Science as progressive lying

Much has been made in recent news of Anthony Fauci’s “deceit,” and to be honest, the whole story brought to mind my granny, alas now deceased. I loved my granny dearly, and she doted on me, her first grandchild, from as far back as my memory extends. Nevertheless, my affection for her did not blind me to the fact that she was a veritable fount of crackpot ideas.

Her fifth-grade education did not prevent her from reading voraciously, and she had such a fair-minded approach that she took everything she read — and I mean everything — unabashedly at face value, with the result that the Compton’s Encyclopedias she constantly had open on exposed surfaces were mixed with pages from the National Enquirer. That fair-mindedness was wedded to an amazing mental flexibility and penchant for story-telling, which natural gifts gave her the ability not only to hold wildly inconsistent beliefs but also to weave them together in ways that were more than a match for any cognitive dissonance she may have experienced in what she read.

My granny believed, for instance, that dinosaur bones could not possibly be more than a few thousand years old because dinosaurs were obviously the kin of that Leviathan that God had made for the sport of it. She dealt with Compton’s perspective on this matter, involving carbon dating and geologic strata, by scouring Genesis for clues. When her research was complete, it had become clear to her that God had created those layers of earth and rock and seeded the bones with C-14 precisely to mislead people.

I recall our conversations, scattered over the years, in which I expressed my own doubts about whether God had worried about a shortage of souls to torment enough to justify such preemptive measures, but her response was steadfast: It’s obvious, and God must have a reason for it.

My dear granny took practically any available opportunity to ridicule nutrition science. “When I was a kid,” she would wind up, “we ate bacon and eggs and butter, and look at how old I am.” Then she would methodically recite decades of nutritional guidance with special venom for the various inconsistencies she saw.

“Don’t you think,” I would venture, “that learning more and updating what we know is sort of how science works?”

“Of course!” Granny was always on the side of science and truth. “But if they really knew what they were talking about, they wouldn’t have to change anything.”

The human condition

I miss and cherish these conversations, but not because they are entertaining or pitiful stories about an aging granny’s epistemic eccentricities. No, I cherish them for their universality. She was, in so many ways, a prototypical primate: a cerebral cortex joined in a never-ending dance with a limbic system. My granny was a particularly explicit example of each of us.

Aristotle defined our species as rational animals, by which he means that we are neither rational agents temporarily clothed in animal skins nor are we brutes with occasional flashes of insight from above. On the contrary, there is something essentially dual about our nature, all the way down.

If you’ll permit me a pseudoscientific parable, think of it like this: The human cortex, Nature’s most advanced pattern-recognition machine, is Nature’s way of giving us a fighting chance in a landscape “red in tooth and claw.” Language, which we cling to as the emblem of our supremacy over fellow animals, is actually an elaborate mechanism for cataloging, refining, and sharing patterns.

This is the human condition, friends. Our brains are wired for order, but Nature left it up to us to discover whether the stories we tell ourselves are real or imagined. Inside each of us, there’s a primate screaming, “I have a story that makes sense of everything, and the story must be right because it makes sense.” And in each of us there’s also a little piece of cortex that constantly whispers, “But what about . . . ?”

Dualing stories

We navigate the joys and sorrows of our dual nature by means of that delicate dance, yielding sometimes to stories that make comforting sense of our experience, and sometimes to those less satisfying partial stories grounded in things beyond the story itself. It’s hard, and it’s hard work, to tell the difference — a piece of human wisdom that turns up all over the world in stories about our stories. Consider Gautama Buddha’s reflection:

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Dhammapada, 1

This terrifying observation reminds us just how powerful our dual nature is. When it comes to our species, Nature cobbled together self-consciousness and reason late in the game; the animal came first. Yes, reason is feeble and often an afterthought, but it’s just about all we’ve got going for us.

And that’s why philosophy is for everybody.