One of the most far-reaching developments of the last 200 years or so has been the emergence of the social sciences. It is a development that has come to encompass every aspect of life in the West, from education policy to voting patterns to the advertising industry. If we can understand ourselves, and especially our minds and actions, scientifically, then, one hopes, we can do things more efficiently. All well and good, for this can be seen as a natural outcome of that application of scientific method and ingenuity which has helped to make the world a safer, healthier, and better-nourished place. But where we must be on our guard is when we are told that such sciences as psychology and sociology, based to a large extent as they are on neurology and evolutionary biology, can explain us completely, thereby consigning religion in particular to a redundant and now superseded phase of human development. But let me hasten to make it clear that by no means all practitioners of these disciplines have this agenda – a not inconsiderable number are devoutly religious, as I know from personal experience. What I see as the problem, rather, is that the findings of the social sciences are not infrequently hijacked for use as ammunition by New Atheists and secularists.
But as all these sciences have clear historical roots, it might be useful to explain how the social sciences came into being.
As we have seen above, philosophers, doctors, and scientists have, since Greek times, put forward ideas that relate directly to what would become in the late nineteenth century the “social sciences”. These included ideas on the mind–body relationship (extending as far back as Hippocrates on epilepsy), social organization, behaviour, the causes of emotion, the nature of the “good life”, and even our biological and psychological relationship with the animals. But it was after 1800 that things really took off. This derived partly from the often aggressive secular radicalism that came out of the French Revolution, and partly from demographic and technological changes that were going on full tilt across Western society by 1850.
First, there had been the drastic curtailment of the then great killer, smallpox, initially by the risky technique of immunization and then, after 1796, by Edward Jenner’s much safer method of cowpox vaccination, along with an improvement in general public health standards by 1850. This had led to an escalation in population growth as more people lived long enough to reproduce, especially in Great Britain, where the population shot up from 8.5 million in 1801, when the first proper census was conducted, to 16.75 million in 1851, and 30.5 million in 1901.
The sudden rise of industrial steam manufacture, moreover, and the dislocation of millions of people who now laboured in the new industries, created social problems on an unprecedented scale, first in Great Britain, then in France, Germany and America. These new social problems brought with them all kinds of psychological side effects, especially among the poor; and one has only to read the mid-century “Manchester” novels of Elizabeth Gaskell, and the Parisian ones of Émile Zola, to get a sense of the magnitude of the problem of displaced and often dysfunctional people: poverty, vagrancy, family breakdown, violence, alcohol and opium abuse, syphilis, and “madness”. And on a massive scale! And then there was the rapid professionalization of expertise, as a diverse body of new professions and specialities came into existence, from economics to civil engineering to psychiatry. And very important in our present context was the professionalization of “madness”, or the development of clinical psychiatry as a new speciality within the medical profession.
Yet in 1788, for example, when HM King George III became mentally disturbed, he was successfully treated by the Revd Dr Francis Willis, an Anglican clergyman with a wide reputation and fashionable practice in what was then known as “mad doctoring”, who had been granted an Oxford DM degree to regularize his position. Willis, like most eighteenth-century “mad doctors”, worked in accordance with the theory mentioned above – namely, that “madness” was caused by over-exertion, excitement, or obsession, and could be gradually eased away by a carefully disciplined, quietening regime. A similar explanation would have been applied in the case of the insane poor, though lack of resources frequently led to their being confined to places like London’s Bethlehem Hospital (Bedlam), where they were often given purgatives to exhaust them and kept locked up. Not an intended act of cruelty, I hasten to add, but an exasperated managerial response to the growing number of people who were becoming “crack-brained”. And as the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, the problem only got worse.
This, I would argue, was the origin of psychiatry as a new medical specialism in the nineteenth century, as it was of sociology: one set out to understand the distressed person as an individual, and the other to make sense of the society that caused the distress. Paris, Edinburgh, and Vienna lay at the forefront of the movement, as “the mad” became a source of fascination not only to doctors such as Sir Charles Bell, François Magendie, John Connolly, Jean-Martin Charcot, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Henry Maudsley, Cesare Lombroso, Sigmund Freud, and others, but also to artists and novelists like Théodore Géricault and Émile Zola. Indeed, it was these men, and their colleagues, who really took the study of the brain and central nervous system from where Thomas Willis in the seventeenth century had largely left it. Reflexive responses, hypnotism, brain damage, dementia, heredity, “idiocy”, Down’s syndrome, Parkinson’s disease, criminality, schizophrenia, “the Unconscious”, and sadism and masochism (coined by Krafft-Ebing and Freud from their studies of the sexual literary writings of the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) were all part of the flood tide of discovery, clinical classification, and attempted understanding. And overwhelmingly, such disorders were considered to lie in the victim’s brain physiology, and not in a disturbed soul. And this, I believe, is very important, and would become pivotal to future interpretations both of mentally ill individuals and of the societies in which they lived. For “madness” focused increasingly on a reductionist interpretation of brain pathology, and “disturbed souls” began to be consigned to a less-developed – even superstitious – phase of medical and social understanding.
