The Song Sparrow and the Child: Claims of Science and Humanity.

AuthorSmith, Steven D.
PositionBook review

THE SONG SPARROW AND THE CHILD: CLAIMS OF SCIENCE AND HUMANITY. By Joseph Vining. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2004. Pp. ix, 198. $25.

TABLE OF CONTENTS A. Science, Antiscience, and Totalistic Science B. What Do We Believe, Really? C. Science as a Human Enterprise D. Atrocities and the Morality of Scientists E. Openings into "Spirit" F. Holding the Line, Hopefully Just over half a century ago, researchers in occupied Manchuria conducted experiments on "logs": this was their term for the human beings on whom they were experimenting. The term arose, possibly, from research on frostbite. "[T]hose seized for medical experiments," a later report explained,

were taken outside in freezing weather and left with exposed arms, periodically drenched with water, until a guard decided that frostbite had set in.... [T]his was determined after the "frozen arms, when struck with a short stick, emitted a sound resembling that which a board gives when it is struck." (1) In one experiment, the "log" was a three-day-old baby. The researchers reported on how they overcame one obstacle in this case: "Usually a hand of a three-day-old infant is clenched into a fist ... but by sticking the needle in [the baby's finger], the middle finger could be kept straight to make the experiment easier." (2)

Joseph Vining's (3) reflection on (as the subtitle indicates) the claims of science and humanity begins with a terse but disturbing recitation of these and similar scientific experiments conducted on human beings during the twentieth century in Manchuria, Nazi Germany, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. The incidents are conveyed through quotations, sometimes of the coldly clinical prose that the researchers themselves chose as most suitable for their purposes. These quotations are juxtaposed against others from an array of distinguished scientists and philosophers explaining the naturalistic cosmology that, in the view of these thinkers, modern science has given us: it is a stark, cold cosmos without inherent meaning, purpose, or value. "The more the universe seems comprehensible," Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg remarks, "the more it also seems pointless." (4)

In this pointless universe, "living creatures just are very complicated physico-chemical mechanisms," J.J.C. Smart explains. (5) And what of ourselves--of human beings? Another Nobel Prize winner, Francois Jacob, instructs us:

Biology has demonstrated that there is no metaphysical entity hidden behind the word "life." ... From particles to man, there is a whole series of integration, of levels, of discontinuities. But there is no breach either in the composition of the objects or in the reactions that take place in them; no change in "essence." (6) What are we supposed to make of this pairing of descriptions of moral enormities with statements of a scientific worldview? Is Vining trying to do to science what critics often do to Christianity when they give descriptions highlighting, for example, the sexual abuses of clergy or the Inquisition--thereby condemning a whole movement of life and thought by equating it with the abuses that any large-scale enterprise involving human beings will occasionally produce? If so, readers might well toss the book aside as a cranky manifestation of the "antiscience" that is one of the book's abiding concerns. To be sure, scientists sometimes behave unfeelingly, just as other humans do. But there is nothing intrinsic to the scientific method or worldview that leads to the atrocities of Manchuria or Nazi Germany: that much is obvious.

Or is it? The question runs through Vining's multifaceted meditation, and the answers that gradually, tentatively emerge are complicated, provocative, and counter to the culture that prevails in much of academia today. In that and other respects, The Song Sparrow and the Child is continuous with earlier writings (7) that have established Vining among the more profoundly challenging but also more idiosyncratic and elusive (and as a result, I believe, underappreciated) legal thinkers in recent decades.

The elusiveness of Vining's work does not result, as is so often the case, from ponderous prose or jargonistic terminology: on the contrary, Vining's vocabulary is modest and often poetic, and his prose can be lyrical. It may be that readers are simply not accustomed to a legal author whose sensibility and message seem more characteristic of a poet than of either a traditional doctrinal technician or of a law-and-whatever type. In any case, there is no pretending that this book is an easy read. Its difficulty may induce already deluged scholars and students to set the book aside in favor of more accessible and immediately usable material. That would be unfortunate, because they would thereby miss hearing one of the voices in the legal academy most worth listening to. Consequently, my aspiration in this review will be not so much to give a critical evaluation of Vining's claims as to provide a sort of reader's guide to this important book.

