Author: Ophelia Benson

Malcolm Gladwell, in whimsical vein, writes in The New Yorker about the non-obvious connection between comedy-writing teams and groups that stimulate and encourage the creation of philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, ideas. He takes off from a book about the people who created the American tv show ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and then brings in Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, about the group of thinkers and inventors around Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley in late 18th century Birmingham. Gladwell points out that one feature of group dynamics is that friends can encourage and provoke each other to take more extreme positions than they would on their own, and that this is generally considered a bad thing. “But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.”

Surely he’s right, and group-think is yet another example of those tiresome, difficult, annoying phenomena where one has to say ‘Yes but’ all the time. Some of this but some of that; can be good but can also be bad; half full or half empty. Such things make it so difficult to generalise. There are groups like Aryan Nation and the National Front, and then there are groups like Monty Python or the circle around Emerson or the people who used to meet for dinner chez Magny in Paris in the 19th century. Groups of friends can encourage and embolden useful or beautiful new ideas, or vicious ugly ones. Moderation can be closer to truth or it can be just the tame conformist compromise that gets us nowhere. Extremism can be loony and absurd and futile, or it can reveal ideas and problems and solutions we need and want. It simply depends, is the boring truth of the matter.

There are many tributaries that flow into the river of hostility to science, and some of them are ideas and thoughts that, used well, have much to recommend them. Used badly, they are another matter. Good ideas misapplied can turn silly in a heartbeat.

There is for instance the matter of deference. There is a bumper sticker/T shirt slogan in the US: ‘Question Authority’. Of course it’s obvious if you think about it for one second that that idea can cut both ways. To get it right the slogan would have to use qualifying language that would ruin it as a slogan. ‘Question authority but also bear in mind that authority may well know more than you do and knowing more doesn’t absolutely always equate to arbitrary and unjust privilege so–‘

No, it won’t do. But that’s why slogans aren’t much use, really, except to rally the troops, and sometimes the troops are rallied to dash off in the wrong direction. As with hostility to science. Of course, many scientific disciplines have vast social impacts and implications and therefore should be accountable, subject to scrutiny and second-guessing and probing questions from outsiders. But it doesn’t follow from that that science as a whole, the scientific way of thinking, the emphasis on evidence and peer review and replication, is fraudulent or sinister or accorded undue deference. In some quarters it is considered as hopelessly naive and retrogressive to think science is in general a good idea as it is to think the earth is flat, or possibly more so. After all, who told us it wasn’t? Consider the source! Question authority!

Two stories about Harvard in the Boston Globe in the last two days raise a lot of interesting if intractable questions. The first tells of a plan for a Law School committee “to draft a speech code that would ban harassing, offensive language from the classroom.” It is interesting that “another professor’s comment that feminism, Marxism, and black studies have ‘contributed nothing’ to tort law” is included by the reporter in a list of “racial incidents.” Is that comment, that opinion, really a racial incident? By what definition? But perhaps even more unnerving is the name of the new group: the Committee on Healthy Diversity. Oh dear. What sanely skeptical adult does not want to pack a bag and light out for the territory on being offered such a Committee? ‘Give me Sickliness any day!’ will surely be the cry. ‘I don’t want to be healthy,’ one hopes all those jaundiced overtired law students are muttering. But in this healthy climate, Randall Kennedy told Alan Dershowitz that his language was insensitive and that students should not be embarrassed (law students!) to answer. Dershowitz told Kennedy not to try to silence him, and in a very healthy moment Philip Heymann pointed out that teachers at law schools are supposed to challenge students to defend their opinions. “Making someone uncomfortable should not be prohibited,” he said. Indeed not. Perhaps Harvard Law needs another committee: the Committee on Instructive Discomfort.

The second story perhaps errs in the other direction. The subject is the reinvitation of the poet Tom Paulin to give a lecture, after the invitation had been rescinded because of protests over “an interview with an Egyptian newspaper that quotes Paulin describing Brooklyn-born Jews living in Israeli settlements as ‘Nazis’and ‘racists’ and saying that they ‘should be shot dead.’” Now the English department has “argued strenuously for reinviting Paulin and sending a message that the English department supported free speech, even if it is controversial or offensive.” Without taking a position on whether Paulin should be uninvited or reinvited, it is possible to note that surely saying people should be shot dead is something beyond merely controversial or offensive. Perhaps there is a good case to be made for the notion that a poet should be able to say such things, or that free speech depends on allowing even incitement to violence, or that the First Amendment would be fatally weakened by giving in to such protests. But the case can’t be made if the terms are fudged. If one wants to defend incitement to violence as free speech, then one has to call it what it is and not something else.

A remarkably rich essay by Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian is full of matter relevant to the concerns of Butterflies and Wheels. His subject is the difficulty and subtlety of distinguishing between fiction and fact, what he calls the border between the two, and the necessity nonetheless of making the distinction, of continuing to patrol that border, and resisting any postmodernist temptation to shrug and say it’s all the same thing. Garton Ash mentions Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties, a fictional account that presented itself as a history until the end. “Schama suggests that history as storytelling, as literature, must reclaim the ground it has lost to history as science, or pseudoscience. I entirely agree; but from this particular literary device it is not a long step to the postmodernist conclusion that any historian’s ‘story’ is as good as any other’s.” I don’t agree with the history as science part. Historians examine, evaluate, and interpret evidence just the way scientists do, after all. History is also literature (but then so can science be), but it has to be accurate, self-correcting, open to criticism, just as science does. Perhaps the border between fact and fiction should be better patrolled whereas the one between history and science should be done away with.

Which is not to say that the job is an easy one. Garton Ash goes on to consider the unreliability of witnesses and of memory, the way the mind generates narrative to make sense of facts and experiences that perhaps don’t make sense in reality, the need for selection among the mass of events and facts in the world, the morality of truth, and the fact that we believe people who warn us not to believe them. In short he examines the paradox we all bump into many times a day, that truth is both elusive and necessary.