Operating largely in tandem with the new psychiatric movement in medicine was the new science of sociology, which set out, in all good faith, to understand the physical, reactive, quantifiable methods by which humans functioned in groups. And as in the case of neural science and psychiatry, one might say that sociology had roots that could be traced to the “mechanistic” psycho-social theories of Thomas Hobbes, and perhaps to a lesser extent to the social contract theory of the origins of society implicit in John Locke’s Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690).
It was the founder of positivism, Auguste Comte, however, who coined the French term sociologie in the early nineteenth century; and while the word was first used in England in 1843, it was popularized in the English-speaking world by Comte’s British philosophical disciple, Herbert Spencer. It tended to be used in those days to indicate an “evolutionary”, or developmentalist, view of society, and was very much concerned with positivist ideas of “progress” and with new, secular, ways of seeing humanity. Then in late nineteenth-century Continental Europe figures such as Max Weber and Émile Durkheim really began to build up the discipline. Furthermore, the political and economic analysis of the human condition set out in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) also provided new conceptual tools for seeing humanity in society as a mechanism driven by aspiration, obstruction, resource-seeking, competing relationships, control, and rebellion. And the individual human units within it were themselves the product of the neurological and psychological factors outlined above.
When one adds the impact of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, especially in the wake of his animal and human behaviour studies in the early 1870s, and the emergence of “Social Darwinism”, one begins to see where many of the “mechanistic” or “man is a beast” theories that became so prominent in the twentieth century had their origins.
Indeed, by 1870 one even finds physiological mechanisms for “explaining” superior and inferior human traits. In their love affair with “craniometry” (skull and brain measuring) and other perceived methods for the quantification and classification of humanity, Darwin’s cousin Sir Francis Galton, Thomas Henry Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, Cesare Lombroso, and others began to articulate a medico-social model along the following lines. Educated, upper-middle-class European and American males have the best brains. They need to marry within their own caste, otherwise their obvious gifts of cleverness and resourcefulness (along with art, science, culture, and industry) will be swamped by the “gemmules” (genes) of the rapidly swelling underclasses and other inferiors, and will be lost. And progressive civilization will go to the dogs! For are not the peasants – such as the Italian criminals and peasants studied by Lombroso, whose brains he began to dissect as an Italian army doctor – of a less evolved, or a “regressed”, type?
It is true that such views were by no means universal among doctors and social theorists, either in the nineteenth century or later, but they were profoundly influential in viewing humanity not as needy children of God, but as animals in different stages of evolution or regression. Yes, regression: for if vaccination and improved public health meant that evolution’s losers were no longer dying off as Nature intended, or as quickly as they once had, then surely they would soon swamp the vigorous and healthy? A way of thinking that was to find articulation in the eugenics movement which aspired to control human breeding so as to deliberately restrict the proliferation of “undesirable” or “regressed” persons.
Yet those who most vigorously objected to this way of thinking were not the secular intellectuals, but Christians of all denominations. While the highly intelligent, the average, and the mentally challenged are a statistical fact of life, it was Christians who affirmed that all were God’s beloved children, and not merely higher primates to be encouraged or expended in accordance with biological law. Were there not other factors involved in forming people and societies than just iron laws and bio-mechanisms? What about nurture as well as nature, to say nothing of compassion; for could not healthy, positive living, in decent social conditions, and with access to education and opportunity, allow “genius” to blossom even among the poor? Indeed, Samuel Smiles’s Self Help (1858), and other works (and Smiles, though a writer, was also an Edinburgh qualified doctor), not to mention other authors, amply demonstrated that, given the right opportunities, extraordinary talent could be found even among those in “humble circumstances” – as substantiated by such figures as James Watt (engineering), John Hunter and James Simpson (medicine), Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday (physics and chemistry), William Smith and Hugh Miller (geology), and scores of others! And if geniuses were the exception, in any population group kindly and humane social structures and habits could help, nonetheless, to bring out the best in everybody.
What I hope to have shown above is how the psycho-social sciences came into being, how they were rooted in the scientific method, and how they have been pursued for the noblest intellectual motives. Yet unlike physics, chemistry, engineering, or cellular biology, they do not just deal with physical and consistently replicable experimental processes. Rather, they deal with what the great early twentieth-century Quaker cosmologist Sir Arthur Eddington characterized (in a slightly different context) as “mind stuff”: or that non-physical domain which exists between the laws of physics and our individual “consciousness” as human beings. For as we have seen several times already in this book, the linchpin in understanding scientific and religious thinking, and in New Atheist myth-spinning, is not the solid scientific evidence of brains, genes, quantitative social studies, or of evolutionary genetics, but how individuals choose to interpret the evidence. Does one do so from a perspective of secular “methodological reductionism” – where “mind is only matter” is an a priori assumption – or from a perspective which does not feel intellectually compromised by ideas of the transcendent? For while New Atheists are insistent that “real scientists” can only countenance matter and law when explaining the nature of reality, there are nonetheless, as we saw in Chapter 1, many scientists who are active practitioners of Christianity, Judaism, and other religions. And here I do not just mean physicists contemplating the origins of the big bang, but also psychiatrists, psychologists, social theorists, economists, and evolutionary geneticists – as I know from my own personal experience of the scientific community.
