Science: The Art of Living (an interview with Steve Fuller about his latest book))

Q1. Science: The Art of Living is the third book you've written on the science/religion relationship. In what sense does it mark a logical progression in your treatment of this theme?

A1. If you look over the three books – i.e. Science vs. Religion?, Dissent over Descent, and Science: The Art of Living -- you’ll see that I am becoming increasingly explicit about the kind of science-religion world-view that I would promote in the name of ‘humanity’: on the one hand, ‘science’ understood in the broad ‘Wissenschaft’ sense that includes the humanities and theology as sciences; on the other hand, the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) that presumes the unique proximity of humans to God amongst the creatures of nature. A book that precedes these three, The New Sociological Imagination (Sage, 2006), speaks of this unique combination as the ‘anthropic world-view’, which I believe has also justify the interest – perhaps (regrettably) diminishing in our own time – to carve out a special body of knowledge called ‘social science’. I deal with the future prospects for this world-view in my latest book, Humanity 2.0: Foundations for 21^st Century Social Thought (Palgrave Macmillan), due out next year. ‘Intelligent design’ (ID) is central to this conception mainly for its sustaining intellectual content, not its current cultural politics, which as everyone knows tends towards the conservative and sometimes even the reactionary. The idea that the natural world might be constructed as the best possible machine has always been a powerful force in motivating the significance attached to scientific inquiry, the intensity of its pursuit and the extent of its application. ID is responsible for that idea – God as The Big Engineer -- which when seen against the backdrop of the world’s creation stories appears very counter-intuitive. The additional degree of specificity that Science: The Art of Living provides that was not present in my earlier work is ‘Protscience’, the idea that science is not merely indebted to the Protestant Reformation for is itself now undergoing its own version of that movement, with people taking science increasingly into their own hands (say, via the internet) in much the same way the Protestants took the Bible into their own hands (via the printing press). For this idea, Richard Dawkins recently interviewed and condemned me as an ‘Enemy of Reason’ in one of his television programmes.

Q2. I gather you're not too crazy about the academic sport of routing and scaffolding works in relation to their forbears, so I hope you can forgive me for asking this question. I guess it speaks more broadly as well to the issue of historical continuity and rupture, so I'll persist: is it at all helpful to contextualise the book in relation to classical sociology? Specifically, I'm wondering if your demonstration of the compatibility of science and religion is designed to avoid the Scylla of scientism and the Charybdis of obscurantism? No less an authority than Weber had warned of the ascendancy of "specialists without spirit" and the "sensualists without heart", operating in a world where the powers that bear down on humans and ordain their callings are not divine, but rather the conditions of modernity itself- specialization, rationalization, and intellectualization. I suspect though you might want to qualify the comparison. Perhaps we could speak then of science as an art of living as a corrective to Weberianism rather than the intellectual and superstitious retreat he himself feared? This would mean that the pursuit of truth and understanding is placed in a communal context within which they can flourish most fully. St. Bernard of Clairvaux might even be cited as setting an early precedent, along with the scientists you positively refer to in your book.

A2. A couple of points here, the first about classical sociology. Just sticking to the Holy Trinity of Marx, Weber and Durkheim, it’s clear that ‘sociology’ began with a focus on ‘religion’ as what ‘modern society’ sought to both supersede and perfect. All three thinkers – as well as sociology’s founder Auguste Comte – appreciated the power of especially the salvation religions to motivate people to organize themselves to do great things for long periods of time. They also realized that the secular world continues to piggyback on this sentiment, while disavowing the underlying metaphysics. This results in various forms of ‘bad faith’ and ‘disenchantment’, which sociology might then address directly (Marx, Durkheim) or indirectly (Weber). I should say that this side of classical sociology was pretty evident when I was a student 35 years ago. But back then, the Holy Trinity was complemented by Pareto and Freud, the great theorists of how old sentiments never entirely disappear but return in new expressions. I believe that the lack of recognition of the religious roots of sociology today reflects the decline of ‘society’ (understood as a unitary entity) as an object of concern within the discipline.

The second point concerns ‘superstition’, which I do not see as something over which religion has a monopoly. In fact, most of our beliefs in science are, strictly speaking, superstitious (a point I made in the first book of mine called Science, published in 1997). Very few people know much about the science in which they believe – they simply know which scientists and theories to name-check when pressed on matters of epistemic authority. Moreover, there is very little cost-accounting for science: The publicity given to ‘brilliant discoveries’ tends to overwhelm science’s failures and disasters, very much like a religion that strings along its believers with periodic miracles amidst the ambient misery of their day-to-day lives. I am not saying that we should therefore junk science altogether: Rather, we should be just as rational when appraising science’s performance as we suppose science itself to be when doing its job properly. Our belief in science’s rationality should not cause us to hold that belief irrationally. A similarly paradoxical point originally led the Protestants to question Catholic authority: The Catholics simply required the believer to declare loyalty to the Church and perform various rituals without necessarily ever encountering the doctrine first-hand to decide for themselves whether they truly believe it. While this practice certainly kept a lot of Christians under the same tent, it emptied the act of believing of any specific epistemic content. ‘Protscientists’ of the sort described in Science: The Art of Living feel exactly the same way vis-à-vis science – which is why they engage so actively with internet-based projects, most impressively Wikipedia.

