Still Two Cultures

The Two Cultures are both alive and well, thank you very much, as is the yawning chasm that exists between them for some people, most aptly illustrated by their pathetic attempts to reach across it. This piece by Philip Pullman (of His Dark Materials fame) in the Guardian is so lazy, clumsy, and, well, undergraduate, I’m not sure what’s most infuriating: the casual disdain towards science, or the attempts to demonstrate affinity that only show cluelessness. It appears that Pullman’s piece is intended to be part of a special science fiction edition of the paper’s Life section. Go write me eight-hundred words on science and fiction, says the editor to Phil. Doesn’t need to be coherent or anything. Just take a vague position and throw some of the right words around. Good man.

Forgive some liberal quoting, but go read the whole thing first. I’ll be here when you get back. Says Pullman:

I don’t do science, though I love to read about it. What I do is fiction. They are such different activities that I sometimes wonder whether the same type of mind can do both.

Yes, they are very different activities, but rather than consider with some thought what each might involve, and how those people who do both – because there are such people, whatever Pullman might ‘wonder’ – manage to live with themselves, we’re given a glib apples-and-oranges dichotomy. Which is false anyhow, because science and fiction don’t occupy the same conceptual space, so whyever would one preclude the other? There are certainly reasons why people who are interested in one might be less interested in the other, but there’s nothing intrinsic about each that conflicts with the other. It’s like wondering aloud how people can enjoy both bananas and jazz. Huh?

I’m not talking about science fiction; it’s a respectable genre, with conventions (and Conventions, too), and a canon, and giants and minnows, and classics and trash, but I don’t write it and don’t much read it. I’m talking about all the rest, about the basic thing that’s known as story.

And with that keyboard flourish Pullman relegates science fiction to something other than ‘the basic thing that’s known as story’, with no justification that I can see. I’m reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s frustrated assertion that any writer who notices technology is labelled a science fiction writer. The background becomes the perceived foreground. Here’s what science fiction is: it’s fiction involving conflict between man and an environment that’s to some degree realistic, and to some degree speculative. Here’s what science fiction isn’t: it’s not fiction involving realistic conflict just between humans. Pullman makes his mistake explicit:

Because stories are fundamentally about individual human beings in human situations. They are the answers to questions such as What will happen when Oedipus meets Jocasta? What is Dorothea going to do when she realises she’s made a terrible mistake in marrying that old stick Casaubon? What will Mr Bumble do when Oliver Twist asks for more?

Nope. Some stories – and presumably the ones that Pullman prefers – are fundamentally about individual human beings in human situations. Others aren’t. Still others are about individual human beings in situations that reek of humanity, but in a way that Pullman seemingly cannot reach his mind into. What are we to make of the (both literal and figurative) chess-game conflict between Dave Bowman and HAL 9000 in 2001? That it’s not human? It’s intensely human – indeed, the plot discusses issues of exactly what it means to be human by juxtaposing it with the strengths, failures and frailties of a pseudo-human. But place that discussion against a background of speculatively extrapolated technology – rather than, say, a background of nineteenth-century gentle-folk – and suddenly, for Pullman, the background appears to rob the story of any claims to storiness.

And furthermore:

The tensions, expectations and satisfactions we get from fiction are of that sort, and it isn’t science, because those aren’t scientific questions. A scientific question, I take it, is one like What will happen if I drop two weights at the same moment?

Well, stop the presses. First of all Pullman wonders aloud whether anyone can ‘do’ both science and fiction, and then he claims, to devastating effect, that the questions we ask while processing a story as readers aren’t ‘scientific’ questions. Of course they aren’t. It’s a straw man made up of straw men, and I can’t imagine anyone claiming otherwise. But he misses the essential reason that the questions he describes are not ‘scientific’, or at least not amenable to scientific enquiry. The reason is that the weights are real, and therefore constrained by physical laws, whereas the story characters are purely fictional entities, and therefore constrained by absolutely nothing other than the author’s intentions. They don’t have to behave rationally, or consistently, or with any regard for what’s real or possible. The difference Pullman seems to want to direct us towards is that between the human, and the non-human; that is to say, between that which can produce genuine story, and that which cannot. But the human/non-human dichotomy has nothing to do with storiness, and certainly has nothing to do with our ability to ask scientific questions about behaviour. Pullman seems to prefer clumsily reductionist portrayals of science: weights, and electrons. But science is also cognitive science, and biology, and psychology, and dozens of other disciplines which frame scientific debate on a conspicuously human level, at which point they would certainly apply, in their own way, to Oedipus and Dorothea and Mr Bumble. The reason science doesn’t apply to these characters isn’t that they’re human. It’s that they’re not real.

