The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness

15 A Crucifix for Dracula: Wendell Berry Meets Edward O. Wilson

chapter fifteen A Crucifix for Dracula Wendell Berry Meets Edward O. Wilson Edward Wilson is one of those daunting scientists who write extremely well, know several fields deeply, and have been educated in the humanities during a bygone era in which culture meant more than the tawdry pages of the Sunday Times Arts and Leisure section. Immersed in biology, entomology, ecology, he is nonetheless familiar with literature and the arts, philosophy and literary theory, the social sciences, and much else. His book on sociobiology, reissued in a twenty-fifth anniversary edition, caused much dissention and resistance when it first appeared but has since become naturalized as a founding text in the burgeoning field of evolutionary biology. His recent book, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, pulls together much of his earlier thinking in order to promote a new synthetical direction for all the knowledge disciplines, a bold venture that has rubbed some people the wrong way. Starting out with an extended account of Enlightenment thinkers, Wilson remarks: The assumptions they made of a lawful material world, the intrinsic unity of knowledge, and the potential of indefinite human progress are the ones we still take most readily into our hearts, suffer without, and find maximally rewarding through intellectual advance. The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and the humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship. The propositions of the original Enlightenment are increasingly favored by objective evidence, especially from the natural sciences.1 Although all of these sometimes controversial claims are fleshed out over and over again throughout the rest of the book, one can infer from this 157 passage alone the foundational mindset that undergirds Wilson’s thinking : conservative in the best sense of that term, Wilson believes in truth, a real world, human mindpower, and the preeminence of the sciences. For him, the astonishing feats of the mind are not ultimately the result of metaphysical intuition, faith, grace, or Platonic reminiscence but, rather, are the hard-won achievements of a material organ—the brain—that evolved along with all other forms of matter and organic life. This is a knowledge from below, unaided by nightly visits from a Miltonic Urania.2 The fragmentation of this knowledge, with each specialty operating according to its own rules and worldview, militates against any sort of coherent management of the problems of mankind. The split between the sciences and the humanities prevents “a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lenses of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by response to immediate needs” (13). Political leaders as well as public intellectuals are trained principally in the social sciences and humanities and know next to nothing about the material bases of life as described by the sciences. Natural selection “built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than is needed to survive. The proper task of scientists is to diagnose and correct the misalignment” (61). Wilson recognizes the vulnerability of his confidence in the abilities of the sciences but is willing to hedge his bets in favor of humankind’s best hope. “Better to steer by a lodestar than to drift across a meaningless sea” (65). Consilience, or the jumping together of the various branches of knowledge , is a concept that Wilson derives from his overall thesis about human understanding as a product of evolution. “The central idea of the consilience world view is that all tangible phenomena, from the birth of the stars to the workings of social institutions, are based on material processes that are ultimately reducible, however long and tortuous the sequences , to the laws of physics” (266). This means that to treat human faculties as special creations from above rather than growths from below is to ignore the facts of evolutionary history and the development of species to survive in congenial environments. Wilson’s characterization of the field of economics can serve as a global critique of the knowledge professions in general. Speaking of the nature of classical economic theory, he remarks: “Its models, while elegant cabinet specimens of applied math158 “nature ” and evolution ematics, largely ignore human behavior as understood by contemporary psychology and biology. Lacking such a foundation, the...