Q3. Quantum mysticism has been used as an example of the Charybdis of postmodern obscurantism. This brings us to the elephant in the room. One of the biggest misconceptions about you is that you are a postmodern "relativist" for whom "anything goes". You've previously expressed a preference for metarelativism instead. Can you relate this term to what you call "Protscience" in this, your new book?

A3. No one who is sympathetic to my work – and that includes people who would call themselves postmodernists and relativists -- considers me a postmodernist or a relativist. This misconception is a great example of how people who may have some of the same intellectual/cultural/political enemies are seen as sharing a common world-view. The relevance of Protscience to this issue is that Protestants do not give up on the universal aspirations of Christianity, and neither do Protscientists. Protestantism is not a relativistic form of Christianity; otherwise, it would not so actively proselytise for people to join their particular denominations, even to the point of provoking conflict. Relativism tends to be associated with a quiescent politics in which tolerance is taken to be an end in itself. (This is a ‘metarelativist’ point – i.e. it relativises relativism.) Yet, science requires the sort of conflict whereby people routinely challenge each other’s grounds of faith because they presume to be in a common project to reach some (divine) endpoint, aka Truth. Science’s great institutional innovation has been to pursue this potentially quite volatile project in dedicated spaces within clearly defined rules of play. As Popper said, echoing Goethe, in science our ideas die in our stead. However, nowadays the scientific establishment, very much like the Catholic Church in the 16^th century, is institutionalised almost to avoid conflict altogether, even if that suppresses critical lines of inquiry.

Q4. Did you consider including a discussion of bioethics in your book, as they too would seem to inform science as an art of living? You would be aware that there is a substantial body of work in Christian bioethics, which would surely have some bearing on the science/religion themes you discuss? I suspect you steered clear of it though because it lacks the left/right association with liberation theology you foreground through Protscience, substituting instead a moralization (Good vs Evil) of politics. Charles W Colson comes to mind, for example. Is this a fair summation?

A4. You raise an interesting point. It’s difficult to deal with Christian bioethics – or, for that matter, any bioethics underwritten by a strong sense of natural law – if you take seriously the idea that humanity is collective project ‘under construction’, as it were. The main stumbling block is the tendency for believers in natural law to essentialise the human, as if there were demarcation criteria for human nature that could be read off a hereditary feature of our animal being, e.g. a moment in antenatal development or a pattern of nucleic acids on the genome. Here a remarkable – and often diabolical – alignment of followers of Aristotle, Aquinas and Darwin (at least conservatives ones) sing from the same bioethical hymn sheet. They have similar views about the boundaries of the human, even in terms of judgements of ‘abled’ versus ‘disabled’. Where they differ, of course, is that Christians would not demean or exterminate the ‘disabled’. In that respect, I find Gregor Wolbring’s doctrine of ‘able-ism’ a useful antidote to this whole line of thought, as it points to the status of ‘ability’ as what welfare economists call a ‘positional good’, such that one’s standing as ‘abled’ or ‘disabled’ depends on an ever shifting norm of societal expectations about human performance. Thus, what it means to be a fully able-bodied human is something in principle always up for negotiation, which is to say, that all rights are civil rights.

Q5. I want to come at the science as an "art of living" ideal from another angle. At least initially, it brings to mind how "art for art's sake" can make an activity appear to be an end in itself, which would put us back in the camp of Weber's "sensualists without heart". Because the book does not use your preferred title, I have to ask whether aestheticism per se is a central concern?

A5. As normally understood, ‘aestheticism’ is not central to the book. I interpret the ‘art of living’ motif of the series in terms of ‘artifice’ – that is, life is not something naturally lived but only lived with a sense of purpose, which implies some sort of discipline designed to realize that purpose. Science, with its valorisation of intellectual focus and constrained observation, clearly constitutes ‘art’ in that sense. Max Weber was clearly one of the master performers and interpreters of this art. But there is no denying that the “art for art’s sake” ideology was partly motivated by a Romantic analogy between God and human as artificer, which was central to intelligent design’s role in motivating the Scientific Revolution. However, the Scientific Revolutionaries were much more inclined to convert the analogy into an identity – that is, they thought they could not only create like the deity but also discover how the deity creates.

Q6. In a recent article published in History of the Human Sciences, you argue that the legacy of aestheticism has been mostly harmless, while the more subjective advocacy journalism has been tainted to some extent by its historical association with authoritarianism, citing the examples of H.G. Wells, J.G. Crowther, and Waldemar Kaempffert- all of whom "leveraged contemporary developments into visions of future utopias". Are you willing to characterize your own book as a form of advocacy journalism?

