Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century (150 page)

One of the scientists Horgan interviewed who thought there is a limit to knowledge was Noam Chomsky, who divided scientific questions into problems, ‘which are at least potentially answerable, and mysteries, which are not.’
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According to Chomsky there has been ‘spectacular progress’ in some areas of science, but no progress at all in others – such as consciousness and free will. There, he said, ‘We don’t even have bad ideas.’
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In fact, Chomsky went further, arguing in his own book,
Language and Problems of Knowledge
(1988), that ‘it is quite possible – overwhelmingly probable, one might guess – that we will
always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.’
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Horgan considered that there were perhaps two outstanding fundamental problems in science – immortality, and consciousness. He thought that immortality was quite likely to be achieved in the next century and that, to an extent, as J. D. Bernal had predicted in 1992, man would eventually be able to direct his own evolution.

The challenge implicit in Horgan’s thesis was taken up by John Maddox, the recently retired editor of
Nature,
in his 1998 book,
What Remains to Be Discovered.
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This was in fact an excellent review of what we know – and do not know – in physics, biology, and mathematics, and at the same time a useful corrective to the triumphalism of some scientists. For example, Maddox went out of his way to emphasise the provisional nature of much physics – he referred to black holes as ‘putative’ only, to the search for theories of everything as ‘the embodiment of a belief, even a hope,’ and stated that the reason why the quantum gravity project is ‘becalmed’ right now is because ‘the problem to be solved is not yet fully understood,’ and that the idea the universe began with a Big Bang ‘will be found false.’
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At the same time, Maddox thought science far from over. His thesis was that the world has been overwhelmed by science in the twentieth century for the first time. He thought that the twenty-first century is just as likely to throw up a ‘new physics’ as a Theory of Everything. In astronomy, for example, there is the need to confirm the existence of the hypothetical structure known as the ‘great attractor,’ toward which, since February 1996, it has been known that 600 visible galaxies are moving. In cosmology, there is the search for the ‘missing mass,’ perhaps as much as 80 percent of the known universe, which alone can explain the expansion rate after the Big Bang. Maddox also underlines that there is no direct evidence for inflation in the early universe, or that rapid expansion, a Big Bang, took place before. As he puts it, the Big Bang is ‘not so much a theory as a model.’ Even more pithily, he dismisses Lee Smolin’s ideas of parallel universes, with no unique beginning, as ‘no more persuasive than the account in
Genesis
of how the universe began.’
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In fact, Maddox says plainly, we do not know how the universe began; Hubble’s law urgently needs to be modified; and, ‘from all appearances, space-time in our neighborhood is not noticeably curved [as it should be according to relativity], but flat.’
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Maddox considers that even our understanding of fundamental particles is far from complete and may be crucially hampered after the new CERN accelerator comes on stream in 2005 – because experiments there will suggest new experiments that we don’t, and shan’t, have the capability for. He points out that in the early weeks of 1997 there were suggestions that even electrons may have internal structures, and be composite, and that therefore ‘the goal of specifying just why the particles in the real world are what they are is still a long way off.’
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In regard to string theory, Maddox makes a fundamental objection: If strings must exist in many dimensions, how can they relate to the real world in which we live? His answer is that string theory may be no more than a metaphor, that our understanding of space or time may be seriously
flawed, that physics has been too concerned with, as he put it, ‘the naming of parts,’ in too much of a hurry to provide us with proper
understanding.
Maddox’s reserve about scientific progress is hugely refreshing, coming as it does from such an impeccable source, the editor who first allowed so many of these theories into print. He does agree with Horgan that life itself is one of the mysteries that will be unravelled in the twenty-first century, that cancer will finally be conquered, that huge advances will be made in understanding the link between genetics and individuality, and that the biggest remaining problem/mystery of all is consciousness.