There’s also bad science in the piece:

The difference is that once a scientific question is answered, it stays answered – at least, until someone changes the question.

Not so. Once a scientific question is answered, it stays answered only until a better, more complete answer comes along.

So doing science is not the same as doing fiction.

This is an assertion, not an argument. It’s certainly true, but glibly, emptily so. The assertion also bears little relation to what’s come before. There are all sorts of levels at which it’s possible to discuss how science and fiction interrelate, but Pullman isn’t terribly interested in clearly distinguishing them. They’re lazily conflated into this sentence. Here are the three levels that come to mind:

1. The level at which humans ‘do’ science, and ‘do’ fiction. That is, the processes humans go through in order to pursue scientific enquiry, and in order to generate fiction. There might be some overlap here, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to suggest that those processes are quite different.
2. The level at which the actual universe ‘works’, and at which the fictional universe ‘works’. This seems to be the level at which Pullman’s piece addresses itself, but it’s a pointless exercise. His argument is something like: you can’t ask scientific questions of story characters because they’re human. But that’s nonsensical. The reason you can’t ask scientific questions of story characters is that they’re not real. The corollary of that, which Pullman misses, is that it’d be just as silly to expect his dropped weights to behave scientifically in a story. It’s not a scientific question, because they’re not real weights.
3. The level at which humans process stories. This is actually the level which interests me most – it’s the core of my aborted PhD. Asking questions about how stories affect their readers, how they work, or don’t work, and why they work or don’t work, is entirely amenable to scientific enquiry.

It is to be hoped that:

When it comes to science, it’s not hard, these days, to find enough superb writers and fascinating material to satisfy your most demanding interior set-designer. In biology and evolution, there are Richard Dawkins, Steven Jay Gould…

does not mean that Pullman is unaware that Gould has been dead for two years. But Pullman really gives away his Two Cultures meme right at the end:

It isn’t hard to find things out. But the best reason to read about science is not to check facts, but to revel in wonder.

That’s actually fair enough, so long as what Pullman means by ‘to revel in wonder’ has something to do with the wonder of understanding, the wonder of discovering how things are, rather than how one might wish them to be. However, as an example of what he means, he continues:

Part of the impulse behind my longest story lay in the extraordinary poetry of the phrase “dark matter”, and my discovery that Milton had anticipated it in Paradise Lost:

Unless the Almighty Maker them ordained
His dark materials to create new worlds

Rather than understanding, on some fundamental level, what ‘dark matter’ is, and how it’s a concept that’s used to account for gravitational anomalies in the universe, Pullman’s ‘wonder’ seems to consist of making a thin connection between the ‘poetry of the phrase’ and a superficially-similar phrase used by Milton. On this level, Pullman is exactly right: fiction is not science. But nor does borrowing some buzzword from science (cf. ‘chaos theory’, ‘the butterfly effect’) and using it out of all reasonable context confer anything other a magpie’s taste for the shiny and eminently stealable. In particular, it doesn’t carry with it any of the scientific content to which the phrase might refer. All you have are the words, and what you do with them might be fiction, but it’s no longer science.

Pullman finishes:

When you come to write the story, you mustn’t lose that first impulse of wonder. Science and fiction deal with different entities, and ask different questions; but each can intoxicate, inspire, console, and feed that appetite for mystery and revelation that makes human beings at least as interesting as electrons.

Science is often accused – typically by those for whom it seeks only to debunk and explain away – of being reductionist. What Pullman does here is a lazy portrayal of science as the deterministic, reductionistic process for rude mechanicals that he would abhor were it presented to him that way. Fiction, says he, is about humans. Science, says he, is about deterministic electrons – and therefore cannot form story. Well, no. Science is also about humans. It’s also about fiction, since fiction is a human process – both its creation and its consumption. We might not be able to hypothesise scientifically about Dorothea – not because, to repeat this until it sinks in, she is human, but because she’s not a real human – but we can certainly hypothesise about the brain and the fiction-writing processes of George Eliot, and about how each human who processes the text of Middlemarch does so.