Polanyi on science and civilization

Continuing with Mark T. Mitchell's introduction to the thought of Michael Polanyi, I read today something that puts the current argument over embryonic stem-cell research in a particular light. I hope I can give an adequate brief account of where Polanyi thought Western science and epistemology went wrong, and set the stage for totalitarianism.

Polanyi was first and foremost a scientist, but as a refugee from the Nazi madness, he became preoccupied with the question of how we know what we know, and what that had to do with the twin totalitarianisms that menaced the world in the 20th century. He was horrified by the Soviet idea that science had to be put in service of society (i.e., the State). Science had to be free. But to Polanyi, that freedom wasn't unlimited. Science that was free to pursue anything the scientists wanted would quickly become monstrously nihilistic. There had to be boundaries set somewhere. Both science and society required shared belief in "transcendent ideals" like truth, justice and charity if they are to be free. To deny transcendentals is to deny any defense against totalitarianism.

Science is a system that must work within itself by purely materialistic and empirical data. Those are the rules; to admit anything else into the world of science renders it ... less than science. It was only after science was freed of having to subject its own inquiries to dogmas laid down by religion that it was able to make such dramatic progress. In other words, a limited rejection of traditional authority freed science up in beneficial ways, as Galileo's successors could testify. However, modernity swung too far the other way, and took the empiricism and skepticism that undergirded science as a rule for interpreting all reality. Anything that wasn't empirically provable was rendered meaningless.

Here's the rub: Polanyi says that modern, post-Enlightenment man has lost faith in transcendentals, but he cannot escape the detritus of Christian culture -- meaning that he will still burn with the Christian passion for righteousness and justice, even though he has discarded the transcendental aspect that makes the ideal concrete. Mitchell quotes Polanyi describing the situation as follows:

In such men the traditional forms for holding moral ideals had been shattered and their moral passions diverted into the only channels which a strictly mechanistic conception of man and society left open to them. We may describe this as a process of moral inversion. The morally inverted person has not merely performed a philosophical substitution of material purposes for moral aims; he is acting with the whole force of his homeless moral passions within a purely materialistic framework of purposes.

We still believe in moral perfection, Polanyi says, but now lack the Christian concept of original sin and the stern warning that perfection can never be established this side of heaven. So we are susceptible to applying the methods of science to achieving perfection, even to the point of traducing boundaries that were previously considered immoral. This is how you get the Holocaust and the Soviet Great Famine as the scientifically engineered "final solutions" to the "problems" that stood in the way of totalitarian societies establishing the rule of (Nazi or communist) heaven on earth.

But how did British and American societies escape this fate? According to Polanyi, through what you might term unconscious hypocrisy. Though they'd accepted modernity's empiricism, they still felt obliged to honor the old morality, at least in spirit. This pull of the past, weak though it was, kept the UK and the US from yielding to the full implications of what modernist epistemology, and its attendant scientism, would allow.

What does this have to do with ESCR? We are seeing quite a large number of Americans -- the majority, it would seem -- agree that it is permissible to create human life for the purpose of experimenting on it and exterminating it, all for the sake of the Greater Good of Mankind. Why should embryos small than the head of a pin be privileged if experimenting on them could ease suffering? The morality of ESCR is not simply a matter of whether or not you believe a human embryo has moral personhood. No, the ESCR proponents cannot evade that the procedure crosses a bright moral line: to carry it out, what everyone admits is biological human life (a genetically distinct and fully human creature) must be willfully created for the ultimate purpose of its destruction. Recognizing the biological humanity of the embryo requires no religious belief at all: it is what it is. And scientists created these beings, which most Americans believe have no moral value, for the sake of making the world more perfect.

It is a horror. But we turn away from the implications of what we are doing, and shriek -- just as the Progressives did during the eugenics era -- that the only people who could possibly object are religious fanatics who want to stop the march of Science. Satisfied that we aren't like those cretinous fundies, we refuse to ponder the deeper meaning of the power over life and death that we have reserved to ourselves, for the sake of achieving perfection. We don't want to consider what may come of it once the scientists tell us that if we could only grow fetuses in the laboratory for harvesting and experimentation, great cures and suffering may come of it. We would never agree to that, we tell ourselves. But 20 years ago, we would never have imagined that we would permit cloning -- but now we do, for "therapeutic" reasons.

This is the kind of thing that's going on in this country. But see, being enlightened people, we fight our elections over macaca and dirty books.