A6. Actually, in one sense, the book is a piece of advocacy journalism, since I do believe that science requires the kind of world-view-style justification that theology has traditionally given it. Whether theology is up to the task nowadays is another matter, especially given that so much theology is, in practice, bound up with pastoral functions. Science, understood as the ultimate risk-seeking collective enterprise in human history, sits uncomfortably with forms of theology that seek mainly to provide a sense of solace and security in an uncertain world. Of course, not all theology is like this. More millenarian, emancipationist forms of theology have played on Biblical themes that stress the empowerment of humanity through recognition of its godlike character. But it is difficult to push this line consistently without challenging church authority, a problem that especially Catholic clerics ranging from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin to Gustavo Gutierrez (the founder of liberation theology) have experienced in recent times when they have pushed the implications of theology into anti-establishment readings of contemporary science and politics, respectively. But of course, science itself suffers as much from the problem of authoritarian lockdown as theology. This is acutely registered by the Popperian purist – perhaps me – who upholds that science is really in its own element when it is in what Popper himself called (with a nod to Trotsky and a slight to Kuhn) ‘permanent revolution’, which is to say, testing even fundamental assumptions by using one’s own reasoning and experience – not by deferring to expert opinion.

Q7. Why does it appear to be the case though that the people who most publicly condemn the human condition’s casualization in the modern world are conservatives, (i.e. Charles W Colson Syndrome again) who often turn the natural law tradition to their own ends? In this vein, the writings of Teilhard, who you positively refer to in your book, could become caricatured by some as an authoritarian form of advocacy journalism. After all, Teilhard entrusted the leadership of socialization to an elite, who were to guard against the "mass of humanity", who he regarded as "profoundly inferior and repulsive". With the hierarchic structure of nature left unchallenged, Teilhard was free to recommend eugenic measures to deal with "life’s rejects" (Human Energy [Collins, 1969], pp. 132-133). This doesn't appear to sit too well with your previous critical stance towards Peter Singer's expressed desire to expand the "moral circle" at the expense of disabled humans. What should we be looking for here?

The sanest attitude towards ‘eugenics’ is to regard it as a politically incorrect term for the most basic feature of the normal processes of social reproduction. One does not need to contemplate breeding farms, sterilisation clinics and gas chambers to engage in eugenics. Persistent class differences, and their associated patterns of nutrition, health and income flows, have always carried out the workings of natural selection in the guise of social structure. This point was very clear to Francis Galton, who coined ‘eugenics’ in the 1860s in the aid of rationalising an otherwise mindless reproduction of social structure. (His main bugbear was the hereditary UK House of Lords.) Indeed, Galton thought he was providing the foundations for a scientifically self-conscious social policy – not merely an extension of evolutionary biology to human beings, as eugenics now tends to be seen. I make this point because the main ethical cloud that continues to hang over eugenics is the tendency of its advocates – and this was especially true in Nazi Germany – to present eugenic policies as if they were simply carrying out the orders of ‘Nature’ rather than taking personal responsibility for engaging in a quite specific risky policies to design the future of humanity. Had the eugenicists consistently presented their work as a political project, rather than as an anonymously imposed scientific imperative, then it could have been discussed more in the agonistic spirit of, say, radical economic policies calling for massive income and resource re-distribution. In fact, I hope that eugenics comes to be normalised in political discourse in just this way, whatever its concrete outcomes. However, at the moment, as you say, we are living in a time when eugenics is simply carried out ‘casually’, that is, through many individually made choices about whether to abort, mercy kill or genetically modify – the collective effect of which is then, by definition, a by-product. In The New Sociological Imagination, I called this state of affairs, whereby a free market approach to eugenics approximates the indirect workings of natural selection, ‘bioliberalism’. In that respect, we seem to be (regrettably) making the long march back to the time before Galton entered the picture.

Q8. I assume minimising these kinds of risks gets back to the principle of epistemic justice integral to social epistemology: i.e. holding people accountable for not only the intended consequences of their discourses/actions? Is this sense of justice intended to complement one of your stated objectives of science as an art of living, where you discuss (page 135), "the ease with which we normally declare someone’s death an “injustice”, describing how this ease "first of all, capitalizes on some sense of its prior improbability, combined with a foreshortened view of the person’s past and an indefinitely extended view of his or her future. This leads us to treat the death as having happened “before its time’”. One objective of science as an art of living would be to redress this temporal asymmetry, enabling us to acquire the affect needed to put the value of a person’s life in a more historically balanced perspective. This may include, for example, a realization that, given a rounded view of the relevant biosocial background, the deceased had already reached his or her potential, leaving others now better placed to carry forwards that achievement". Could you please elaborate on what standard of proof is indicative of "potential", "achievement", and "the relevant biosocial background", when determining if a "temporal asymmetry" is unjust?

