I am quite sure that we should all be very humble. At least, I think I’m sure — I’ve heard it so many times from so many authorities. If there is one perfectly reliable, utterly safe platitude in science writing, it is that we should all be very, very humble.
The platitude comes with a backstory: Before modern science, humanity was perched atop a pedestal of foolish pride. We thought ourselves both physically and purposefully central to the Universe. We were the masters of a noble and unique globe around which the stars themselves revolved. Bulging with hubris, we were pumpkin-ripe for smashing.
Copernicus and Galileo, who exiled Earth from its position of central privilege to circle the Sun as a second-rate clod of dirt, were the first to rock the column of errors atop which we perched gloating like Yertle the Turtle. Latter-day astronomers demoted the Sun itself from centrality, then our galaxy, and then our entire Universe, which, many cosmologists now say, is probably just one of untold trillions.
The nature of these humbling shocks diversified in the nineteenth century, hitting hard below the self-conceptual belt: geology showed that our share of deep time is as vanishingly small as our location in space is obscure. Darwin showed that we are not the descendants of a miraculous First Couple but cousins of the rats and apes, evolved by a blind process. And so the gleaming hero, Science, blow by blow, slew the dragon of faith-based self-importance.
One could fill volumes with versions of this standard narrative. Darwin noted that “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” [1] Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “great revolutions in the history of science . . . knock human arrogance off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own self-importance,” attributing this idea to Freud. [2] E. O. Wilson admitted the salutary value of Copernicanism but thought that the “revolution begun by Darwin was even more humbling: it showed that humanity is not the center of creation, and not its purpose either.” [3] In 2008, New Scientist held a panel discussion on whether Galileo or Darwin “did most to knock man off his pedestal.” [4] (Darwin, it decided.) The lead editorial of the Jan. 1, 2009 issue of Nature was humbleness all over:
The first scientific observations with telescopes displaced Earth from the centre of the Universe. Modern technology continues to humble us . . . Marking Galileo’s anniversary, the International Year of Astronomy seeks to remind us of the humbling nature of gazing at the heavens. . . . The Universe will continue to humble us, if we take the time to look.
So in case you didn’t get it, we are very small and very brief and very accidental and should all be very, very, very humble.
It’s all hooey. Oh, the science part isn’t wrong: my first ancestor really was a smear of slime. And science has stirred up our ideas about ourselves, profoundly, as it should. Yet the stock narrative about the toppling of prescientific hubris is a tissue of wishful thinking, bad history, and logical confusion. Example: how, exactly, pace E. O. Wilson, did Darwin show that humankind is not creation’s “purpose,” or at least one of its “purposes”? Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, depending on what we mean by the word, but the name of the scientific specialty that adjudicates such questions seems to have slipped my mind.
Science has never made anybody humble. If scientists’ discoveries have moral or spiritual meanings they are not scientific meanings and we will meet them, if ever, only up completely non-scientific dark alleys. Pure reason has nothing to say about values: to logic, big numbers are just numbers. If we feel ourselves rebuked by greatness, awed, humbled, made aware of our weakness, if we bend the knee, if we adore the visions of science, it is the godlike in us that does so. As G. K. Chesterton said, we are taller when we kneel. As we abase ourselves before light-years, deep time, and deep relationship, our pedestal sprouts higher and higher beneath us, mounting to the heavens like Jack’s beanstalk. It’s the damnedest thing.
So science needn’t, in logic, humble us. Nor has it. The humility supposedly produced by contemplating Darwin and Galileo is prescriptive and ideological, not actual and personal; it is generally recommended by thinkers who display no more humility than the rest of us, often less (Freud, Gould, Wilson, and Richard Dawkins spring to mind like jack-in-the-boxes). Not surprisingly, nobody’s been buying. Our collective relationship to Nature is as suicidally exploitative as ever, our nationalisms and other group manias burn just as bright. As Charles Cockell says in Nature, “The revelations of Charles Darwin and Nicolaus Copernicus were not accompanied by a reduction in the number of wars as a result of a new humility.” [5] A good general rule: proclamations of humility coupled to glorification of any collective with which one identifies, such as one’s religion, one’s nation-state, or Science, are always insincere and unreal — as in, “I’m nothing but a little, tiny, humble cog . . . in the biggest, most shiny, most kick-ass machine the world has ever known!”
The only person who can really be humbled by the night sky or the news that they are related to the slug in their salad is one who is already humble. I refer to the possession of that mysterious virtue humilitas, which I do not pretend to practice or understand, not what passes for “humility” in triumph-of-Science narratives. That is merely the painless, even pleasant reflection that we are but little hobbits in a wide world after all and that someone else — usually a religious someone else — is due to eat some major crow.
The retailers of the stock narrative are projecting onto intellectual history a beloved image that we owe ultimately, at least in its most canonical, proverbial form, to the Old Testament: the downfall of the proud. “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18, King James version). In the stock narrative, humanity as a whole suffered from haughty-spirit syndrome until science imparted the mind-blowing knowledge of our “place in the Universe” (Nature, 01/09) — rural address, lowly origins, the whole bit. Thus the proud are humbled by the truth-tellers, huzzah! This storyline is familiar from not only the Bible but any number of folk tales and comic books. It informs the moral imagination of my own leftist politics. It is very human, probably cross-cultural, and highly gratifying. It also happens, in this case, to be fictional.
Place selected human beings next to an obviously humbling object, a mountain for instance, and record their reactions. George MacDonald will see a “beautiful terror” [6], while an extreme-sports enthusiast for whom the whole splendid, ancient earth is little more than a large outdoor climbing wall will perceive nothing but another peak to bag. The meek shall inherit the earth because they are the only people who really see it.
[Originally posted Feb. 9, 2009]
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[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 1871, closing paragraphs of main text. (Entire text available free athttp://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2300).
[2] Stephen Jay Gould, “The Evolution of Life on the Earth,” Scientific American, October 1994, p. 91.
[3] E. O. Wilson, “Intelligent Evolution,” Harvard Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2005, p. 30. At http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/11/intelligent-evolution.html (visited Jan. 5, 2009).
[4] At http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026877.100-who-did-most-to-knock-man-off-his-pedestal.html (visited Jan. 5, 2009).
[5] “Visions of Ourselves,” Nature, Jan. 1, 2009, p. 30.
[6] George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie, 1883, first page.
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