Originally published 17 July 2001
Is scientific knowledge true?
Or is it just one more made-up story of the world, with no greater claim on truth than any other?
Critics on both the religious right and political left state that scientists are self-serving and unreliable, slaves of fashion or faceless pawns of their military-industrial patrons, and that therefore anything scientists state as truth is suspect.
Biblical literalists bash science for suggesting that certain aspects of the scriptures — a seven-day creation, the flood of Noah — are not literally true. Left-wing academic critics argue that, since all knowledge is a social construction, we should espouse world views that advance particular social or political agendas.
Both sides drub science as materialist, reductionist, and soul-denying.
And then there are the Bobos.
I refer to David Brook’s bestselling book, Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There. His catchy tag is short for “bourgeois bohemian,” a fusion of hippie and yuppie. Bobos are smart, well-educated, affluent, free-spirited, anti-establishment but non-disruptive, health-conscious, politically centrist, self-indulgent, environmentally sensitive, socially inclusive, morally conservative but not traditionally religious. In other words, a hodgepodge of values representing, Bobos say, the best of all worlds.
Espresso-sipping artist meets cappuccino-gulping banker. Jack Kerouac meets the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.
David Brooks doesn’t talk about the Bobo attitude toward science, so I’ll take a shot at it.
As usual, Bobos want it all. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Gary Zukav’s The Seat of the Soul. Albert Einstein and Andrew Weil, the New Age health guru. Physicist Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, and Black Elk Speaks about the famed Oglala Sioux holy man.
They love science, and indeed they make their money on it. They devour shows like Nova on public television. They babble on at cocktail parties about the latest pics from the Hubble Space Telescope or Richard Dawkins’ latest book on utterly mechanistic biology.
But Bobos love the New Age, too. They are voracious consumers of every form of alternative medicine, and suckers for tales of near-death experiences. They will embrace any kind of paranormal mysticism as long as it’s called therapy. They will snap up any book whose title starts with “The Seven Steps to…”
As Brooks says, Bobos do not believe that the universe can be reduced to one natural order, one divine plan. Therefore, there cannot be one road to truth. All claims for absolute truth are suspect, from the right or the left. “All that is required,” says Brooks of Bobos, “is that people of good faith seek their own paths in an open and tolerant manner, without trying to impose their own paths on others.”
There’s something to be said for Bobo open-mindedness and tolerance, but where does that leave us on the question we started with: Is scientific knowledge true? Or perhaps we should rephrase the question as: Is science a privileged path to knowledge?
Philosopher Michael Ruse offers a valuable discussion of the question in his recent book, Mystery of Mysteries: Is Evolution a Social Construction? (Harvard University Press). His subject is the theory of evolution by natural selection, but it might as well have been the atomic theory of matter, the germ theory of disease, or any other scheme by which science attempts to understand the world.
Is evolution true? Or is it an arbitrary human invention, influenced by fashion, a handy way of organizing experience, but ultimately having no more claim to truth than biblical literalism or the latest offering of the postmodern deconstructionists?
Ruse takes us through the history of evolutionary theory, and shows us how at every turn its development was influenced by culture and personality. But he backs away from concluding that the theory is therefore of equal reliability with its alternatives. We may never know ultimate reality, he states, but we can know when one way of organizing our experience is better than another. The history of evolutionary thought demonstrates, according to Ruse, that in this limited sense Darwinism is without a credible rival.
Many scientists would go a bit further than Ruse. Creatures either evolve or they don’t, they would say, and the evidence is overwhelming that they do. The germ theory of disease is reliable knowledge because germs exist. And the atomic theory of matter is better than alternatives because we have devised ways to photograph atoms.
Mystery of Mysteries is not quite a Bobo book. For all of its equivocating, in the end it comes down for a privileged position for science. But guess what? I found the book in an airport bookstore, of all places, right there next to The Seven Steps to Health, Wealth and a Slim Figure. For that, we must thank the Bobos.