A8. This is quite a complex but important issue. The first point is that the very idea that one can live ‘scientifically’ presumes that God and humans differ in degree, not kind. This is the sense in which the Abrahamic religions and modern science are joined at the hip: God is the creator of that which science can know. In practice, this means that scientific judgements are always inferior versions of godlike judgements, which may be improved over time. Moreover, ‘God’ in this context is not only the source of reality’s intelligibility but also a being who stands equidistant from all points in time and space, which I take as an operational definition of ‘transcendence’. This implies that God knows the past as well as he does the future because everything is equally present to his mind. In contrast, a creature who knows the past so much better than the future that it is inclined simply to repeat the past indefinitely is an animal. Humans, of course, are at least animals in this sense and, philosophically speaking, it explains the lure of induction as way of knowing the world. However, one of the godlike goals of science is to produce symmetry in our knowledge of the past and the future, which means both distrusting the security of our attachment to the past and empowering us in our capacity to determine the future. Modernity is largely about striking just this temporal balance in order to raise us above the animals: a deconstructive attitude to the past and an experimental attitude to the future, both pursued simultaneously. Now, this general strategy clearly has implications for how we think about individual lives, especially in terms of whatever ‘injustices’ we currently ascribe to unexpected deaths, which may come to be seen as exaggerated, once we grant ourselves greater knowledge of future prospects.

Q9. Finally, I understand you cannot divulge much here about your two forthcoming books, which sound intriguing- particularly for readers of this blog- Humanity 2.0. I get some clues from Science as an Art of Living where you might take a discussion of transhumanism, but wonder if you have anything to add? Any idea yet on a publication date?

A9. Humanity 2.0 should be out in the first half of 2011, since it is already with the publisher (Palgrave Macmillan) and being looked over by reviewers. I am broadly supportive of transhumanism, but I definitely see it as a movement that continues Abrahamic theology by other means – which is something that I think only some self-described ‘transhumanists’ realize. For one thing, transhumanism is a completely counter-Darwinian idea, since it projects all sorts of normative utopias about the successor species to Homo sapiens that Darwin’s specific brand of evolution would deem a folly. Here it is worth recalling Darwin’s own refusal to embrace eugenics, when Galton, his cousin, approached him for an endorsement. Darwin really believed that humans were just one more – perhaps the latest – species to spend a few million years on the planet and then become extinct like the others. There is nothing in Darwin to suggest the sort of capacity, let alone entitlement, ascribed to humans that motivates the often science-fictional enthusiasms of transhumanists. Bluntly put, Darwin did not believe that humans could take control of evolution – but transhumanists do. I am with the transhumanists on this one, and they should be as well! I believe that it is not accident that the likes of Norbert Wiener, Herbert Simon and Ray Kurzweil are all Unitarians, the Abrahamic faith that posits the most direct connection between humans and God.

It is here that one might find the basis for mounting what I have begun to call a Creationist Left, that disembeds intelligent design theory from its current cultural-political moorings in American Christian fundamentalism. Since such a negative social stigma is attached to the label ‘creationist’, it’s perhaps worth belabouring what I consider very obvious based on the historical record: namely, that the strongest motivation we have for pursuing science in the manner and with the intensity that we have for the last 400 years or more has been that we have supposed reality to be ‘intelligible’, which is to say, constructed so as to enable our rational understanding of it. This is a ‘creationist’ position because it imagines that reality is itself an artefact comparable to ones made by our own hand – only much greater. And of course I am talking about some high-tech secular descendant of the Abrahamic God as the grand artificer. If we really believed, as Darwinists insist, that reality has come to acquire the order we perceive by essentially random processes that produce at best transient stabilities, then we would never have focused so much effort on science in the first place, nor value its results so highly. Such a metaphysics would doom the scientific enterprise to long-term failure. Nevertheless, the exceptional value placed on science and its ‘mechanical world-view’ has been the calling card of modern Western culture, especially when seen against the backdrop of the world’s cultures, including the ancient Greeks and Romans. This point about the world-historic significance of Creationism is true and can be made quite independently of any specific claims about particular churches or dogmas. Here readers of a sociological bent are instructed to look at the work of Rodney Stark, who has documented this point over several books. Of course, it is ideologically convenient to pigeonhole ‘Creationism’ as an aberration from the general decline of religion in an increasingly secularised world – but it would be misleading, both in terms of understanding the science-religion relationship in world history and where it is likely to head in the future.

Big Shiny Prison, Metal Jew, Heavy Metal Islam

If that image doesn't grab your attention, then nothing will......

I came across it on the Metal Jew blog (where there's a link for a free download) in the course of following up some resources on cultural sociology and popular music. I regard cultural sociology as an alternative to the garden variety Zizekianism that tends to dominate the cultural studies influenced parts of the blogosphere, as well as the sociology of culture (my earlier post on Janet Wolff clarified some of the important differences). Other than Metal Jew, one can read Andy Bennett's (Griffith University) position paper to see what is involved, and then - for example- try to read Heavy Metal Islam according to Bennett's strategy (I suggest this supplement because it's rumoured something went awry during publication in HMI, which led to a watering down of the theoretical focus; so as it currently stands, it could probably be compared to a kaleidoscope- many entrancing shapes and colours that somehow never seem to align). Not sure when the related film might materialise though:


Metal Jew also makes some interesting observations about Burzum's new album, with which I concur. I'd adopt a similar justification for my taste in Death In June, Blood Axis, Boyd Rice et al- which otherwise make for strange bedfellows with the Afrofuturism I also enjoy.

