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By Root 724 0

it. Then, once the fashionability of the unconscious was established, literary theory took a detour from Vienna and headed for Paris, were it combined formalism and Jacques Lacan’s Hegelian-Freudian psychoanalysis to end up with Jacques Derrida’s conclusion that there is nothing to interpret except other interpretations. On the way from Freud’s Vienna and Leavis’s Cambridge, the science of interpretation passed through semiotics, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, formalism, ethnomethodology, colonial and subaltern theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, historicism and new historicism, reader-response theory, and feminist and queer theory. What all these “-isms” and “-ologies” have in common is an often heavily disguised commitment to the Neolithic conspiracy theory of human behavior that managed to get us out of the Pleistocene and into the Holocene about 10,000 years ago. This hoary old theory, as we have seen, gives center stage to narratives, histories, plots, conspiracies, and other ways of stitching motives into stories. Narratives will always be with us. Derrida’s Narratology solemnly attests to the fact.

By the 1980s, these humanist stratagems—trying to use science’s fallibility against itself, denigrating science as merely political, and pretending to be scientific—transformed C. P. Snow’s “two cultures” into the “science wars.” Scientists tried to bridge the gulf between themselves and the humanities, but they were ultimately unwilling to surrender the standard of predictive success based on experiment as the basis for claims to knowledge. Thus, they found themselves accused of attempted intellectual hegemony and ideological imperialism. They were accused of failing to see that their standard of predictive success was itself without independent objective basis. What is more, humanists argued, Kuhn and others had shown that there was no such thing as objective knowledge. The enterprise of science was also an arena of subjectivity. The humanities were a domain of knowledge different from but in no way inferior to science’s way of knowing.

No scientist could really take these charges seriously; in fact, outside of the lecture hall and the seminar room, neither could the most interpretatively besotted postmodernist. Theirs was a doctrine repudiated by its adherents every time they got on an airplane, had an X-ray, or washed their hands, for that matter.

When it comes to ways of knowing, scientism must plead guilty to charges of hegemonic ambitions. There is only one way to acquire knowledge, and science’s way is it. The research program this “ideology” imposes has no room for purpose, for meaning, for value, or for stories. It cannot therefore accommodate the humanities as disciplines of inquiry, domains of knowledge. They are not the source of truths about human affairs, to which real science must reconcile its results. There may be two cultures, but only one of them is free from illusions and qualified to tell us about reality.

That doesn’t mean that scientism has nothing to say about the humanities, beyond curbing their pretensions. The same facts that put science in a position to show why the humanities are a scientific dead end also show why they are an important source of satisfaction, happiness, and psychological reward universal to human experience.

Recall from Chapter 9 how Mother Nature secured our survival and eventual triumph in the evolutionary struggle. She disposed of a major threat—bigger, stronger, faster, meaner predators—by turning us into teams, making us conspiracy theorists, experts in the interpretation of the conduct of others, lovers of stories. The way natural selection turned us into conspiracy theorists was by hitching the psychological feeling of pleasure, satisfaction, relief from curiosity to the formulation of minimally predictive hypotheses about other people’s motives, what they wanted and what they believed about how to get it. The humanities thus were not second nature, but first nature to us. No wonder scientists are more committed to bridging the gulf between