When The Blind Believe They Can See

Updated below (someone asked me to say when I update)

Every once in a while, during the long forays into this kind of science and philosophical stuff, it's good for me to remind myself that my intention is political, promoting the individual and common good,  the preservation and protection of life on Earth,  equality, justice, economic justice...   If I was not convinced that this is of the most basic importance to those, I would not go into it at all.  The political consequences of the ideas discussed in this passage  from Weizenbaum's chapter "Computer Models in Psychology" are quite obvious, I hope.  

Sometimes a very complex idea enters the public consciousness in a form so highly simplified that it is little more than a caricature of the original; yet this mere sketch of the original idea may nevertheless change the popular conception of reality dramatically.  For example, consider Einstein's theory of relativity.  Just how and why this highly abstract mathematical theory attracted the attention of the general public at all, let alone why it became for a time virtually a public mania and its author a pop-culture hero, will probably never be understood.  But the same public which clung to the myth that only five people in the world could understand the theory, and which thus acknowledged its awe of it, also saw the theory as providing a new basis for cultural pluralism;  after all, science had now established that everything is relative.   A more recent example may be found in the popular reception of the work of F. Crick and J. D. Watson, who shared the Nobel prize in Medicine in 1962 for their studies of the molecular structure of DNA, the nucleic acid within the living cell that transmits the hereditary pattern. Here again  highly technical results, reported in a language not at all comprehensible to the layman, were grossly oversimplified and overgeneralized in the public mind into the now-popular impression that it is already possible to design a human being to specifications decided on in advance.  In one fell swoop, the general public created for itself a vision of a positive eugenics based not on such primitive and (I hope) abhorrent techniques as the killing and sterilization of "defectives," but on the creation of supermen by technological means.  What these two examples have in common is that both have introduced new metaphors into the common wisdom. 

A metaphor is, in the words of I. A. Richards, "fundamentally a borrowing between and intercourse of thoughts, a transaction between contexts"  Often the heuristic value of a metaphor is not that it expresses a new idea, which it may or may not do, but that it encourages the transfer of insights, derived from one of its contexts into the other context.  Its function thus closely resembles that of a model.  A Western student of Asian societies may, for example, not learn anything directly from the metaphoric observation that the overseas Chinese are the Jews of Asia*.  But it may never have occurred to him that the position of Jews in the Western world, e.g., as entrepreneurs, intellectuals, and targets of persecution, may serve as a model that can provoke insights and questions relevant for understanding the social role and function of, say, the Chinese in Indonesia.  Although calling that possibility to his attention may not give the Western student a new idea, it may enable him to derive new ideas from the interchange of two contexts, neither of which are themselves new to him, but which he had never before connected.  

Neither the idea of one object moving relative to another nor that of a man being fundamentally a physical object, was new to the common wisdom of the 1920s and the 1960s, respectively.  What struck the popular imagination when, for some reason, the press campaigned for Einstein's theory, was that science appeared to have pronounced relativity to be a fundamental and universal fact.  Hence the slogan "everything is relative' was converted into a legitimate contextual framework which could, potentially, at least, be coupled to every other universe of discourse, e.g., as an explanatory model legitimating cultural pluralism. The results announced by Crick and Watson fell on a soil already prepared by  the public's vague understanding of computers,  computer circuitry, and information theory (with its emphasis on codes and coding), and, of course by its somewhat more accurate understanding of Mendelian genetics, inheritance of traits, and so on.  Hence it was easy for the public to see the "cracking" of the genetic code as an unraveling of a computer program, and the discovery of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule as an explication of a computer's basic wiring diagram.  The coupling of such a conceptual framework to one that sees man as a physical object virtually compels the conclusion that man may be designed and engineered to specification.

