Modern Mind
evidence, the smaller imaginative steps of science are what account for its success. Another response is to find enchantment in science, as many – if not all – scientists clearly do. In his 1998 book,
Unweaving the Rainbow
(London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), Richard Dawkins went out of his way to make this point. His title was taken from Keats’s poem about Newton, that in showing how a rainbow worked, in terms of physics, he had removed the mystery and magic, somehow taken away the poetry. On the contrary, said Dawkins, Keats – and Chaucer and Shakespeare and Sitwell and a host of other writers – would have been even better poets had they been more knowledgeable about science; he spent some time correcting the science in the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Wordsworth. He mounted a ferocious attack on mysticism, spiritualism and astrology as tawdry forms of enchantment, sang the praises of the wonders of the brain, and natural history, including a detail about a species of worm ‘which lives exclusively under the eyelids of the hippopotamus and feeds upon its tears’ (page 241). This book was the first that Dawkins had written in response to events rather than setting the agenda himself, and it had a defensive quality his others lacked and was in my view unnecessary. But his tactic of correcting great poets, though it might perhaps be seen as arrogance, did have a point. The critics of science must be ready to have their heroes criticised too.
75.
Bryan Magee, Confessions of a Philosopher, Op. cit., page 564.
76.
Ibid.,
page 536.
77.
Ibid.,
pages 546–548.
78. One man who has considered this issue, at least in part, is Francis Fukuyama, in
The Great Disruption
(The Free Press, 1999). In his view a Great Disruption took place in the developed countries in the 1960s, with a jump in levels of crime and social disorder, and the decline of families and kinship as a source of social cohesion. He put this down to the change from an industrial to a post-industrial society, which brought about a change in hierarchical society, to the baby boom (with a large number of young men, prone to violent crime), and to such technological developments as the contraceptive pill. But Fukuyama also considered that there has been a major intellectual achievement by what he called ‘the new biology’ in the last quarter century. By this he meant, essentially, sociobiology, which he considered has shown us that there is such a thing as human nature, that man is a social animal who will always develop moral rules, creating social cohesion after any disruption. This, he points out, is essentially what culture wars
are:
moral battlegrounds, and here he was putting a modern, scientific gloss on Nietzsche and Hayek. Fukuyama therefore argued that the Great Disruption is now over, and we are living at a time when there is a return to cohesion, and even to family life.
79.
Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
80. Also cited in: Neil Postman,
The End of Education,
New York: Knopf, 1995; Vintage paperback, 1996, page 113.
81. Edward O. Wilson,
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge,
New York: Little, Brown, 1998.
82.
Ibid.,
page 220.
83.
Ibid.,
page 221.
84.
Ibid.,
page 225.
85.
Ibid.,
page 297.
INDEX OF NAMES, PEOPLE AND PLACES
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Aalto, Alvar, 332
Abba, Marta, 191
Abel, John, 103
Abel, Wolfgang, 310
Abetz, Otto, 409
Abraham, David: The Collapse of the Weimar Republic,
737
Abraham, Karl, 274, 505
Achebe, Chinua, 51, 706, 713;
Things Fall Apart,
460–2, 470
Adams, Franklin P., 217
Adamson, George, 608, 609?
Adamson, Joy, 608, 609?
Addison, Thomas, 103
Adler, Alfred, 15, 138, 142
Adler, Dankmar, 81
Adorno, Theodor, 225–6, 306, 308, 357, 376, 435, 502;
The Authoritarian Personality,
434–5
Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), 737–8
Afar Triangle, Ethiopia, 612
Africa: archaeology of, 726–9; chimpanzees studied in, 609–10; Conrad on, 49–50; elephants studied in, 611–12; gorillas studied in, 610–11; lions studied in, 608; as supposed origin of classical civilisation, 727–8; universities in, 73;
see also
Laetoli; Negro peoples; Olduvai Gorge; Rift Valley; individual countries
Agadir crisis (1911), 172
Agnew, Spiro, 644–5
Agostinelli, Alfred,
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