The Sentimentality of Scientists

     This week I gave a talk on Shakespeare and wonder, for the Maclaurin Institute at the University of Minnesota.  (While I am at it, I'd like to thank them publicly for their good cheer and hospitality, and I urge anyone in the Twin Cities area who wishes to see how Christians can help irrigate the desert of higher education to pay them a visit; they are doing extraordinary work.)  The thesis of the talk was that in our grade schools and secondary schools we have scorched the fields of the child's imagination, mystifying the self while slandering or stifling three principal objects of wonder: the hero, the beloved, and God.

     I'd been told that there might be a few opponents in the audience.  In fact, the first man to speak up objected, "I'm a biologist and I do not believe in God, yet when I look at the beauty of nature I think I can feel that wonder you are talking about.  So, obviously, belief in God is neither here nor there."  Although I had said that "God is the source of our wonder, and the guarantor of its truth," I'd been careful also to note that there would always be a few souls, though only a few, who could respond fully to the wondrous beauty of nature or of man while denying the ground of that wonder.  In any case, I responded by noting that at all costs I wished to affirm that what I was talking about was not a mere sentiment, but a reverence for nobility or grandeur that an object actually does possess.  My fear, I said, is that the unbeliever who begins with that reverence will end, by the force of his logic, by consigning it over to irrelevance.  It will be a kind of neural tic; it will depend wholly upon the disposition, even the gastric temperament, of the unbelieving beholder.

     I am well aware that atheistic scientists can be enthralled with the complexity and magnificence of natural phenomena.  The late Carl Sagan was such a man; yet as he grew older he also grew sourer and angrier, more and more determined not to show how beautiful nature was, but how beautiful it was not, lest the beholder be brought to the threshold of belief.  In that sense he was a sentimentalist, as was my interlocutor in Minnesota.  Such men want to bask in what they must concede is simply a feeling, pleasant enough, but not logically or empirically warranted by the object.

     How far such a feeling can take you, as you grow old and your bones ache, or cancer ravages your body and you confront the great fact of death, may be shown by my favorite materialist, the ancient poet Lucretius.  He too, as logically ruthless as he thought himself, was another sentimentalist, and he too had a keen eye for the glories of the natural world.  So his poem On the Nature of Things begins with a hymn to Venus, an allegorical representation of the fecundity of nature:

     Mother of Romans, delight of gods and men,
     Sweet Venus, who under the wheeling stars of heaven
     Rouse the ship-shouldering sea and the fruitful earth
     And make them teem -- for through you all that breathe
     Are begotten, and rise to see the light of the sun;
     From you, goddess, the winds flee, from you and your coming
     Flee the storms of heaven; for you the artful earth
     Sends up sweet flowers, for you the ocean laughs
     And the calm skies shimmer in a bath of light.

But the sixth and final book of the poem ends with a horrible description of the great plague of Athens in 430 BC.  The dead and dying are everywhere, and there is no remedy, no consolation, no Epicurean calm; only miserable mankind born to die:

     Many lay flat in the street for thirst, lay prostrate
     Before the fountain-statues of Silenus,
     Breath choked by the great desire for that sweet water.
     And strewn about in the roads and parks you'd see
     Legs and arms, nerveless, attached to half-dead bodies,
     Ragged and dirty, clothes caked with excrement,
     Dying, with only bare skin left to the bone,
     Nearly buried already in pus and sores and filth.
     Yes, all those holy temples of the gods--
     Death stuffed 'em with corpses, and the shrines of heaven
     Were charnel houses, burdened by cadavers,
     Places the priests had filled with worshipers.
     Now their religion, now the will of the gods
     Meant nothing: present pain was conqueror....
     The suddenness and poverty incited
     Horrors.  On funeral pyres heaped up for others
     People would lay their own kin down, and wail,
     And set their torches underneath, and sometimes
     Brawl and shed blood, rather than leave their dead.

So the poem ends.  Me, I prefer not the sentiment of wonder, so quick to flee, but the real thing, granted by God and affirmed by the testimony, objective testimony, of those apostles who have made known to us the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, who were eyewitnesses of his grandeur.