But the real mischief arises, I believe, when secularists in arts disciplines, such as literary criticism or art appreciation, attempt to “explain” to us why we like or dislike certain art works in accordance with their interpretations of psycho-, neuro-, socio-, or evolutionary criteria.
Let me give two examples. The first comes from a research project which I read of recently, run by a major British university arts department, to scan the brains of people as they read or listened to Shakespeare. Needless to say, they found that specific regions and receptors in the brain came into operation upon being exposed to the Bard’s immortal syntax. This was supposed to indicate that we are “programmed” to respond favourably to “great literature”. Somehow I doubt if anyone would have bothered to scan the brains of people who prefer The Beano comic to Macbeth, or whose neurons go into overdrive when Manchester United score a goal!
And of course, the visual arts have also provided rich pickings for the devotees of evolution-related speculation. Some evolution-inspired art critics have argued, for instance, that since the Pleistocene era humans have evolved to evaluate the landscape as a way of finding food and avoiding predators – and that this is one reason why we like landscapes! Others have speculated about why certain paintings become so popular that prints of them appear on numerous people’s walls. I remember some months ago reading an analysis of why Henri Matisse’s “Blue Nude” sequence was so popular. And guess what – it’s all down to evolution and the survival instinct! Men like the “Blue Nude”, it was argued, because the voluptuous model somehow suggests fertility and fecundity, and, by definition, a chance to pass on their genes and dominate future generations. And women, we are told, buy copies of the “Blue Nude” because it somehow affirms their femininity! But what this hypothesis fails to explain is why Matisse’s paintings can still be appreciated as great works of art by men who prefer thin women to more Junoesque ladies and have never in their lives wished to reproduce; and by gay men. So if you think such evolutionary interpretations of art appreciation sound a trifle over-theoretical in their quest to see biological motivation at the heart of everything, don’t worry – you’re not alone!
One of the intellectual tragedies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, indeed, is an invasion of highly speculative “scientific” thinking into so many aspects of life – the arts, politics, social policy, and even theology – and all because they can be imaginatively reduced back to something in evolution or brain studies which, so we are told by “those who know best”, must be true!
Yet what popular, reductionist, arts-inspired “socio-evolutio-psycho-speculation” fails to do is tell us anything meaningful about love, fear, or joy as experienced, motivating conditions in the real lives of real people. Indeed, in its obsession with theory, reductive analysis, and the deliberate de-spiritualizing of human experience, it is all a bit like what I call my “orchestra analogy”. This is what I mean. Imagine making a detailed auditory and visual record of everything that is done by the players in a symphony orchestra over sixty minutes: an exhaustive behavioural, mechanical, and acoustic record of the act of operating a variety of wooden and metal devices under a central director. Horsehair is scraped across catgut stretched over wooden boxes, and human lungs send blasts of hot, moist air down a variety of tubes. Yet what is it that turns the brute physics of sound into music? And why does this music have the weird power of changing how we think and act? And why do the scrapings and blowings of Mozart, Mahler, and John Cage speak differently to different types of people and generate different emotional responses? The experience of music – or any other mind-changing activity, such as sport, sex, or religion – in the person who responds is of quite another dimension from the machinery that might produce it. And even though it might be conveyed to our consciousness first by the physics of the eardrum and auditory canal, and thence through the synapses of the cerebral cortex, the final result is that it lifts our minds, spirits, and souls to a different dimension of being.
That our physical bodies, and our brains, have come into being by complex and beautiful evolutionary processes is not a thing that can be held in doubt. And the discovery and unravelling of these processes, from comparative anatomy, natural selection, and cerebral and neurological researches, and open-minded social investigation, with all their existing and potential therapeutic benefits – from the genetics of cancer research to viable treatments for a whole range of neurological conditions – is one of the monumental achievements of human ingenuity. Yet let us be cautious about leaping from the hard science to the more misty regions of trying to explain who we are. While the human brain is probably the most wonderful thing that we have so far discovered in the universe, and its study can undisputedly explain many aspects of behaviour, from epilepsy to Alzheimer’s, and it is becoming increasingly amenable to surgical and chemical control, I strongly suspect that it is not the whole story by any means. No more so, in fact, than scraped catgut and blown tubes are the same thing as the sheer joy and exultation that we may feel upon encountering Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
So let us be on our guard against those who, while mocking and deriding the idea of God, heaven, and transcendence, merrily cherry-pick from evolutionary, social, and neural scientific research to spin their own myths. Myths about our being no more than our genes, or brains, or our noble chimpanzee ancestors, yet who sadly have grown too big for our boots and now think of ourselves as lords of creation.