What's Old is New Again: Consilience and the Two Cultures

Steph and I have a joke that Spokane is still in the 90's. I think it's some combination of the architecture, the signs, and the neighborhood streets that remind me of when I was growing up, and the clothes and the people, of course, are a little different but in ways that are reminiscent of that time.

And so, since I like to read things for myself when people seem to be interested in talking about them, I got an old copy of E. O. Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, which dates from the mid 90's, and reading it sitting outside after school or while subbing for classes that could work quietly, the spell was complete. It took me back.

He makes a good point about the hard sciences not being physics and chemistry but psychology and sociology, or even aesthetics and literary interpretation. This made me think about the hard questions people like to ask of intellectual celebrities these days, for Peterson, "Do you believe in God?" and for Pullman, "Where do you get your ideas?" Next to something like that, even the most complex question about black holes or epigenetics seems pretty tame.

The argument reaches a bit further back to C. P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures," and to periodic manifestations before that, well documented in the foreword to the Cambridge Canto edition: Ruskin, Arnold, Huxley... Basically, the claim is like in the title of the O'Connor story: Everything that rises must converge. Wilson draws on the image of the labyrinth, the serpent, though the flight of Icarus hovers unsettlingly near, too. Snow decries the concrete problems which collaboration between scientists and political and literary elites could address, but which persist and worsen while the intelligentsia pontificate. Poverty, dismal education, and catastrophic climate change/squandering of natural resources are the specters they raise and seek to dispel with reason. But to my mind, McGilchrist has set forth much the richer picture of human nature, and with it the more compelling call to adventure.

I walked to the river last night, musing on the god who works for six days and rests, and walks in the garden in the cool of the evening, calling to his work, made in his image... Poetry and metaphor, playful irony and earnest jest seem like the only honest way to answer the really hard problems.