One who offers himself as a guide takes on risks, of course. One risk is that the would-be guide will be undertaking to help his pupils through terrain that he himself understands only very imperfectly. But that limitation is an acknowledged feature of most tours. You do not expect the guide you pay to show you highlights of London or the Louvre to know everything about the subject: you listen to what the guide has to say and do not embarrass him with too many hard questions. A different risk is that someone might accept the quick tour as a substitute for encountering the thing itself, in the way that undergraduates read the Cliffs Notes for Crime and Punishment and never bother to read the actual novel. My own tour of Vining's book will be intended, among other things, to indicate how much would be missed by prospective readers who adopted that lazy expedient.

  1. Science, Antiscience, and Totalistic Science

    Most conspicuously, this is a book by a lawyer writing about science: that is unusual and risky and, some might think, audacious. No one, however, will doubt the subject's significance. Of the various influences that over the last several centuries have shaped and reshaped the way we live and think, "science" (whatever it is) is surely among the most important. But has science's overall influence, on balance, been healthy--or destructive? The question is one that all of us, including lawyers, are entitled to ask. Taking passages out of context, reading them carelessly, one might easily conclude that Vining views science as pernicious, and that he himself is a partisan of what he calls "antiscience." And indeed, compared to those scientists and philosophers who denigrate antiscience as nothing more than a destructive and irrational menace, (8) Vining is more understanding of and sympathetic to this protest.

    Even so, Vining himself cannot plausibly be placed in the camp of antiscience. On the contrary, he perceives it as "dangerous" (p. 63). And he is affirming sometimes to the point of extravagance in paying his respects to science. Thus, Vining speaks of "the deep necessity of science, the scientist in each of us" (p. 13). Much of what is good in modern life we owe to science, according to Vining (p. 94). "Science is a gift," he observes, "as music is a gift" (p. 27). He elaborates, "science brings gifts, of fascination, of beauty, of relief from pain, gifts of unclouded thought, of freedom to love; and in fact these gifts and their effects are enjoyed even by those who live in a world whose material constitution they deny" (p. 81).

    So if (contrary to casual impression) science is not after all the target of Vining's criticism and concern, what is? The book's first paragraph offers the answer that is repeated throughout: what Vining finds threatening is not science but rather "total claims" made in the name of science, or "total theory," or "total vision." It is the reductionist insistence that there is ultimately "nothing but" or "merely" (phrases that Vining finds ominous) the objective "systems" and "processes" that scientists study--and hence that the kinds of objectivist and impersonal explanations given by science and valuable for explaining some things can ultimately explain everything (including the scientists themselves).

    Vining's principal target is thus the sort of worldview endorsed by John Searle, who declares that the world "consists entirely of physical particles in fields of force, and some of these particles are organized into systems that are conscious biological beasts such as ourselves." (9) Searle goes on to explain that "the simple intuitive idea is that systems are collections of the particles where the spatio-temporal boundaries of the system are set by causal relations.... Babies, elephants, and mountain ranges are ... examples of systems." (10) It is this totalistic view, and not science itself, that Vining sees not merely as mistaken but as a threat to humanity--and even, paradoxically perhaps, to science itself (which in Vining's view appears to be the sort of healthy golden mean threatened on one side by antiscience and on the other by total vision).

    Much of the book is thus devoted to describing and understanding this total vision--not only its substance but also its mindset and its tone. The affirmative substance of total vision is conveyed in part through quotations such as that from Searle given above. The book provides numerous similar instances and expressions. In this reductionist view, "the brain is merely a meat machine." (11) As noted neurobiologist Jean-Pierre Changeux puts it, "[t]he brain secretes thought as the liver does bile." (12) The same scientist explains that beliefs--which can be "defined as a specific state of nerve cell activity"--are comparable to diseases: "they can propagate from one brain to another, and spread 'infection' much as viral attacks do." (13)

    But the nature of total theory is hardly...

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