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By Root 2009 0

or the defence attorney? What about the judge or the other jurors? Has she formed an opinion about this case not from the facts laid out in court but from pre-trial publicity? Will she assign evidence from police officers greater or lesser weight than evidence from witnesses for the defence? Is she biased against the defendant’s ethnic group? Does the potential juror live in the neighbourhood where the crimes were committed, and might that influence her judgement? Does she have a scientific background about matters on which expert witnesses will testify? (This is often a count against her.) Are any of her relatives or close family members employed in law enforcement or criminal law? Has she herself ever had any run-ins with police that might influence her judgement in the trial? Was any close friend or relative ever arrested on a similar charge?

The American system of jurisprudence recognizes a wide range of factors, predispositions, prejudices and experiences that might cloud our judgement, or affect our objectivity, sometimes even without our knowing it. It goes to great, perhaps even extravagant, lengths to safeguard the process of judgement in a criminal trial from the human weaknesses of those who must decide on innocence or guilt. Even then, of course, the process sometimes fails.

Why would we settle for anything less when interrogating the natural world, or when attempting to decide on vital matters of politics, economics, religion and ethics?

If it is to be applied consistently, science imposes, in exchange for its manifold gifts, a certain onerous burden: we are enjoined, no matter how uncomfortable it might be, to consider ourselves and our cultural institutions scientifically and not to accept uncritically whatever we’re told; to surmount as best we can our hopes, conceits and unexamined beliefs; to view ourselves as we really are. Can we conscientiously and courageously follow planetary motion or bacterial genetics wherever the search may lead, but declare the origin of matter or human behaviour off-limits? Because its explanatory power is so great, once you get the hang of scientific reasoning you’re eager to apply it everywhere. However, in the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world. I’m aware that some of the discussion in, say, the preceding chapter may have such a character.

When anthropologists survey the thousands of distinct cultures and ethnicities that comprise the human family, they are struck by how few features there are that are givens, always present no matter how exotic the society. There are, for example, cultures - the Ik of Uganda is one - where all Ten Commandments seem to be systematically, institutionally ignored. There are societies that abandon their old and their newborn, that eat their enemies, that use seashells or pigs or young women for money. But they all have a strong incest taboo, they all use technology, and almost all believe in a supernatural world of gods and spirits, often connected with the natural environment they inhabit and the well-being of the plants and animals they eat. (The ones with a supreme god who lives in the sky tend to be the most ferocious - torturing their enemies for example. But this is a statistical correlation only; the causal link has not been established, although speculations naturally present themselves.)

In every such society, there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the sceptical world of science and the credulous world of religious belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both.

In a life short and uncertain, it seems heartless to do anything that might deprive people of the consolation of faith when