Thanks to book editing commitments over the last fortnight I now have such severe RSI that I can barely type. I've since been avoiding the computer like the plague, but still hope to check in again before too long.

Academics Caught Between Plagiarism and Bullshit

New on my reading list is Steve Fuller's latest book. I haven't got hold of it yet, so until I do I'll be monitoring reviews as they trickle in. The title of this post is actually a chapter in Fuller's book, so it seems he is not pulling back on the critical style I enjoyed so much in The Intellectual when he skewered one of my favourite bugbears, contemporary practitioners of Continental philosophy.

The Sociology of Intellectual Life
The Career of the Mind in and Around Academy
Steve Fuller
University of Warwick, UK
August 2009
224 pages
SAGE Publications Ltd
Series: Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society

Hardcover
ISBN:
9781412928380
£60.00


Table of Contents:
Introduction
I. THE PLACE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: THE UNIVERSITY
1. The University as an Institutional Solution to the Problem of Knowledge
2. The Alienability of Knowledge in our so-called Knowledge Society
3. The Knowledge Society as Capitalism of the Third Order
4. Will the University Survive the Era of Knowledge Management?
5. Postmodernism as an Anti-University Movement
6. Regaining the University's Critical Edge by Historicizing the Curriculum
7. Affirmative Action as a Strategy for Redressing the Balance between Research and Teaching
8. Academics Rediscover their Soul: The Rebirth of 'Academic Freedom'
II. THE STUFF OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: PHILOSOPHY
1. Epistemology as 'always already' Social Epistemology
2. From Social Epistemology to the Sociology of Philosophy
3. Is the Sociology of Philosophy Merely the Codification of Professional Prejudices?
4. Interlude: Seeds of an Alternative Sociology of Philosophy
5. Prolegomena to a Critical Sociology of 20th century Anglophone Philosophy
6. Analytic Philosophy's Ambivalence toward the Empirical Sciences
7. Professionalism as Differentiating American and British Philosophy
8. Conclusion: Anglophone Philosophy as a Victim of Its Own Success
III. THE PEOPLE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE: INTELLECTUALS
1. Can Intellectuals Survive If the Academy Is a No Fool Zone?
2. How Intellectuals Became an Endangered Species in Our Times: The Trail of Psychologism
3. A Genealogy of Anti-intellectualism: From Invisible Hand to Social Contagion
4. Re-defining the Intellectual as Agent of Distributive Justice
5. The Critique of Intellectuals in a Time of Pragmatist Captivity
6. Pierre Bourdieu: A Successful Case of an Academic Sociologist Becoming a Public Intellectual
7. Conclusion: Recovering Sociologist's Voice in British Intellectual Life
EPILOGUE: THE IMPROVISATIONAL NATURE OF INTELLECTUAL LIFE
1. Academics Caught Between Plagiarism and Bullshit
2. Bullshit: A Disease Whose Cures Are Always Worse
3. The Scientific Method as a Search for the (Piled) Higher (and Deeper) Bullshit
Other Titles in: Social Theory Philosophy of Social Science Philosophy of Education

How Kevin Bacon cured cancer

This interesting program, which was clearly intended to popularise science, screened on the ABC last night. Disappointingly though, sociology was conspicuous only by its absence (and the same could be said of the graph theory of Leonard Euler). Network science was heralded as "the science of the 21st century", and Duncan J Watts provided a major focus for the program. Now I just happen to also own a copy of Watts' book, Six Degrees: the Science of a Connected Age, in which an intellectual debt to sociology is frankly acknowledged. Simmel is specifically mentioned on account of his theory of triads as the fundamental unit of group structure (p58), and this long sociological pedigree extends right through to today, as evidenced by the Journal of Mathematical Sociology and actor network theory.
Elsewhere on this blog I have referred to actor network theory in critical terms, which by extension makes me less sanguine than the makers of this documentary that network science is going to necessarily have a positive democratising effect by reminding us all that every problem is essentially a "small world" problem because of our interconnections. Indeed, the program counteracts its own intentions in these respects by demonstrating the increasing penetration of network science into the Westpoint Military Academy. Its proselytisers at Westpoint even credit it with helping them to capture Saddam Hussein.

Another point of interest for me was how it is particular hubs, or nodal points if preferred, that are instrumental in how a network distributes its flow of information. By extension, referencing my earlier post, one could use BlogPulse as a bibliometric tool to determine the major hubs in the Continental philosophy blogosphere, by tracking conversations to see who most consistently captures the attention space in the first instance.

