There are inevitable problems with parascientific argument. At best, arguments based on science, no matter what their source, are vulnerable over the medium term, at least, on account of the very commendable tendency of science to change and advance. At this point, the parascientific genre feels like a rear-guard action, a nostalgia for the lost certitudes of positivism. The physical universe, as it is known to us now, is not accessible to the strategies of comprehension that once seemed so exhaustively useful to us. Nevertheless, that it is accessible to these strategies is the core faith that continues to animate the writers in the parascientific tradition.
Comte, in the words of the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, foresaw the evolution of human consciousness beyond its theological and metaphysical stages and into positivism. The article says, “When that stage has been reached, not merely the greater part, but the whole, of our knowledge will be impressed with one character, the character, namely, of positivity or scientificalness, and all our conceptions in every part of knowledge will be thoroughly homogeneous.” The impulse to impress all thought with one character is mighty in the literature of parascience, perhaps because it shared its cradle with philosophic monisms like positivism. This is true despite the fact that the traditions of modern thought, however rigorously self-consistent, are not consistent with one another — except in their shared impulse to nullify individual experience, which is perhaps as much a motive as a consequence of their rigor. William James, in an essay on Hegel, says he fears lest that philosopher’s monism, “like all religions of the ‘one thing needful,’ end by sterilizing and occluding the minds of its believers.” Perhaps there is something about a sterilized and occluded mind that is strongly associated with missionary zeal, an impatient need to enlist believers, to bring others into the fold. This zeal is another characteristic of the literature I have called parascientific. It has found in the object and glory of Comte’s system, altruism, an irresolvable anomaly and an irritant.3
If I were a practitioner of the hermeneutics of suspicion, I would note here that, despite their pedagogical tone, these preachments are often intended for those who are in the fold already, meant to reassure them as to the wisdom and actual virtue of their being there. Malthus’s Theory of Population took its authority from a formula expressing a supposed ratio of the growth of population to the increase of arable land. His contemporaries saw clearly enough what the implications must be for social policy, that the impulse to intervene in the suffering of the poor, an impulse that was under formidable control among them in any case, could, if acted upon, yield only greater suffering among the poor, given the inevitable limits to population size Malthus had seemed to express so objectively. Darwin, famously influenced by Malthus, made the competition for limited resources an elemental, universal principle of life, and, in The Descent of Man, folded tribal warfare into the processes of evolution, a notion which meshed nicely with colonialism and with the high esteem in which Europeans of the period held themselves. To proceed from Peter Townsend’s observations of overpopulation and starvation among dogs stranded on an island stocked with sheep to the observed fact of starvation among the lower classes in Britain to a formula that makes starvation seem inevitable, as Malthus did — setting aside very practical questions about the distribution of resources, raised by Adam Smith and others — is an instance of parascientific reasoning. To proceed from biological evidence of our origins among the primates and the primitives to an argument for European supremacy is no less an instance of it. Then there are the writings of Sigmund Freud, by far the greatest and the most interesting contribution to parascientific thought and literature ever made. Freud will be the subject of the next chapter. Recent contributors to the genre include Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, who have given their ideas the effective authority that comes with successful popularization.
However starry-eyed Comte’s vision of humanity may have been, there is something in experience that relates, however inexactly, to benevolence and also altruism. There is something in the nature of most of us that takes pleasure in the thought of a humane and benign social order. The tendency of Malthus, and of Darwin in The Descent of Man, to counter the humane and also the religious objections to warfare and gross poverty puts compassion or conscience out of play — two of the most potent and engrossing individual experiences, both factors in anyone’s sense of right and wrong. This is a suppression of, and an assault on the legitimacy of, an aspect of mind without which the world is indeed impoverished. It is done in the course of proposing an objective, amoral force to which every choice and act is subject. In light of this fact our own sense of things is shown to be delusional, insofar as it might persuade us that our behavior is not essentially self-interested in a narrow sense of that term. By the word “altruism,” altruisme in French, Comte intended a selfless devotion to the welfare of others which was to fill the place of belief in God left empty by the triumph of scientific positivism. In parascientific literature, the word always appears in a context that questions whether altruism is possible or desirable, or whether apparent instances are real, or what survival benefit might be conferred by it that would account for its undeniable persistence among certain insect colonies.
Herbert Spencer, an important earlier contributor to parascientific literature, is in some degree an exception. In his Data of Ethics, published in 1879, he takes up the issue framed by Comte, defending egoism in one chapter and altruism in the next. His argument for egoism is Darwinian: “The law that each creature shall take the benefits and evils of its own nature, be they those derived from ancestry or those due to self-produced modifications, has been the law under which life has evolved thus far; and it must continue to be the law however much farther life may evolve. Whatever qualifications this natural course of action may now or hereafter undergo, are qualifications that cannot, without fatal results, essentially change it. Any arrangements which in a considerable degree prevent superiority from profiting by the rewards of superiority, or shield inferiority from the evils it entails — any arrangements which tend to make it as well to be inferior as to be superior; are arrangements diametrically opposed to the progress of organization and the reaching of a higher life.” He goes on to make a case for altruism based on his understanding of reproduction among “the simplest beings,” which, he says, “habitually multiply by spontaneous fission.” He notes that “though the individuality of the parent infusorium or other protozoon is lost in ceasing to be single, yet the old individual continues to exist in each of the new individuals. When, however, as happens generally with these smallest animals, an interval of quiescence ends in the breaking up of the whole body into minute parts, each of which is the germ of a young one, we see the parent entirely sacrificed in forming progeny.”4
Spencer is using two modes of scientific thought available to him in the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolution and the observed division of single-cell animals, to explain the origins of two apparently conflicting ethical impulses or values. Having in a sense legitimized them both by means of these etiologies, he expounds on the ethical, social, and intellectual benefits and difficulties associated with each one, proceeding in the way parascientific argument typically proceeds. Some allusion to the science of the moment is used as the foundation for extrapolations and conclusions that fall far outside the broadest definitions of science. It is to Spencer’s credit nevertheless that he acknowledges complexity in this instance. Altruism is a classic problem in the tradition of Darwinist thinking, and Spencer is unusual in granting it reality and a legitimate place in human behavior. It is to be noted, however, that in his considerations of both egoism and altruism, the question might be rephrased in terms of justice or humanity, both of which do from time to time entail some cost to oneself. Justice worth the name tends to exact advantage from anyone who might otherwise enjoy the benefits of relative power. This is a cost which most would be ashamed to notice, and for which they might feel they were fully compensated in the assurance that equity is an active principle. But parascience excludes such subjective considerations.