On Literary Science and the Bounds of Knowledge

“But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too.”

The Literature of Science

Philistinism is a word typically used to describe people who do not care for (or even despise) the arts. Perhaps the best-known philistine is Charles Dickens’s Thomas Gradgrind, who, in the 1854 novel Hard Times, cares only for cold hard facts and numbers. “Fact, fact, fact!” cries Gradgrind in agreement with some official who tells a young girl that “You are never to fancy.” The Gradgrinds of the world care not a whit for Shakespeare (or Dickens, for that matter) or any other such frivolous nonsense. There are only facts, and that is the end of it.

But philistinism is not limited to the arts. I believe that those who cannot appreciate the wondrous beauty of the real world as revealed by science are philistines, too. Those who fail to thrill at Shakespeare and those who cannot shudder at the cosmos or the simple intricacies of evolutionary theory are equably pitiable (in both senses of the word).

Let me clear up a possible misconception. Gradgrind might be a fundamentalist for facts, but this is most emphatically not the same thing as championing science, properly understood. Science is not a collection of facts but, rather, a quest of discovery, where all conclusions are provisional and where great mysteries always remain to be solved. And the world it reveals is nothing short of marvellous, from the Cosmic Microwave Background that is the afterglow of the creation of the universe itself to our ancestors’ more than four-billion-year evolutionary battle for survival and reproduction through earth, water, air, and fire—a battle which resulted in nothing more and nothing less than each and every single one of us.