But I should finish by returning to my point that the program was not reflexive enough to situate its complicity in maintaining the hegemony of science as a public discourse. Watts mentions Asimov's Foundation series in his book, Asimov's novels positively reference sociology, and another scientist mentions Asimov again [without mentioning sociology] in the film, reminding us that we are living in a world where science, and even science fiction, are afforded more public legitimacy than sociology. Although that thought is quite depressing, it is still worth watching the program as evidence of the phenomenon of homophily, where that which is similar tends to cluster in a network. I regard homophily as a heuristic relative of the term I like to bandy about, seriality.

"Dissent Over Descent": Steve Fuller interviewed at Acheron LV-426

Given this blog's interest in the growing cultural significance of the biological sciences, I was especially keen to speak to the renowned sociologist, Steve Fuller, about his book, Dissent Over Descent. I've already speculated about the rationale behind Fuller's interest in Intelligent Design, which I now also regard as consistent with his pronouncements on the enduring value of the social sciences and the humanities.

I tried to avoid the generation of more heat than light, which would have followed if the interview had simply recapitulated positions familiar from the so-called "science wars". I therefore regard the interview as striking a fair balance in its examination of Fuller's stated objectives in this, his most recent work.

Q: Before you got involved in the US court case, Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), which pitted intelligent design against evolution, most people knew of your work in the philosophy and sociology of science associated with ‘social epistemology’. I suppose a fair summary of your views is that you are for the democratisation of scientific authority, but you would also expand science’s jurisdiction to cover morally sensitive matters like humanity’s genetic potential.

A: Yes, I suppose I am for both extending the range of people eligible to exercise scientific judgement and intensifying the role that science plays in our lives.

Q: OK, that already sounds pretty futuristic – if not science-fictional (and I want to get back later to what relationship, if any, your work has to sci-fi). But then how do you square that with your support for intelligent design, which you call on page one of your latest book, Dissent over Descent, ‘scientifically credentialed creationism’?

A: Well, I guess I don’t see ‘creationism’ as necessarily pejorative. It’s a commonplace in the field in which I was trained – history and philosophy of science – to explain the West’s 17th century Scientific Revolution in terms of Christians taking the Bible into their own hands (i.e. not accepting the word of priests) and seeing themselves as literally having been created in the image and likeness of God to comprehend and perhaps even complete the divine plan. Thus, people like Newton read the Bible like a script in which they saw the roles they were being asked to perform. So, Newton saw himself in the role of God and articulated a world-system from God’s point of view in the abstract mathematics and with the predictive accuracy that you might expect of a transcendent being detached from ordinary human affairs. I talk more about this in the final chapter of Dissent.

Q: But you’ve got to admit that this is not how creationists seem to behave these days – I mean, they’re not exactly Newtonian demi-gods.

A: Of course, you’ve got a point. And it’s an interesting historical question how the Protestant Reformation, which has empowered so many people over the past five centuries, has nevertheless left its evangelical wing with such a timid and negative view toward science. My guess is that the unprecedented science-based and science-backed destruction on the part of Germany in the First World War caused evangelicals to recoil from the advancement of science in a way they had never done before. The Anglo-American ‘fundamentalism’ that continues to form the main ideological opposition to evolution dates from this period. Nevertheless, as I observe in my book, among the most scientifically credible proponents of eugenics in the same period have been such devout Christians as Ronald Fisher, Sewall Wright and Theodosius Dobzhansky.

Q: But these are all people normally counted as founders of the Neo-Darwinian synthesis that brought genetics under a general theory of natural selection. Surely you don’t mean to include them as creationists?

A: Well, I do think their exact commitment to Darwinism can be questioned. In particular, I don’t think they shared Darwin’s considered view that we will never be able to trump natural selection. Fisher, Wright and Dobzhansky all believed that we had not only the power but also the obligation to engage in genetic engineering in order to bring God’s plan to completion. It doesn’t follow that they had a libertarian attitude toward human life – à la ‘designer babies’ and easy abortions and euthanasia – but they certainly did believe that the more we know about our genetic potential, the greater our responsibility for its future cultivation. This is clearly to be an exercise in social decision-making – part of social epistemology, if you will. Nazi excesses do not undermine this point, especially in light of the revolution in molecular biology that occurred less than a decade after the end of the Second World War.

Q: But how do you expect creationists – or intelligent design theorists – to sign on to a view that would basically make us co-creators with God? It still sounds pretty sacrilegious to me.

A: Yes, I suppose it does. But the view in fact runs quite deep in Western theological thought, not least in the legends surrounding the character of Faust, who tried to derive god-like powers through a certain heretical reading of the Bible. In today’s world, the theological appeal of genetic engineering and other technoscience-based forms of human enhancement is that they stress the sense in which humans are at once fallible and corrigible. The German-Canadian scholar Gregor Wolbring has promoted the idea of ‘ableism’, whereby we are ‘always already’ disabled because science has taken the lid off what counts as the ‘normal’ performance of various abilities. A good case in point is the slow but perceptible acquiescence to the acceptance of various (physical and intellectual) performance-boosting drugs. There may come a point in our lifetimes when a person who refuses to take such drugs is regarded as disabled.

