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By Root 736 0

inequalities in income and wealth that grow larger and larger. These inequalities in wealth and power will eventually provide some producers or consumers with enough economic or political clout to start to set prices to benefit themselves at the expense of others. This is not a new observation, of course. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith noted that businessmen invariably collude to set prices when they can. The result is the breakdown of the market’s ability to make most people as well off as possible.

The only way to repair this breakdown is to level the playing field among producers and consumers. The unequal distribution of wealth must be eliminated or at least reduced to allow the market to return to its welfare-conferring competitive character. Just breaking up monopolies, of course, won’t be enough. You have to break up the market power of individual consumers along with the producers. So, scientism plus core morality turn out to be redistributionist and egalitarian, even when combined with free-market economics. No wonder Republicans in the United States have such a hard time with science.

To the charge of being soft on crime, scientism pleads guilty. According to scientism, no one does wrong freely, so no one should really be punished. Prisons are for rehab and protection of society only. To the charge of permitting considerable redistribution of income and wealth, it must also plead guilty, and for the same reasons. Perhaps it should be clear now to many scientistic people why we are disproportionately sympathetic to Robin Hood. Scientism made us do it.

SCIENTISM AND THE TWO CULTURES

In 1959 a British scientist and novelist, C. P. Snow, published an article about “the two cultures”—the sciences and the humanities—in which he worried about the ignorance of scientists and humanists about each other’s culture and their alienation from one another. Snow sought to bridge the divide between these two cultures. Each, he thought, provided distinctive understanding, knowledge, wisdom. There had to be a way of vindicating the claims of each without sacrificing the insights of the other.

We have seen that this can’t be done. Despite their pretensions to equal standing, the humanities can’t compete with science when it comes to knowledge of reality, including human reality. There is only one kind of knowledge, one kind of understanding, and there is no such thing as wisdom. What looks like wisdom is either knowledge or good luck.

So, how should we treat the humanities?

To begin with, we can’t take their views of science seriously.

As Snow observed, scientists are in general keener to learn about the other culture. They certainly know a lot more about the humanities than humanists know about science. Snow made an invidious comparison between scientists’ acquaintance with Shakespeare and humanists’ ignorance of the second law of thermodynamics. (The physicist who discovered the quark must have been a serious consumer of the humanities. He found the word quark in Finnegans Wake.)

In fact, Snow went on to describe humanists as little short of proudly illiterate about science. As a result, he wrote, “So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their Neolithic ancestors would have had.” Snow was much more on target than he realized.

Driven by physics and by the second law in particular, science has built up an account of reality that we can be confident is fairly accurate, if not complete. This reality looks nothing like what humanists think about nature. Humanists are literally, nonmetaphorically trapped by the worldview of our Neolithic ancestors. As we have seen, since well before the late Stone Age, people were acting on the notion that understanding comes from interpretation of other people’s actions in terms of motives and meaning. It was a useful illusion then and for a long time after. In fact, much of contemporary society is still organized around that illusion, and for a long time it was hard to shake