Consilience

Consilience is “literally a ‘jumping together’ of knowledge by the linking of facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation" (8). Wilson believes that consilience, common in the natural sciences, can cross boundaries into the social sciences and even the humanities. Environmental policy, ethics, biology, and social science are related fields studied separately; when they intersect, confusion reigns. However, Wilson believes that the experts from each field can find common ground on which to think clearly about issues that cross from one field to the next. Already, many scientific domains are joining forces, as with chemical physics, ecological genetics, and chemical ecology.

Some scholars are uncomfortable with the idea of consilience; they claim that the unification of the natural sciences with the humanities is the purview of philosophy and not science. If so, then philosophers can help guide the process of adding scientific rigor to all fields of thought, including philosophy itself. In higher education, fields of study have become compartmentalized, science courses are rarely required, and the ideal of the “unity of learning” has been lost. Politicians and pundits, largely ignorant of science, struggle with the great issues because they try to apply rigid ideologies rather than scientific findings as their solutions. The sublime quest, then, is to find the underlying principles that govern life and to apply them fruitfully to all human activities. 

The Enlightenment begins in the 1600s; it is an era imbued with the belief that knowledge can grow and unify and serve humanity. Arguably it ends in 1794 with the death of the Marquis de Condorcet, a leader of the Enlightenment who dies during the French Revolution for not being vigorous enough about suppressing dissidents. Robespierre, a leader of the revolution until his death in 1794, takes to heart Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s dictum that society must be run in accordance with the “general will” and decides that dissidents must be punished. Robespierre’s Reign of Terror sweeps up 300,000 opponents, Condorcet included, killing 17,000 of them.

Condorcet, born into a royal family, grew into a polymath with a photographic memory and joined the Académie des Sciences—of which he became permanent secretary—and the Académie Française. Condorcet was the first to apply math to social and political problems; he developed an early version of decision theory. Condorcet’s support of social justice and welfare included a campaign against slavery. He held that human history has causes that can be discovered and used to design the best future path. Above all, Condorcet believed human life can be improved indefinitely, and that reason will guide people to a better future. Even while imprisoned, Condorcet maintained his optimism, writing a book, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, that argues that humanity has made progress throughout history and, despite “the injustices which still pollute the earth” (22), still can reach for higher levels of attainment.

If the Enlightenment led to a Reign of Terror and an early form of totalitarianism, perhaps it contained a fatal flaw. The Enlightenment might merely be one style of thought in a multicultural world with many equally valid theories on how the world works. The answer is that the ideals of the Enlightenment, despite their flaws, have “been the principal inspiration not just of Western high culture but, increasingly, of the entire world” (24). Enlightenment philosophers thought of the world as a machine made of parts which, in turn, are made of smaller parts all the way down to atoms. Likewise, society is made up of people with brains made of neurons which are made of atoms.

The founder of modern science, Francis Bacon, believed knowledge shouldn’t be based on ancient beliefs or mere scholarship, but on a thorough and unbiased examination of the real world. Bacon based the philosophy of science on induction—the detection of patterns in the world, combined with rigorous fact gathering. Bacon rose to the heights of political power during the early 1600s, becoming Chancellor under England’s James I, then falling from grace during a scandal. His public career in a shambles, Bacon returned to his first love, the study of nature; his last years were spent doing science. Bacon died when an experiment using snow to preserve meat gave him a serious illness. Bacon believed science should be studied coolly but described warmly, with vivid descriptions and stories that showcase the wonders of nature. He warned against reasoning fallacies including tribal beliefs, personal prejudices, the lure of fancy words, and the dazzle of “misleading demonstrations.”

René Descartes, founder of modern philosophy and inventor of algebraic geometry and its Cartesian coordinate graphs, is France's greatest scholar and was a mentor to other early Enlightenment thinkers. His belief that the universe operates on rational cause and effect laid the groundwork for subsequent scientific advances. Descartes’ chief contribution to the development of scientific thinking was his stress on the use of logic and doubt to eliminate all extraneous assumptions and arrive at an unassailable set of reasoned axioms. His theory that the world is made of parts that can be examined separately is called reductionism; that, and his mathematical modeling, are the most powerful analytical tools of modern science.

Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity unified physics and helped validate Descartes’ ideas on the universality of natural laws. The successes of physics encouraged other Enlightenment thinkers to propose a similarly analytic study of people and societies; their work set the stage for the later emergence of sociology.

Reductionism has led to the development of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, the deepest and most basic principles so far known and the first to extend well outside the human brain’s ability to understand scientific laws intuitively.

The Enlightenment also caused a reassessment of religion. Deists believed God created the universe and then sat back. Some modern deists suggest that God may manage numerous universes, and He “adjusts physical laws and parameters in order to observe the outcome" (35), with the result that certain universes, including our own, can support life. These deists predict that, sometime in the distant future, intelligent life will use science to discover God. Christians, from the Enlightenment to today, argue instead that this knowledge cannot be found that way and must, instead, be revealed by God.

Unable to prove that God exists, Enlightenment thinkers next tackled ethics but found that, absent religion, moral systems must rely on the subjective concept of natural rights. Even if thinkers were to derive, from the first principles of nature, a perfect social system, this would deprive humanity of its freedom and, worse, open the gates to a totalitarian regime. The French Revolution, scientific socialism, fascism, and world-destroying technologies point to the dark possibilities of a world ruled by science. Faced with the possibility of a future filled with Frankenstein’s monsters, a Romantic Revolution flared to life during the 1800s, calling for a return to art and intense emotions instead of cold reason. Even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the great poet and novelist who loved science, resisted its claim to explain the universe. Goethe’s contemporary, Friedrich Schelling, believed in a unity of the cosmos that ultimately is unknowable to humans. American romantics, including Thoreau and Emerson, loved science; like Schelling, though, they believed the universe ultimately is unknowable. Life is filled with a grandeur, they said, that cannot be reduced to molecules and grubby evolution from pond scum.

Scientists abandoned the search for God and beauty, leaving those topics to practitioners of the humanities, and the great Enlightenment quest for a unified system of knowledge was set aside. As science advanced rapidly well into the 20th century, its discoveries hinted at the very unity proposed by Enlightenment thinkers, but scientists instead focused on the minutiae of their respective departments of study. Artists, meanwhile, developed Modernism, which broke all the old rules to create an eclectic, personalized, rebellious style that turned away from the old, orderly aesthetic and rejected the science that once accompanied it. Postmodernists go further, believing that no ultimate knowledge is possible and that science is merely a social construct meant to benefit a ruling elite. Science and the humanities, then, are “no longer on speaking terms" (43). Perhaps the postmodernists will challenge scientists to sharpen their arguments in favor of reason and the search for ultimate truths. If so, their nihilism will have served a useful purpose.