The Ways of
Nature are
Discrete
and Just
by Robert Pollack
© 1997 Robert Pollack, all rights reserved.
Excerpted from keynote address at colloquium "Science in a Progressive Liberal
Arts Education," Goddard College, June 13, 1997.
(Posted June 27, 1997 · Issue 11; archived July 11, 1997)
Science cannot become important to general education if it remains unimportant to students. Their increasing indifference to science signals a disturbing cultural phenomenon, the separation of the intellectual worlds of scientists and nonscientists. When a liberal arts college fails to bridge this divide, it cannot succeed in any other meaningful way.
I entered Columbia planning to be a scientist, and I left with a major in physics. But in between, thanks to a good general education program, I was taught how to put my work into a larger context.
For me, general education was a set of precious, painful good-faith efforts to learn to think more clearly and analytically. The literature and philosophy I studied asked questions that cut close to the bone, for which there were no final answers. Some of these questions have stayed with me since then:
Not all scientists make the connection between their chosen profession and the larger questions of life and death. From my own experience, I would argue that the place of science in general education is to ensure that science, and the ways scientists think and argue, become part of every student's learning to think for himself or herself.
It is essential that teachers know how to expose a future lawyer or political figure, military officer, or corporate leader to a dose of the scientist's world, to protect her or him from the errors symmetrical to ones I would have made had I not been exposed to a good core curriculum in the humanities and in political philosophy.
These are the errors of believing:
To avoid propagating these errors, science teachers must learn what science is, how it is practiced, and how it connects to the large questions central to general education. The eminent physicist Richard Feynman spoke of "the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom, as our duty to all coming generations."
How can we make sure that general education includes "a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance?" We face three major barriers:
Let us consider these impediments in order. The cultural obstruction to science entering general education properly concerns the public perception of science. Too often, scientists are portrayed as white-coated magicians or practitioners of a pagan religion. They obey only their own arcane rules, and uncover mysteries of the universe that might have been better kept hidden. But since these discoveries may lead to products of great, if morally ambivalent value, society cannot totally disregard their efforts.
In fact, the benefits of science have contributed to the development in this country of a science-as-progress myth. It is the myth of our invincibility, a belief that we can continue to overindulge and overconsume indefinitely. We are responsible for creating a myth of never-ending fixes, and we have an obligation to say so.
A second, political block to the introduction of science in general education is the misuse of general education to indoctrinate students instead of teaching them to think. Lists of books, works of art and music, political tracts, and religious credos are used as the source of a set of facts, ideas, and memories that must be learned in one particular way. When asking questions is less important than memorizing lists, general education has failed.
The third obstacle to science in general education is the resistance to general education as such in any science departments. In a solid general education curriculum, the science component:
The current structure of university science departments makes each of these goals hard to achieve and harder to maintain. Interdepartmental courses in particular will never be easy to organize, or to sustain, so long as salaries, promotions, office, lab space, and teaching assignments all flow to faculty from the chairs of different departments. Physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, astronomy, mathematics, and computer sciences departments remain separate worlds to their separate faculties. Few science departments are ready to join even a loose academic Federation of Science. As a chemist once said to me, "I don't teach science, I teach chemistry."
Scientific research supported by outside funds permits scientists to live more comfortably than their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. That being the case, no one should be surprised to learn that scientists have organized life on their departmental islands so as to keep up the flow of outside research grants. Many regard themselves first and foremost as citizens of their departments, and only where convenient, as citizens of their college or university. As a direct result of this enlightened self-interest, interdepartmental and general curricular concerns rarely get proper attention.
Some of the most creative and interesting scientists look baffled when a well-meaning colleague or dean asks them to put some extra time and effort into general education. It brings them no grants, adds nothing to their research, and requires them to teach students who by definition will never become their intellectual offspring. They enter such discussions open-minded but puzzled, then become amused, and then bring the conversation to a close by getting back to their real work.
Here are some suggestions on how we may begin to establish a proper place for science in the general education curriculum.
(1) As an antidote to the cultural barrier, nothing I know of beats going public. Scientists should tithe their time to explain themselves to the taxpayers who support their research; and schools, whether large or small, should hold public debates about science and public policy. I have found writing for the general public to be as rewarding as bench science. My first book, Signs of Life: The Meanings and Language of DNA, came out in 1994 and has since been translated into six languages; my next book, It's About Time: Science and the Future of Medicine, will be published in 1999.
