Otherness (40 page)

"Give up," they preached. "Don't bother trying to figure out how the flawed world works. Perfect knowledge is to be found only within the mind, the soul. Seek your own private salvation, then, apart from the world, and don't bother getting your hands dirty trying to piece together the nuts and bolts of God's handiwork."

Before Galileo very few philosophers in any culture dared question this near-universal, dualist mysticism, which almost always was accompanied by top-heavy hierarchies of magicians, shamans, priests, or art critics. Only from time to time would a rebel dare counter:

"Hey, I may not ever be able to be certain what is absolutely True . . . but I sure as heck can work to find out what
isn't
! Moreover, I can improve my model of the world by slowly, carefully finding out what is
truer
than what I already knew."

In other words, by slowly, carefully testing the things you and others believe, through a process of elimination, you can falsify, get rid of, a lot of wrong ideas—even ones you cherished—until the resulting picture, imperfect as it is, lets you see the world a little more clearly than before.

This is the second half of the declaration, the manifesto, of a new revolution—one that began to take hold only a couple of centuries ago and is still tentative, uncertain, incomplete, yet has already achieved incredible wonders. To the problem of imperfect knowledge it suggests a new and unprecedented solution—honest work.

To come close to what's really going on, I must learn to double-check, to experiment, and even to consult and cooperate with other people. Mutual deliberation, or giving of "reality checks," helps us agree on common ground, and criticism is the only anodyne human beings have ever discovered against error.

It has always taken great wisdom, maturity, and force of will to overcome ingrained human egotism and say—"Hey, I can fool myself! I might even be wrong, from time to time."

But it has taken an even more remarkable revolution for people to be able to add—"Instead of retreating into ourselves, let's try taking the problem apart into little pieces, see where I'm wrong, where you're wrong, and where we both may wind up being surprised."

I should pause for a moment to explain something that may have perplexed you. Yes, I did lump faith and reason together a little while ago. There is a hoary notion that the two mental systems are essential foes, forever in opposition, but this is not so. Any thoughtful scientist will tell you that reason is just another
type
of faith. You scribble down a scenario on paper—as Plato, Aquinas, Hegel, Marx, and Freud all did—and convince yourself, after a lot of "ifs" and "therefores," that something must be so.

After all, can't you prove things on paper . . . in mathematics?

In fact, mathematicians are considered the idiots-savant of the scientific family—because they actually believe in logical "proofs." Mathematics is certainly the most brilliant, accurate, and useful metaphor-generating system ever conceived. It contains systems to check for self-consistency, so that most flaws are weeded out before publication. Yet even the most elegant theorem must be tested against reality or remain a nebulous thing. A curiosity. Just another pretty incantation.

In other words, mathematicians are shamans, too.

Reason can be just another form of faith—a tower of words or symbols that seem to demonstrate what you wanted to prove, forgetting that in other hands the same tools can be used to show opposite conclusions. Take the famed philosopher, René Descartes, who decided to throw out everything he knew and start from scratch—then proceeded, step by painstaking step, to logically "prove" all of the premises and prejudices he had started out with! When you have an ideology or theory that
ought
to be true, it takes great strength of character to overcome the very human desire to believe your own spell-weaving, and instead allow others to test the edifice you've created. Testing it against the possibility of being wrong.

Fitfully, hesitantly, we have begun preaching this lesson to our youth—especially those entering science—yet it is a hard standard to live up to. To a surprising degree the new priesthood manages to work by this new code, but the siren call of egotism and self-righteousness can never be escaped. It resonates within our Cro-Magnon skulls, ever beckoning us back toward the narcissistic joys of magic.

Today one hears fundamentalists—those preaching a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis—attacking so-called secular humanism by claiming it is "just another religion." Meanwhile they promulgate what they call "Creation Science." The irony of this implied compliment—that science is more trustworthy than older ways of knowing—seems to escape notice by both sides in the public debate.

The same people proclaim that "evolution is just a theory." And, of course, we know that all theories are equal, yes?

Cultural Relativism, a myth springing up at the opposite end of the political spectrum from Creation-ism, also proclaims not only that all ideas have equal value, but that no worldview or culture has any better inkling what is going on than any other. That there is no such thing as good or bad, right or wrong . . . only an amorphous sea of relativity, with every concept mutually exchangeable. The only thing valid is individual aesthetics. A repackaging, in other words, of the same old prescription—a retreat to the inner world.

But all theories aren't equal! Human thought thrives on competition among ideas. Some are disproved and go deservedly to the dustbin. Meanwhile, others graduate to become
models of the world
. Anyone can come up with a metaphor or notion, but a model of the world offers consistent explanations for what people see going on around them.

More important, a valid model goes on to make testable predictions.

Most first-rate scientific papers end with a statement saying, in effect: "If this wonderful theory of mine is true, so-and-so will be discovered in this-and-such experiment. On the other hand, my theory will be disproved if trials X or Y show contrary results."

That's the way it works, and not just in science. It is also how honest men and women live their lives. If you believe in something, then by all means try to prove it, even convince others. But always leave room for the possibility that someone else may prove you wrong.

What about these so-called "models of the world," then?

The name could be applied to any theory that best describes the universe at a given time. Call it a monarch among theories, for as we said before, all ideas are not equal. In any month or year, in any subject area, one description is usually the leader—generally the one with the fewest inconsistencies and the best accumulated evidence to back it up.

In science no model lasts forever. Leading theories are rewarded by becoming prime targets! More experiments are aimed at testing them than any others. Even if a model survives trial after trial, it inevitably
changes
in the process. Usually, these new versions are incremental improvements rather than rejections, as Darwin's concepts have matured during the century since his death, while retaining their basic validity. But revolutions are also known to happen. Plate tectonics did not start out as the Best Model in geology. It won its place after a long process of criticism, successful predictions, and comparison to evidence.