There is no point in complaining that Einstein never intended his theory to serve as one half of the metaphor just described.  It is, after all, necessary for the two contexts coupled by a metaphor to be initially disjoint, just as (as I insisted earlier) a model must not have a causal connection to what it models.  the trouble with the two metaphoric usages we have cited is that, in both, the metaphors are overextended.  Einstein meant to say that there is no fixed, absolute spacetime frame within which physical events play out their destinies.  Hence every description of a physical event ( and in that sense, of anything) must be relative to some specified spacetime frame.  To jump from that to "everything is relative" is to play too much with words.  Einstein's contribution was to demonstrate that, contrary to what had until then been believed, motion is not absolute.  When one deduces from Einstein's theory that, say wealth and poverty are relative, in that it is not the absolute magnitudes of the incomes of the rich and poor that matters, but the ratios of one to the other, one has illicitly elevated a metaphor to the status of a scientific deduction.  

The example from molecular biology illustrates an over extension of a metaphor in another sense  there is the extent of what we know about the human as a biological organism is vastly exaggerated.  The result is, to say the least, a premature closure of ideas.  The metaphor, in other words, suggests the belief that everything that needs to be known is known.

I will note the fact that both Crick and Watson have, publicly, and even within what is commonly believed to be science, supported the primitive concept of eugenics that Weizenbaum mentions, never mind the more genteel expression it often takes these days.  In Weizenbaum's word, both of them "grossly oversimplified and overgeneralized" the meaning of genetics and their discovery. They were hardly alone in that nor were they the first.

While researching the series I did about Darwin, Galton and Haeckel last year, the number of prominent post-WWII era scientists who still believed in the same brand of eugenics as Pearson and even Davenport astonished me.  The culture of science seems to allow even very sophisticated scientists, who are supposed to learn from the real world, to be blinded by science to the extent that they couldn't see the disaster that eugenics produces in real world, human societies, producing horrors more abundant than the ones eugenics is superstitiously believed to prevent.

Crick, who is commonly presented as something of a broad-minded progressive figure, as compared to Watson,  campaigned for the applied program of eugenics as expounded by Arthur Jensen, writing many letters on his behalf.   I will not draw a metaphor to relate that to his scientistic materialism and his, also, often stated desire to destroy the belief in what he termed "vitalism"  (you can safely read "the soul" or, by extension, "God") except to note that those two things exist in one mind, on the basis of what the possessor of that mind believes to be "science".  Noting the connection between those ideas  in the one and same mind, and their presumed reliance on a more basic unity of belief, requires no metaphor.  Crick violently rejected a far less obvious dualistic modeling of the mind so the connection between his materialism and his pesudo-scientific eugenics would not violate his own framing.   There was no compartmentalization of or fire wall between Crick's materialism and his eugenics, nor is there in the minds of other materialist-eugenicists and there are more of them than many who see themselves as up-to-date and sciency folk would probably care to believe.  Indeed, one of the things that seriously alarmed me within the last ten years, slapping me out of my lazy late middle-age torpor, was the casual and unaware belief in eugenics expressed by those who believe themselves to be liberal.

* Given that his mention of this metaphor may raise a few eyebrows I'm well accustomed to having raised at me, I'll point out that Joseph Weizenbaum's family were among those who fled the Nazis.  His account is given in a documentary movie made a few years back,  "Rebel At Work",  [English transcript in pdf].


Update:   I understand someone believes I'm making up what I said about Crick.  Here, from this small sample of his thinking on racial inequality and eugenics, is a letter  to Sir Charles Snow in 1969

Dear Charles

I gave a talk to University College on 'The Social Impact of Biology' and the BBC subsequently broadcast a shortened version of it.  As I covered a very broad range of topics I decided not to publish it, and no manuscript exists as I spoke from notes.  As far as I remember I said that the biological evidence was that all men were not created equal, and it would not only be difficult to try to do this, but biologically undesirable.  As an aside I said that the evidence for the equality of different races did not really exist.  In fact, what little evidence there was suggested racial differences.

Had I enlarged on the subject I would have dwelt on the probable positive differences, such as, for example, the Jews and the Japs, rather than speak only about Negroes.  From what I hear you are saying something along these lines.  I would certainly love to see what you've written when you're satisfied with it. 

F.H.C. Crick 

And, as can be seen in his letter to another scientific racist and eugenicist, his fellow Nobel laureate,  William Schockley,  he wasn't only a fan of Arthur Jensen's scientific racism .