Updated, 18 January 2021
This is the third in an (unintentional) series about the tendency to view and value modern American culture and its trappings as the highpoint of civilization. The first one published in October 2018 was titled, “Valuable Things that Get Lost in Modern Philosophy and Culture.” The second, appearing here in June 2019 carried the title “Founding Principles Lost to the ‘Silent Artillery of Time.’” Those articles spoke of today’s popular attitude that current ideas, philosophies, and practices are vastly superior to those of the past, thus leading to looking down upon and even forsaking many valuable things.
Last night I read an interesting article that contributes another critique of the evolutionary notion of the development of culture and society. Daniel C. Peterson, writing in the most recent issue of the LDS academic journal Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship reminds us that all human endeavor, because it takes place in a fallen world by mankind with fallen natures is inherently flawed. An abstract of the article says “Every human enterprise ... is marred by human weakness, by our inescapable biases, incapacities, limitations, preconceptions, and sometimes, yes, sins.”(1)
This applies to even what are considered today the highest of human enterprises–science, which presently, as Peterson says, “enjoys the greatest universal prestige of any cultural phenomenon in the modern world.”(2) To demonstrate the flaws which may be found even in science he reviews a recent article in the popular journal Scientific American. The article is titled “Reckoning with Our Mistakes: Some of the Cringiest Articles in the Magazine’s History Reveal Bigger Questions about Scientific Authority.”(3) A mouthful of a title indeed. The authors of this piece review past issues of Scientific American to highlight some of the topics where the popular science of the day got it wrong. In some instances got it wrong for a long, long time.
What were some of the errors modern science–at least as reflected in Scientific American is concerned? Well, some may surprise you. Those that Peterson highlights include using science to justify slavery, male superiority, eugenics, and social Darwinism to promote and sustain racism. While Peterson speaks of this article as a “clear-eyed look at a small selection of embarrassing episodes”(4), he also makes an interesting point when he observes, “no great courage is required to admit the ‘sins’ of others, to acknowledge the missteps of predecessors.”(5) Then follows this paragraph which cuts to the heart of my present concern:
But acknowledging our own errors can be extremely difficult. Not only morally but, precisely, because we can’t always easily discern them. The authors called out in the article by Schwartz and Schlenoff were probably not evil people by the standards of their times. They may well even have been idealists. But, as we see today, they were blind–just as blind as the countless laypeople, politicians, administrators, religionists, bureaucrats, and captains of industry who relied upon and followed the all-too-human scientific experts. (This is a real-world example of the blind leading the blind.)”(6)
This leads Peterson to a very important question: “How can we be certain that we’re not blind today?” He concludes, “The march of science, and of historical and other forms of understanding, hasn’t stopped. It hasn’t culminated with us.”(7) The point that many predecessors even in the highly touted field of science were blind and the march of science continues and has not culminated with us is profound. Maybe in a hundred years some of our notions may be viewed as the “blind leading the blind.” Who knows?
My point is that it is prideful folly to get cocksure about the knowledge and practices of today in comparison to those of the past, especially if it leads us to disrespect or even jettison fundamental principles and valuable traditions and practices. Peterson reminds us, “Humility is an intellectual virtue as well as a practical virtue for everyday life.”(8) I suggest these ideas apply not just to the follies of science, but also to the iconic philosophies of modern culture and of history.
Here is an example. Recently I read an interview with author Lynn Sherr. She has written a biography of Susan B. Anthony, probably the leading woman in America who led the fight for women’s rights and the right to vote. Sherr tells that as a young reporter in the late 60s and early 70s she got interested in Anthony when she covered many of the early women’s liberation movement meetings of that time. She tells what happened:
As I got involved, both as a reporter and as a woman, I also was struck by the fact that this exciting new field of women’s rights was to me new, different, exciting. I truly believed we had invented this. I truly believed we were the first ones to think about equal pay, to think about sex discrimination. Then I started reading a few history books, because in college, in high school, in grammar school I learned almost nothing about women’s history. I suddenly discovered there were all these women that had come before, and, to my mind, the brightest star of all was Susan B. Anthony. She just got there first with everything. She said it all first. She did it at a time when it was much, much more difficult to stand up against the entrenched philosophies of society, so she became my hero ....(9)
Thus the importance of two elements of perspective. First, though he may not have intended this, Peterson’s article is a reminder of the value of possessing as much of the perspective of the past as we can get. We should be on a life-long quest to understand the history of whatever subjects, disciplines, matters, and issues that concern us. Second, we need the eternal perspective of the doctrines and practices of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. With these it is less likely that the blind will be leading the blind. With such a perspective we can accumulate as much as possible of the good from the past and add it to the benefits of the present.
Let’s think together again, soon.
Endnotes:
1. Daniel C. Peterson, “Reckoning with the Mortally Inevitable,” Interpreter, 29 (2020): vii-xvi, see especially xiv-xv.
2. Ibid, vii.
3. See Scientific American 323, no. 3 (September 2020): 36-41.
3. Peterson, “Reckoning,” viii.
4. Ibid, xiv.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid, xv, all forms of emphasis added.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Lynn Sherr, Booknotes interview of 5 March 1995, in Brian Lamb, Booknotes: America’s Finest Authors on Reading, Writing, and the Power of Ideas, New York: Random House, 1997, 306, emphasis added.