It is a remarkably successful process, by which our understanding of the universe has evolved year after year, without the traumas or heretic-burnings that used to punctuate advances in human knowledge. This new priesthood is open to all comers, even the daughters and sons of peasants. One peculiar side product, relatively rare in times past, is a strange commodity called "honesty"—(absolutely indispensable in science)—which is probably the least likely marvel ever to have emerged out of self-centered human minds.

Alas, at times the process also seems staid, un-dramatic, even despotic to those who nowadays portray themselves as brave nonconformists, and science as today's oppressive monolith. Some arty types would seem to prefer going back to older ways of doing things—the way "wisdom" was handled everywhere and everywhen, except in our own narrow sliver of time.

For six thousand, ten thousand, fifty thousand years—however far back you assume we were intelligent and able to ask questions—our ancestors had very little idea how the world worked. And we can safely assume that they were terrified most of the time.

Throughout those millennia nearly every civilization we know of had a belief system based upon what might be called a Look Backward worldview. In other words, people shared a common belief that their tribe, people, nation once had a
golden age
, a better time when humans were more virtuous, stronger, closer to heaven. An era when sages worked wonders and were wiser than more recent folk. From Sumeria to China, to the legends of Native Americans, this thread of lost glory runs through almost every mythic tradition.

Except ours. Our worldwide, cosmopolitan, modern culture is arguably the first to take a radically divergent orientation, not necessarily better, but profoundly different. A philosophy that might be called Look Forward.

There was
no
golden age in the past, this revolutionary view declares; our ancestors scratched and clawed, and a few of them—the well-meaning ones—tried hard to redress the shabby ignorance they had inherited. Some, in sincerely trying to improve things, came up with dreadful world models, pantheons or social orders that excused, even encouraged, terrible persecutions or injustices. Still, despite all the mistakes and obstacles they faced, men and women managed glacially, generation by generation, to add to our knowledge—and to our wisdom, as well.

There was no past ancient golden age, say believers in the Look Forward vision. But there is a notion going around that we just might be able to
build
one, for tomorrow's children.

This new orientation toward the future, not the past, is especially clear in the scientific attitude toward knowledge. Instead of "Truth" with a capital
T
, immutable and handed down unchanged through time from some ancient text of lore, today we have the cycle of improvement and revision I've described in this essay. The best world models are found in the latest journal articles, in the most recent textbooks on any given subject—and even they won't be the final word, because in five or ten years there'll be better models still, as results pour in from new experiments.

To you, a modern reader and member of contemporary civilization, this way of looking at truth may sound obvious. (Note how even the phrases "Look Backward" and "Look Forward" sound biased in favor of the latter, a result of prejudice built into our language.) But I cannot overstate how recently this point of view achieved anything approaching widespread acceptance. This shift in the time orientation of wisdom is an intellectual sea change unprecedented in the annals of human thought. Its consequences, which already include science and democracy, will grow more profound as the years go by.

Let's take a side trip, while on the subject of human thought. To begin, we must backtrack to skim a little biology.

Richard Dawkins, in his book
The Selfish Gene
, describes how our genetic heritage seems to have resulted from struggles by nearly invisible clusters of DNA against nature and each other. Nearly all of evolution could be regarded as a winnowing of those genes that fail to achieve the central goal of making and spreading copies of themselves. Of course, molecules do not contemplate goals. "Wanting" is a human emotion. Still, the effects of natural selection often do look eerily as if different genetic heritages have been striving against one another for niches in the ecosystem.

Put it this way: if, by fortuitous happenstance, a set of genes stumbles onto the right attributes, enabling it to create an organism that, in turn, lives to make and pass on more copies of the genes, then most of those copies will also share the original successful trait and have an improved chance of making copies themselves. And so on. The process works as well for autonomous creatures, like you and me, as for a virus that invades a host organism and uses it as a tool for replication.

This is but a crude summary of insights Dawkins depicts so well (which led to my story in this volume, "The Giving Plague"). Here it is only a prelude to Dawkins's next step, when he discusses another type of bundle of information with similar traits—not genes, but "memes."

Memes are raw
ideas
. Pure concepts that, like conquering genetic codes, seem capable of thriving in and via host organisms, in this case
human minds
.

What would such a "living idea" be like? Well, for one thing it would survive by making its host
think about it
. In contemplating a concept you in effect keep it alive. For example, some time ago I read a notion—the very one we're discussing now—the notion of memes. You could say this idea was successful at "infecting" me, because I've continued thinking about it, giving it continued existence, or "life."

But a virus or bacterium that just sits inside its host doesn't accomplish much. An effective pseudo-organism must do more. It must reproduce.

How would a living idea proliferate?

By getting its host not only to think about it, but to make and spread copies . . . by telling other people! And now, if you've been paying attention, you'll realize that's just what I've been doing the last few minutes for one particular meme—the meme
of
memes! By telling you about it, I am doing the memic equivalent of coughing on you. Infecting you with the transmissible, self-replicating notion of these infectious ideas. If it's a successful self-replicating notion, some of you will go out and tell others about it. And so on.

Of course life would be impossibly dull if we didn't share ideas, while constantly mutating and adapting them to our purposes. But let's imagine that some of these self-reproducing ideas pick up more attributes. What if one of them helped its host become prosperous, charismatic, or influential—to spread the meme more effectively. Or what if another meme caused its hosts, or host tribe, to keep other memes out. To expose their children only to old, familiar ideas. What a powerful trick that would be!