The application of evolutionary thinking to consciousness, discussed in chapter 39, is only one of the areas where the neo-Darwinists have directed their most recent attention. In practice, we are now in an era of ‘universal Darwinism,’ when the algorithmic approach has been applied almost everywhere: evolutionary cosmology, evolutionary economics (and therefore politics), the evolution of technology. But perhaps the most radical idea of the neo-or ultra-Darwinians relates to knowledge itself and raises the intriguing question as to whether we are at the present living through an era in the evolution of knowledge forms.
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We are living at a time – the positive hour – when science is taking over from the arts, humanities, and religion as the main form of knowledge. Recall that in Max Planck’s family in Germany at the turn of the century, as was reported in chapter 1, the humanities were regarded as a form of knowledge superior to science. Richard Hofstadter was one of the first to air the possibility that all this was changing when he drew attention to the great impact in America in the 1960s of nonfiction and sociology, as compared with novels (see chapter 39). Let us also recall the way Eugène Ionesco was attuned to the achievements of science: ‘I wonder if art hasn’t reached a dead-end,’ he said in 1970. ‘If indeed in its present form, it hasn’t already reached its end. Once, writers and poets were venerated as seers and prophets. They had a certain intuition, a sharper sensitivity than their contemporaries, better still, they discovered things and their imaginations went beyond the discoveries even of science itself, to things science would only establish twenty-five or fifty years later…. But for some time now, science [has] been making enormous progress, whereas the empirical revelations of writers have been making very little … can literature still be considered as a means to knowledge?’
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In
The Death of Literature
(1990), Alvin Kernan quotes George Steiner: ‘We are now seeing, all of us today, the gradual end of the classical age of reading.’
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Kernan himself puts it this way: ‘Humanism’s long dream of learning, of arriving at some final truth by enough reading and writing, is breaking up in our time.’
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He has no doubt about the culprit. ‘Television, however, is not just a new way of doing old things but a radically different way of seeing and interpreting the world. Visual images not words, simple open meanings not complex and hidden, transience not permanence, episodes not structures, theater not truth. Literature’s ability to coexist with television, which many take for granted, seems less likely when we consider that as readers turn into viewers, as the skill of reading diminishes, and as the world as seen through a
television screen feels and looks more pictorial and immediate, belief in a word-based literature will inevitably diminish.’
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‘There is always the possibility that literature was so much a product of print culture and industrial capitalism, as bardic poetry and heroic epic were of tribal oral society, that … it will simply disappear in the electronic age, or dwindle to a merely ceremonial role, something like Peking opera perhaps.’
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Both Gunther Stent, referred to earlier, and John Barrow, an astronomer, have written about what they see as an evolutionary process in the arts ‘which has steadily relaxed the compositional constraints placed on the artist…. As the constraints imposed by convention, technology, or individual preference have been relaxed, so the resulting structure is less formally patterned, closer to the random, and harder to distinguish from the work of others working under similar freedom from constraint.’
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Stent argued that music actually has evolved like anything else. Studies have shown, for instance, that in order to be liked, music must strike a balance between the expected and the introduction of surprises. If it is too familiar, it is boring; if it is too surprising, it ‘jars.’ Physicists with a mathematical bias have actually calculated the familiarity/surprise ratio of music, and Stent was able to show that, beginning with ‘the maximal rigidity of rhythmic drumming in ancient times, music has exhausted the scope of each level of constraint for its listeners, before relaxing them and moving down to a new level of freedom of expression. At each stage, from ancient to medieval, renaissance baroque, romantic, to the atonal and modern periods, evolution has proceeded down a staircase of ever-loosening constraints, the next step down provoked by the exhaustion of the previous level’s repertoire of novel patterns…. The culmination of this evolutionary process in the 1960s saw composers like John Cage relinquish all constraints, leaving the listeners to create what they would from what they heard: an acoustic version of the Rorschach inkblot test.’
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John Barrow added the thought that other creative activities like architecture, poetry, painting, and sculpture have all displayed similar trends away from constraint. ‘Stent’s suspicion,’ he wrote, ‘was that they were all quite close to reaching the asymptote of their stylistic evolution: a final structureless state that required purely subjective responses.’
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A related way in which Darwinism encourages the evolution of knowledge forms has been suggested by Robert Wright. As he puts it, the various ways of conceiving the world – moral, political, artistic, literary, scientific – are ‘by Darwinian lights, raw power struggles. A winner will emerge, but there’s often no reason to expect that winner to be truth.’ Wright calls this approach ‘Darwinian cynicism,’ which he equates to the postmodern sensibility that views all modes of human communication as ‘discourses of power,’ where ‘ironic self-consciousness is the order of the day,’ where ideals can’t be taken seriously because one cannot avoid ‘self-serving manipulation.’
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On this analysis, postmodernism has itself evolved and, as with music, poetry, and painting, has reached the end as a way of looking at the world. Fukuyama didn’t know what he was starting when he wrote about the end of history.

Yet another reason why many of the arts must rate as unsatisfactory forms of knowledge in the twentieth century stems from the modernist reliance on the
theories of Sigmund Freud. Here I agree with Britain’s Nobel Prize-winning doctor
Sir Peter Medawar,
who in 1972 described psychoanalysis as ‘one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.’
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Freud unveiled the unconscious to the world in 1900, at much the same time that the electron, the quantum, and the gene were identified. But whereas they have been confirmed by experiment after experiment, developing and proliferating, Freudianism has never found unequivocal empirical support, and the very idea of a systematic unconscious, and the tripartite division of the mind into the id, ego, and superego has seemed increasingly far-fetched. This is crucial in my view, for the consequences of the failure of Freudianism have not been thought through, and a re-evaluation of psychoanalysis is now urgently needed. For example, if Freud was so wrong, as I and many others believe, where does that leave any number of novels and virtually the entire corpus of surrealism, Dada, and certain major forms of expressionism and abstraction, not to mention Richard Strauss’s ‘Freudian’ operas such as
Salomé
and
Elektra,
and the iconic novels of numerous writers, including D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, and Virginia Woolf? It doesn’t render these works less beautiful or pleasurable, necessarily, but it surely dilutes their meaning. They don’t owe their
entire
existence to psychoanalysis. But if they are robbed of a large part of their meaning, can they retain their intellectual importance and validity? Or do they become period pieces? I stress the point because the novels, paintings, and operas referred to above have helped to popularise and legitimise a certain view of human nature, one that is, all evidence to the contrary lacking, wrong. The overall effect of this is incalculable. All of us now harbor the view, for example, that our adult selves bear a certain relation to our childhood experiences, and to conflicts with our parents. Yet in 1998
Judith Rich Harris,
a psychologist who had been dismissed from her Ph.D. course at Harvard, caused consternation among the psychological profession in America and elsewhere by arguing in her book
The Nurture Assumption
that parents have much less influence on their children than has traditionally been supposed; what matters instead is the child’s peer group – other children. She produced plenty of evidence to support her claim, which turned a century of Freudian jargoneering on its head.
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As a result of Freud, there has been a strain of thought in the twentieth century that holds, rather as in primitive societies, that the mad have an alternative view of the human condition. There is no evidence for this; moreover, it damages the fortunes of the mentally ill.

Robert Wright has described still other ways in which evolutionary thinking has been used to sow further doubt about Freudianism. As he wrote in
The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology
(1994), ‘Why would people have a death instinct (‘thanatos’) [as Freud argued]? Why would girls want male genitals (‘penis envy’)? Why would boys want to have sex with their mothers and kill their fathers (the Oedipus complex’)? Imagine genes that specifically encourage any of these impulses, and you’re imagining genes that aren’t exactly destined to spread through a hunter-gatherer population overnight.’
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