Q: But so far most religious people seem simply to want to stop this drive toward enhancement before it gains too much momentum. There is still a strong appeal in society to ‘natural law’ and what is ‘natural’ to the human condition, all of this traceable back to relatively conventional readings of the Bible. It even has resonance with certain aspects of contemporary environmental movements.

A: And this conservative attitude toward pushing the limits of humanity would also find sympathy with Charles Darwin himself, who saw evolution as pretty pointless, when seen on a cosmic scale, and not something that can be enhanced in any meaningful long-term way. But again, Darwin greatly underestimated just how much we would come to understand the inner working of cells and especially genes. In particular, he would be especially surprised to learn that these micro-entities are literally constituted as complex pieces of machinery.

Q: I suppose that this is how the story gets back to intelligent design?

A: Yes, precisely. It’s not by accident that the vast majority of scientists who endorse intelligent design come from engineering, biochemistry and other fields associated with industry – rather than the field sciences. These are the people most likely to resonate to the idea that creation is one big technological project. And that was precisely the idea that animated the original Scientific Revolution. Here it’s worth recalling what a strange idea this is, when seen from a cross-cultural standpoint. Many cultures, notably China and India, had very advanced technology and very advanced mathematics but it never occurred to them to imagine that reality might be itself constituted as an artefact. Rather, they sharply divided nature and artifice, with nature always appearing rather mysterious and elusive and the extent of human artifice relatively limited and transient. Only cultures descending from the Bible (including Islam) have blurred the boundary to such great effect.

Q: But do you think that is really the intent of intelligent design theorists – to treat nature as a big machine?

A: Well, they’ve certainly set themselves up for this question, if you consider that their main criticism of Darwinism is that it ignores the engineering prowess demonstrated at all levels in the natural world. Nothing goes to waste in nature -- we just need to discover the point of seemingly useless things like ‘junk DNA’, proteins that don’t seem to code for anything, and then make the most of them. If you look at the graphics in ID books and videos, you’ll see just how much of ID’s visual rhetoric is dominated by the desire to get the viewer to see nature as a well-honed super-factory that humans have been entrusted to manage and render productive. There is no mystery-mongering here at all, and frankly it doesn’t sit well with the more ‘scientophobic’ attitudes of the religious fundamentalists. Not surprisingly, there is considerable mixed feeling between intelligent design theorists and, say, young earth creationists – though they are all joined in their opposition to Darwinism.

Q: It sounds like you’re saying that intelligent design faces a religious – as well as a scientific – challenge.

A: In fact, the religious challenge is greater. To be sure, the scientific challenge is symbolically charged because it draws unwanted attention to the authoritarian character of contemporary science. Nevertheless, it is relatively narrow. After all, most biologists can get on with their day-to-day research without adopting a hard line on whether nature is ultimately the product of intelligent design or chance-based processes. However, the religious challenge goes to the heart of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century. It’s easy to appeal to natural law to stop inquiry into all sorts of matters if you believe that life is ultimately mysterious. However, and perhaps unwittingly, intelligent design casts serious doubt on this appeal with its strong pro-mechanistic, anti-chance line on the nature of life. Thus, I am always surprised when people see a concept like Michael Behe’s ‘irreducible complexity’ as a science-stopper. They focus on the fact that he nominates, say, a particular kind of cell or organism as something that must have been purpose-built. Rather, they should step back and consider that he is nominating anything at all – in other words, he’s presupposing that in principle we can know God’s building blocks. Darwinists never make comparably bold claims to knowledge, which is why I think, for example, Catholics find it much easier to accept Darwin than ID.

Q. I am interested in the implications of your previous remarks insofar as they appear suggestive of some continuity in the corpus of your work as a sociologist. For example, and not least of all, you would be aware that an earlier book, The New Sociological Imagination, has been viewed [in some instances] as couched in the terms of theology, metaphysics, and world-view, and therefore in conflict with the legacy of positivists and classic sociologists (who questioned the adequacy of explanations situated at this level in sociological studies of religion). No doubt you would question and wish to complicate such a characterisation, so the meaning of “newness” remains to be determined in this instance. In other words, how legitimate is it to construe Dissent Over Descent as consciously developing a new sociological imagination?