Comments

[themadnessofquixote]

Wonder that is mere sentiment is misnamed, or at least demands that a distinction be made between wondering "how?" and wondering "why?" Wondering how a thing works, how amber generates an electric charge, how honey is made, how plants know to bend toward the light, how swallows navigate, etc. all of nature's mechanisms and processes, and going about to understand them, is entirely noble work, if it presupposes the second type of wonder. If it does, it seeks not only to understand how a thing works but what it means that it does work that way. Ture wonder is awed by meaning. If there is no wondering "why?" then the "how" has no innate meaning, and it ultimately degrades into the mere "How can I manipulate these mechanisms and processes?" The manipulator does not ask why, for to him, he himself is the only why, he is the only meaning. This kind of wonder has a special name all to itself-narcissism. Richard Wilbur has it down in his poem "On having misidentified a wildflower":

"A thrush, because I'd been wrong,
Burst rightly into song,
In a world not vague, not lonely,
Not governed by me only."

[angel]

Does there have to be a "why"?

[Qoheleth]

In the case of emotions, without a "why" there is no "what."

If there is no reason for an emotion, it is, as Mr. Esolen so aptly terms it, nothing more than a "neural tic," and as such shouldn't be taken seriously. If there is no good reason to wonder at nature, then wonder is an illusion at best, and a delusion at worst--in either case it ought to be got rid of.

[DDH]

Thank you for another great post Anthony, this reminded me of one of my favorite Chesterton quotes:

"The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder."

[Dale Decker]

Prof. Esolen,

Will your talk be available on the Maclaurin Institute's website?

[Tony Esolen]

Dale,

That's a good question. They did tape it, maybe it will be available. Let me ask about that.

[John S. Bell]

Go to http://maclaurin.org/mp3s.php and scroll down to "MacLaurin Campus Lecture, October 10th, 2006 - Anthony Esolen." I am downloading the mp3 as I type.

[Ethan Cordray]

My goodness, what an amazing collection of files on that page.

[Marcum]

Very inspiring, and much needed in the region.

Great work!

[Rob Sheldon]

Sentimentalism seems to be disparaged by poet and scientist alike. The former for its degraded form, the latter for its mere presence. Yet so much of the world depends on it, one should be grateful for every shred we find. How many marriages are held together by sentimentalism? (What my wife would say, was the male tendency to hang on to old pairs of shoes.) How many churches in Engleand remain open by sentimentalism? How many babies are born or kept from the abortionists block by sentimentalism? How many mothers remain cared for because of sentimentalism?
And what is true of moral action is true of scientific experiment. We as scientists have no reason to cling to outdated notions of matter and truth and "Existence out there", but we do for reasons not very far from sentimentalism. Call it truth that our mind cannot recognize, or the value of tradition in scientific theory. But it's not defensible. And it's purely sentimental.
There need be no purity of motives or purity of theory for there to be correct action. If sentimentality can do what good education cannot, well then it has power beyond our ken. So here's to sentimentality and another verse of "Danny Boy"!

[James A. Altena]

Dear Rob,

You fail to distiguish between sentiment, which can be quite noble, from sentimentality and sentimentalism, wherein sentiment is made an end in and of itself and the sole arbiter of value. It is the same distinction as between rationality as a proper mode of thinking, and rationalism as a distorted system that insists that nothing but certain constricted forms of reasoning have value.

[Brian John Schuettler]

Over at Ignatius Insight there is some discussion related to atheists in general and the current crown prince of atheists, Richard Dawkins, in particular. I had commented there, and it seems entirely appropriate to apply the same comment here, that atheists very often seem to revel in the senses, specifically the sense of natural beauty, as their source of consolation. But eventually this original elan descends into a painful interior cry of desolation when the senses abandon them e.g. Lutretius' poem On The Nature Of Things. The denial of metaphysical reality ultimately leads to nihilistic loneliness and the consequence of this is a shattering despair.