The man who said “for a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no
regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.” is dead at 89. Solzhenitsyn chronicled with great detail the era of Russia’s descent into demagoguery in his subversive and daring Gulag Archipelago.
Solz was a rather conservative Orthodox Christian. Do you make any connections between his moral courage and theological commitment and the courage to seek scientific truth in your own work?
Perhaps Solzhenitsyn derived strength from his religious convictions, I don’t know. I do think that it’s obvious that religious conviction is not a requirement for moral courage. He also had a lot of negative views about the West after his Exile.
I don’t know about gillT, but one good thing about the scientific work I do is that I don’t have to have all that much courage, moral or otherwise. I suppose those who are “morally” opposed to evolutionary theory don’t like what I do, but I’m not really on the front lines of that battle. That I happen to think it’s a worthwhile endeavor to extend the realm of human understanding is pretty much gravy.
I seek scientific truth more because I enjoy it than any other reason. I guess it does take integrity to be honest and forthright when you find results that detract from your hypotheses, but that should be the sort of ethical behavior that is expected in every walk of life. Some scientists like to act superior, but for the most part we’re just your average people (ok, a lot geekier and a little poorer than average).
My main interest in Solzhenitsyn is as a writer and political radical–the way we works a metaphor or constructs a sentence in the service of something he believed passionately about.
The truth I seek, truth in science, is always tenuous, always subject to change in the light of more and better data. This goes from grand theories down to the interpretation of a simple data point.
Actually doing science is a most humbling experience. It’s not that I’m the brightest, most dedicated, or most knowledgeable, all not true. Rather, it’s the vast amount of work needed to say something meaningful, something with truth value. That’s partly why science isn’t communicated well with 5 second soundbyte, 20 word press release, or from the mouth of a political pundit.
All of our observations are couched with caveats and great caution is exerted when a scientist makes a statement. We have to bow down to the evidence…and there’s always a need for more evidence. So, how does this tie in to Solzhenitsyn? As a scientist, a writer and a science writer, I consider it my responsibility to explain what we talk about when we talk about science, to paraphrase another writer I admire. To write with the verve and passion of a Solzhenitsyn is what I desire.
Interesting. I am not a scientist, but a sort of reluctant theologian. (Though it is precisely as a theologian that I mistrust aspects of Solz’s romantic Russian nationalism, which I suspect of being just that. I am a parish pastor who finds religion, on the whole, a very problematic enterprise, particularly when it carries water for nationalisms.) Anyway, I always enjoy hearing scientists reflect on their work, as it often seems to reflect a deep reverence for truth combined with an iconoclasm toward whatever might stand in the way of that truth. I am wondering about the question of the unity of truth (or, to put it in the cynical mode of Stephen Colbert: truthiness): can there be a convergence of truth between the truth of the poets and theologians (lets call it aesthetic truth) and the truth of the scientists (let’s call it empirical truth)?
I’ve always been conflicted about the nature of truth. Pedantically speaking scientific evidence cannot prove hypotheses, only falsify them. Of course to quote Sherlock Holmes “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” (It’s always a good day when you can quote a fictional character)
Unfortunately there are almost always a nearly unlimited number of improbable explanations. To get by in interpreting the world most of us exercise judgment about what are probable and what are improbable explanations for natural phenomena. Through the scientific method we can eliminate some of the probable explanations. Because scientists are a creatively ornery bunch, a lot of the improbable explanations get tested and eliminated as well.
Science has nothing really to say about the “why” of things, it only deals with the proximal causes. Science can explain that species evolve because heritable differences in fitness cause unequal transmission of traits, but as to why the universe is set up in such a way that this is true, science has no answer. The best we can do is “because that’s the way it is, and anything else wouldn’t make sense.”
All that is not to say that the truth of poets and theologians doesn’t make an abundant appearance in science. I’d venture to say that most of us love science for it’s beauty. Understanding the underpinnings of the natural world only increases the feeling of wonder and fascination. People who study art, poetry, or theology for example, learn to appreciate subtleties that the rest of us completely miss. The same is true for science. The more I learn, the more miraculous it all is, and the more I see how little we really understand.
Those moments of sublime aesthetic truth are, for me, what makes science an endeavor worth pursuing.