(2) With regard to the political barrier of doctrinaire general education, my suggestion is equally simple. This barrier is made by our colleagues, and we should be able to remove it through examples of principled disclosure. We must insist on the primacy of freethinking, nonideological, non-formulaic discourse, and on respect for ideas different from our own. We must also be more humane, acknowledging the links between our work and our beliefs, our feelings, and most importantly, our fears. The short-term cost of taking these positions is likely to be a certain isolation, but the ultimate reward of free and honest intellectual relationships is worth that price.
(3) The third, academic obstacle can also be overcome only by an investment of our time to teach science well, so that it becomes a living part of our culture. But scientists cannot do it alone. We need the leaders of our colleges and universities to articulate a vision of the university that includes a commitment to the study of the political implications of science, and to back that vision with reasonable resources. Without such a jump-start from academic leadership, the more personal interests within science departments will prevail.
(4) Finally, it is not enough to be well led, it is not enough to tell the truth; it is also necessary to live in the world, to engage the issues of the day in one's scholarly work. I saw this was possible when I was an undergraduate, and the lesson has stayed with me.
My colleague Edward Said noted this need twenty years ago, in a quote from an article about his book Orientalism: "In a recent interview [Edward Said] cites with approval Lionel Trilling's assertion that 'there is a mind of society' and argues that it is this mind that the critic should 'address, tutor, doctor, inform, evaluate, criticize, reform.'"
I find this notion of a "mind of society" entirely congenial. But as a scientist, when I look around me I find, with some dismay but no surprise, precious few colleagues willing to involve themselves with the scientific dimension of the societal mind. To do so, we need to teach science as a fully accessible argument between imagination and physical action. The imagination of a scientist creates a vision of a particular aspect of the natural world. But that vision is never enough: physical action - experimentation - weighs in immediately, to test the model.
This back-and-forth of theory and practice - the scientific method - works because in science, the imagination must either yield to, or encompass, the results of experiment. There is no room in science for empty speculation, nor for its complement, the involutional, anarchic, cynical despair we find in so much of today's critical theory.
The resulting narratives of successful science - discoveries, we call them - are bounded by culture no less than any other narrative. But the models they stem from, confirm, and alter are not simply narratives. These models, the most-recently-adapted, current working hypotheses of science, float above all their previous narrative versions, persisting through time, never final, never culture-bound. They continuously give us new ways to see and understand ourselves.
Now here's the paradox: New ways of seeing ourselves or our place in nature are precisely what we do not teach today, neither to the undergraduate nor to the specialist. Student and professor alike should feel the same urgency about this intellectual shortfall.
I first read Dante's Inferno in 1958, in a Columbia general education course. Seven hundred years after this classic was first penned, it is clear that we live today in a world of science easily recognizable in the Inferno. In Canto 31, we meet ourselves face-on. At the bottom of the last circle Dante sees, in the distance, a Stonehenge of monstrous, missile-like towers. Thinking these to be the giants of Genesis surrounding the very pit of Hell, he says to us in a parenthetical aside:
(Nature indeed,
when she abandoned making these animals,
Did well to keep such instruments from man;
Though she does not repent of making whales
Or elephants, a person who subtly inquires
Into her ways will find her both discrete
And just, in her decision: if one confers
The power of the mind, along with that
Of immense strength, upon an evil will
Then people will have no defense from it.)
Have no doubt: There will be more moments when misused science will indeed leave people with no defense from an evil will. Our obligation as scholars is to do what we can to keep science from being misused. To do this, we must begin to open collaborations between scientist and nonscientist, to create a real home in the academy, for the changing but always powerful models of science. These scientific models not only articulate, but also shadow, our lives. Some threaten old notions of free will, human equality, even fate itself. This is not a reason to inhibit the work of science; but it is a reason to be sure these models do not go from the laboratory to the world unchallenged.
Robert Pollack is Professor of Biological Science at Columbia University.
Endlinks
The following Web sites provide a variety of resources for integrating science, engineering, medicine, and mathematics into a broader social context.Beyond BIO 101: The Transformation of the Undergraduate Biology Education - from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, this report details recent and ongoing changes in biology curricula at many American colleges and universities. Work includes changes that will benefit not only biologists in training, but also liberal arts students of science. Also provided are profiles of individual scientists/educators and students.
Division of Undergraduate Education of the National Science Foundation - has programs for developing science education for the nonscientist.
World Wide Web Ethics Center for Engineering and Science - an Internet interface for exploring science and engineering with ethics and social responsibility, for both practitioners and educators.
Introducing Ethics Case
Studies Into Required Undergraduate Engineering Courses - Engineering
ethics studies at Texas A&M. Medical
Humanities - related resources at the New York University School of Medicine,
plus other links. Worldwide
Guide to Science Studies Programmes - database indexed by
subject and geographic region. Richard Feynman Online -
exploration of the physicist's philosophy, plus links to other Feynman sites.