When two tribes go to war: science vs the humanities

In early August the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker wrote an essay in the New Republic entitled "Science Is Not Your Enemy". It was subtitled "An impassioned plea to neglected novelists, embattled professors and tenure-less historians". It was a plea, specifically, for those working in the humanities to sharpen up their scientific chops and accept that the sciences today offer illumination of "intellectual problems from antiquity"—the perennial questions that philosophers and others worry away at.

When the benighted denizens of university departments of English and philosophy complain about scientists tresspassing on their turf, Pinker observed, they often rail against something called "scientism", "more of a boo-word", in his view, than "a label for any coherent doctrine". In fact, he went on, what the critics of "scientism" (the imperial ambitions of scientists to colonise areas of intellectual inquiry previously off limits to them) are actually rejecting is a fundamental intellectual principle, a legacy of the Enlightenment (an era in which, if Pinker's somewhat unreliable grasp of intellectual history is to be believed, all the great thinkers—thinkers as different from another as Spinoza and Locke, Leibniz and Hobbes, Kant and Hume—were scientists). The principle in question holds that the world is "intelligible", by which Pinker means "explicable in scientific terms". From which it seems to follow that to criticise scientism is to reject the very notion that the world yields its secrets to rational scrutiny and to embrace instead mystery-mongering of one sort or another.

That's quite a charge and one that the New Republic's verteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier rejected in a ferocious rejoinder to Pinker published a month later. Pinker's essay, Wieseltier wrote, is a "small masterpiece of scientizing apologetics", central to which is that conflation, illegitimate in his view, of scientific "intelligibility" and intelligibility tout court. This wasn't so much a plea to the humanities, Wieseltier went on, as an extended piece of "condescension": "Pinker's self-congratulatory suggestion that only science recognizes the complexity and obscurity of the world ... betrays a contempt for humanistic exertion ..."

Pinker was never likely to let that pass. And in round three of this highly entertaining bit of high-stakes intellectual combat, he has hit back: "While anointing himself defender of the humanities, Wieseltier repeatedly issues crippling diktats on what humanistic scholarship cannot do—such as make progress." To which Wieseltier has responded: "Pinker, like the good scientizer that he is, misses my point ... The absence of progress is not always evidence of obscurantism or decadence. Sometimes valuable ideas and instruments were established early, and inherited."

This one, you sense, is going to run and run.