The Challenge to Certainty.

• Author: Shore, Zach

IN THE Winter 1999/2000 issue of The National Interest, Alan Charles Kors asked, "Did Western civilization survive the twentieth century?" He concludes, rather optimistically, that despite its many critics Western civilization has emerged resilient, as it had from so many previous, darker times. But Kors, engaged in a lengthy jeremiad against the multiculturalist Left, misses a critical feature of the past century: a far deeper, more pervasive attack from which the West has not yet recovered.

The twentieth century will ultimately be remembered for its challenges to certainty. All of the major themes historians have pointed to as markers of our age can be subsumed within this paradigm. More than any previous period, the twentieth century called into question many of the fundamental beliefs upon which Western civilization had been based. Notions of class privilege, racial hierarchies, gender roles and sexual identities all underwent dramatic rethinking and led to readjustments in political, social and economic relations. Beyond grand societal transformations, certainties upon which individuals had always counted--such as where to live, what occupation to enter, whom to marry, and even what would become of one after death--ceased to be sure. As political and social traditions were being questioned, so too were basic assumptions in the sciences and philosophy. The multiculturalists' assaults upon Western civilization, which Kors adroitly parries, scarcely equaled the mighty blows struck by those from within the very heart of the Western scientific tradition.

THE TWENTIETH century began with Einstein's sweeping away of several fundamental human, not simply scientific, assumptions. Einstein's theories gained worldwide attention for suggesting that two dimensions always assumed to be constants--time and space--were in fact curved and relative, dependent on that which interacts with them. Newtonian mechanics, the basis of Enlightenment advances, no longer functioned in the expanding universes of astrophysics and subatomic particles. If the very dimensions in which we exist were not absolute, what absolutes could we hold on to?

At least there was the certainty that one and one makes two. Or rather there had been, until Kurt G[ddots{o}]del came along. G[ddots{o}]del saw that mathematics was based upon assumptions, not indisputable truths. His infamous incompleteness theorem, published in 1931, argued that the system upon which mathematics is partly...