into the toilet
sometime in the last generation. And that instead of climbing out,
it�s doing the backstroke. Indeed, that it swims proudly in matters
excretory, masturbatory, penile, puerile, bigoted and foul. From the
potty-mouthed tykes of �South Park� to the hateful gay-bashing of
rapper Eminem to the lewd butt worshiping of the music video
channels, it�s become nearly impossible to absorb popular
culture without absorbing slop that would embarrass a pig . . . We
ought to understand by now that taste is, by definition, subjective; I
may draw the line in a different place than you. But here�s the
question: What happens when no one has the guts to draw the
line anywhere? We�re finding the answer now, and it not pretty.
We�ve become a people too cool to take offense, too jaded for
questions of decency and so filled with attitude that we disconnect
from our own feelings, our own barometers of right and wrong. We
took the wrong lessons from Elvis� hips. And we�re getting the pop
culture we deserve.
PLATT
Mr. Pitts ascribes the cause of the present sorry state of society to
a lack of �guts.� Pirsig attributes the cause to the pervasiveness
of amoral objectivity in our thought patterns, spun off from the
scientific paradigm. Of the two causes, Pirsig�s is by far the more
profound.
Pirsig's argument is causally weak. It's less an argument than
an accusation. It's a stock answer that sounds good so long as you don't
ponder it too much. You can re-read my other arguments in my posts
to Jon. You are correct that Mr. Pitts' assessment is far from profound,
but he doesn't jump to conclusions.
PLATT
I will even go further than Pirsig in saying that there are other
reasons why scientific ideology holds dangers to a free society.
First, science deals in stereotypes. It doesn�t worry about
exceptions and individual cases. In dissecting a frog it cares not a
wit about that frog�s unique qualities. A frog is a frog is a frog.
Second, science favors systems analysis where the system (its
behavior and emergent properties) is far more important than its
individual parts. With science so often promoting the collectivist
view it�s little wonder that socialism appeals to many.
While it's true that science deals in generalizations, I find it odd that
you feel justified in taking an argument that illustrates how science
works on frogs and apply a similar one to socialism with equal confidence.
It's not just science that deals in stereotypes. It's human nature.
All people are "scientists" of a sort. One reason we gossip is to
generate "hypotheses". "Uggggh! My husband does such-and-such. Why do
you think he does that? Does yours do that?"
PLATT
No one, least of Pirsig, argues that science hasn�t been
successful in discovering truths about the physical and biological
worlds and providing for our material wants and needs. But by its
very success, we�ve come to believe it can solve all our problems.
Scientists have become the high priests of our age, telling us
what and what not to believe. All one need do these days to be
taken seriously is to say, �According to a scientific study . . . �
There are a lot of studies put out by a lot of scientists and many
contradict one another. Consider how many studies it took for people
to finally believe that cigarette smoking is dangerous to your health.
Human's effect on global warming is still a hot issue. And the number of
diet remedies is enough to make your head spin. People take a lot of what
science says with a grain of salt because they know there's a lot of
controversy. Silicon breast implants are safe, then they're unsafe, then
they're safe again. Eggs are bad for you, then they're good, then they're
bad again. Scientists argue over the relative dangers of fossil fuels
versus nuclear energy, and the public is left not knowing what to believe.
If there are so many issues that science is unclear about, why would people
take science, much less a single scientific study, as gospel?
As far as physics goes, people don't care about it because it's so far
removed from experience. Plus they don't understand it and don't want
to understand it. People have nothing more than a passing curiosity for
the latest subatomic particle discovered. Most people have never heard of
string theory. Most people couldn't care less about the state of affairs
one nanosecond after the big bang.
There's also the "what have you done for me lately" part of human nature.
What's taking science so long to cure the common cold, cancer, and aids?
We take for granted modern technological conveniences. We are quick to
complain when the VCR won't rewind or the answering machine cuts off in
mid-message.
Hollywood movies paint the scientist as a bad guy or a nerdy outcast. His
creations are always threatening society. This is not the stereotype
of a high priest.
Finally, how can you explain why so many people believe in God, guardian
angels, creationist theory, ESP, alternative medicines, and astrology when
science is either neutral or antagonistic toward these?
So no, I don't think scientists are considered today's high priests.
PLATT
Such unquestioning faith hides the seeds of eventual destruction, as
many previous civilizations learned to their sorrow.
You sound a lot like Jon in this regard, and I'm sorry you feel this way.
Glenn
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