One thing in the millennium’s favour was that it provided the perfect opportunity to discharge the irrationalist head of steam which had been building up in the west over the last 25 years. Can we now, perhaps, look forward to a new era of reason? We certainly seem to be entering a period where reason in its most productive form, science, will enjoy an intellectual ascendancy, thanks to its own spectacular dynamism and to the lack of conviction for other ways of changing the world. But reason and good sense are not the same thing.
Charles Murray’s essay, published in Prospect last month under the title “Genetics of the Right,” illustrates what may be in store. By the end of this century, Murray predicts, we will pretty much know it all. As he puts it, “we will be approaching biological truth” about “many aspects of human nature and their social implications.” Referring to EO Wilson’s book Consilience, he anticipates the dawn of joined-up knowledge in which neuroscientists understand the brain, molecular biologists understand “which genes do what,” and a new, scientifically rigorous analysis of human behaviour will explain the shape of culture and society.
In Consilience, Wilson himself foresees that the social sciences will split: one part fusing with the humanities; and the other “folding into biology.” In other words, the useful part will be absorbed by natural science; the rest will be mere literary criticism. The philosophers have interpreted the world-the scientists, however, will explain it.
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