Seth Shulman, editorial director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, reviews Michael Shermer’s new book at the Washington Post. Remember, the subtitle of that book is “How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.”
If you read carefully, I think you can detect that he doesn’t think much of it but wants to be polite or encouraging. It’s possible that I’m just reading that in, but…that’s the sense I get.
‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. told a crowd of protesters in Montgomery, Ala., in March 1965. King’s use of that quote stands as one of history’s more inspiring pieces of oratory, acknowledging that victories in the fight for social justice don’t come as frequently as we might like, while offering hope that progress will come eventually.
But is the contention empirically true?
No. We don’t know how any arc of the moral universe bends. We can’t know. It’s trivially easy to summon up moments crossed with locations when saying such a thing would just be insulting – a hot afternoon at Auschwitz for instance, or a cold night at a Siberian gulag.
Michael Shermer, a professor, columnist for Scientific American, and longtime public champion of reason and rationality, takes on this question and more. In “The Moral Arc,” Shermer aims to show that King is right so far about human civilization and that, furthermore, science and reason are the key forces driving us to a more moral world. It is at once an admirably ambitious argument and an exceedingly difficult one to prove.
If only the claim were that science and reason are among the key forces driving us to a more moral world. That would be a much easier claim to back up, and a less annoyingly self-congratulatory one as well.
To his credit, Shermer tackles this broad agenda with an abundance of energy, good cheer and anecdotes on everything from “Star Trek” episodes and the reasoning of Somali pirates to the demise of the Sambo’s restaurant chain. The anecdotes provide leavening but don’t alter the fact that this is a work of serious and wide-ranging scholarship with a bibliography that runs to nearly 30 pages. The effect can be kaleidoscopic and even a bit scattershot at times, but that doesn’t detract from the truly impressive array of data Shermer assembles.
Oh really? I bet it does. That’s one of the places where I detect (or think I detect) politeness veiling Shulman’s criticism. That kind of thing is one reason I have never liked Shermer’s writing, long before I clashed with him personally.
Shulman cites the precedents of Pinker and Harris.
Overall, Shermer does a good job of mining the scholarship in these and other areas, but his approach and the sheer breadth of scope ultimately make his argument seem more of a survey and less focused than some of these other works.
Faint…praise…
Somewhat less convincing are Shermer’s sections on the role of science as a moral force for good, which mostly boil down to anecdotes in which science has helped supplant superstition since the Enlightenment. It is true, of course, that (as far as I know) we’re no longer burning “witches” at the stake for phenomena we don’t understand. But I hoped Shermer would grapple more with the vexing ways in which science has contributed — and arguably continues to contribute — to moral atrocities, from the role of Nazi scientists to the development of biological weaponry.
Shermer’s case seems more anecdotal and even arbitrary than it should to really prove his grand case. Nonetheless, I enjoyed the book’s provocative breadth and found much of the material fascinating and well chosen. I greatly admire Shermer for tackling such an ambitious project and hope the book spurs many discussions and much further scholarship on this important subject.
Meh. I’m not a fan of that kind of ambition unless you’ve got the chops to pull it off. I prefer people who know their own strengths and weaknesses.
It is at once an admirably ambitious argument and an exceedingly difficult one to prove.
I believe that is reviewer-code for “Shermer waves his hands a lot.”
we’re no longer burning “witches” at the stake for phenomena we don’t understand
They’re killing children as “witches” in Nigeria. Nice try.
tackling such an ambitious project
Definitely reviewer-code for “… and failing.” The worst is when they say something like “tackling such an ambitious project .. ultimately many failed attempts… worthy attempt.”
I just posted a few minutes ago about some of the best books I read last year, and it occurred to me while reading your post that The Altruistic Personality speaks to this question.
Ah good, Marcus, it’s not just me then.
For my money, the review is pretty light weight. Anyone who can say this:
doesn’t really deserve an audience, for Harris did not make a strong case that science had anything important to say about right and wrong answers to moral questions. So even if Shulman should make apparently critical nudges “between the lines,” if he thought Harris’s book was “tautly reasoned”, then he really doesn’t know what constitutes a good argument. I must say, thought, that he does make Shermer’s book look a bit like a philosophical (dare I used the word) comic book.
Eric – heh – true enough, and I did frown at that…but also figured it was perhaps just more of the same careful tact.
But that’s the problem. Harris & Shermer are insiders, so some reviewers may feel a need to be tactful.
I’m not sure that careful tact is what reviewers are supposed to offer. I’m not in favour of the public-humiliation style of reviewing that was briefly in vogue, but surely the point of reviewing a book is to critique it, flaws included.
My point exactly. Mind you I don’t know that Shulman didn’t do exactly that, but…his wording gives the impression of trying to be tactful.
Focusing on rationality and science can make forget about studying emotions. Emotions really drive our behavior. It takes work to counter our emotional impulses with rationality. We are affected by other people and our past relationships (especially with our parents) more than we realize. I have learned a lot of this by studying therapy and being a therapist.
Fortunately, empathy is part of our hard wiring in our brain. Of course, we have competing impulses such as tribalism, fear of strangers. However, the more we get to know other people, the more likely we will feel empathy with them. I think travel, the internet, telephone, etc has made it easier to know and understand people in other parts of the world. we are also becoming more interdependent economically.
I guess my point is that I think Shermer is forgetting how our social relationships and our empathy also lead to a better society
karmacat,
Not only emotions; when one has a full bladder, that too drives one’s behaviour.
But yes, the desire to pursue a goal is itself an emotion, and rationality and science are but tools towards its achievement — and, like any tool, they can be employed wisely or foolishly.
@8, karmacat
All I can really say here is: thank you for your scientific hypothesis. May it lead to a better world for all.