A: I suppose there are two senses in which Dissent over Descent contributes to the development of a new sociological imagination. The first is very obvious from the first chapter, and ID supporters have quickly picked up on it: Science is organized in such an elitist and authoritarian fashion today that we simply don’t know whether a ‘scientific consensus’ literally exists on an issue as far from the scientific workbench as Darwinism vs. ID. Nobody ever bothers to survey the full range of professional scientists systematically. The other sense is much subtler and also, I think, much more controversial. Basically I believe that sociologists are in an ideal position to offer a methodological critique of the sort of pan-Darwinism we see spreading across both the natural and social sciences. This is because we are taught to be sensitive to the potential pitfalls of generalising from a few cases – be they based in history, the field or the lab. Yet, Neo-Darwinists engage in such heroic generalisation all the time. I don’t only mean the tendency of evolutionary psychologists to generalise across species (something I criticized in The New Sociological Imagination) but also the more general tendency of supposing that if natural selection can be demonstrated in the lab, it therefore has been happening on a regular basis on Earth for the last several billion years. Of course some psychologists might want to claim that their lab findings say something deep about human nature that transcends differences in time and place, but such claims are routinely and reasonably met with considerable scepticism. ID’s response to Neo-Darwinist claims is in a similar vein. Of course, to stick with the example, lab psychologists usually get traction not because they’ve discovered the deep structure of history but because their experimental technique can be used as the basis for manipulating some real-world situation that might interest us now. In other words, the power of lab-based knowledge lies in its ability to remake, not understand, the world. Thus, when a Neo-Darwinist claims to have demonstrated natural selection in the lab, I see instead a sophisticated form of artificial selection that might have some bioengineering function in the future – a matter that falls under the remit of social epistemology.

Q. Would you care to comment on the possible implications of this new sociological imagination for the burgeoning field of cultural studies, which in some cases explicitly situates itself as directly challenging the disciplinary authority of sociology. No doubt you've heard the clarion call sounded by scholars such as Cary Wolfe on behalf of the analytic program known as “the posthumanities” (which perhaps typifies a logical extension of the earlier interest in cyborgs and postmodernism among cultural studies practitioners). In Dissent Over Descent you maintain something like the elective affinity between Darwinism and postmodernism as featured in The New Sociological Imagination. You then intriguingly argue that becoming progressive is more readily associated with non-field based, less naturalistic areas such as cybernetics. I feel that Wolfe would be in partial agreement with you on that point, but rather than focus on Wolfe per se, could you instead briefly comment on any possible relationships between the popular cultural studies trope of the cyborg and the neo-Darwinian synthesis targeted in Dissent Over Descent? Furthermore, if transhumanism or android epistemology, for example, in any way present as viable critical alternatives to the cyborg, could you recommend any authors to Acheron’s interested readers?

A: This is a tricky issue because phrases like ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’ can refer to states in which humanity is either perfected or superseded. My inclination is towards the former interpretation, which was certainly the spirit in which Julian Huxley originally coined ‘transhumanism’. However, it is also the tougher option because it foregrounds the difficult normative question of what it is about historical humanity that we wish to preserve, cultivate and extend in the future. It is not obvious to me that the answer must include a provision for preserving the human genome intact. In this respect, I am open to serious bioengineering and the prospect that the features of humanity we value the most are better preserved, cultivated and extended in, say, silicon or some silicon-carbon cyborg than in the sort of hominid descendant that dominates the Darwinist imagination (e.g. in Enhancing Evolution by John Harris). Here I think there is still much to learn from, on the science side, Norbert Wiener, and on the religious side, Teilhard de Chardin – both of whom I talk about in Dissent over Descent. What they shared was the sense that the distinctive feature of humanity is to provide purposeful order to what otherwise is an inherently unruly nature, whether one is talking about the contingencies of Darwinian evolution or the non-linear dynamics of microphysical reality. But from their conceptualisations of this ultimate human condition, it’s clear that both of them were open to significant changes in our makeup. I believe that concrete steps towards such ‘transhuman’ states should be cautiously encouraged, by which I mean that people should be socially insured against the risks they and their loved ones will inevitably undertake by exposing themselves to would-be enhancements.

Q: Finally, I want to return to the role, if any, that science fiction has played in your thought.

A: My attitude toward science fiction is coloured by the fact that H.G. Wells was a finalist for the first UK chair in sociology, which was started at the LSE in 1907. His candidacy was taken seriously because, in some quarters, sociology was still seen as a kind of science of utopias. Against the backdrop of figures like Saint-Simon, Comte, Marx, Mill, Spencer and Galton, Wells did not look so out of place. But of course, he didn’t get the chair. Much of the history of what is called ‘science fiction’ is of people with bold, typically futuristic visions falling out of the academic mainstream and adopting of style of writing that is part-novel, part-projection. I suppose, sociologically speaking, the most interesting feature of science fiction is its large market. Considering that very little of it stands up on traditional literary grounds, it strikes me that science fiction ultimately appeals to a way of relating to theoretical and empirical knowledge that is not normally permitted by academic disciplines. You might say that it sees a lot more in the academic material than academics themselves do. At least, that’s how I read science fiction – as a prod to the imagination. Consequently, I read the stuff pretty fast, simply for plot and device, rather than entertainment. Now speaking epistemologically, I think that science fiction is a bit like very abstract branches of mathematics like non-Euclidean geometry, which were invented before they had any use but subsequently came to function as templates for comprehending new phenomena or aspects of reality. So, for example, a film like ‘The Matrix’ seems to have revived, at least for some philosophers, the idea of God as the great computer programmer, which was the context in which Charles Babbage, the computer’s inventor, made his own argument for intelligent design back in the 1830s.