Debate A provocation from Giorello Obscurantism, Science and Scientism: Counterculture or just...Counter The philosopher of science Giulio Giorello accused Fr Giussani of obscurantism because of his critical opinion about “scientism”(the mentality that sees science as the answer to human problems). Some scientists join this cultural battle with their answers to Giorello’s provocation by Marco A. Pierotti* In his column in the May 20th issue of Corriere della Sera Magazine, Giulio Giorello hurls an accusation of obscurantism at the thought of Fr Giussani. To do this, he utilizes a passage from Giussani’s recent book, Why the Church?, which calls scientism a “blanket of bacteria that has spread through the mentality of the people.” One is immediately struck and surprised that a knowledgeable person like Giorello–whose battle for a broader spread of scientific culture should certainly be supported in a country that often relegates science to the lowest rungs on its scale of priorities–uses science and scientism as synonyms, thus closing the circle for an attack on the “obscurantist” thought of Fr Giussani by making his words seem like “disdain” for science. It is a well-known fact that the term scientism refers to the claim to view and explain all of reality, including what it means to be human, using methods that are adequate to resolve only a part of it. History has shown us that when scientism has taken the place of the scientific method, as happened in the Soviet Empire, the price of its disastrous results was paid by generation after generation. This was the effect, for instance, on Russian agriculture of the scientistic application of Lysenko’s state genetics. The meaning of scientism is clearly explained in Giussani’s book several lines after the ones quoted by Giorello, where it is defined as “a conception of scientific progress that promotes it as the true and exclusive enlargement of the human sphere and therefore utilizes it as a measure for evaluating every form of development.” Experience, even before reason or, to put it better, experience seen through the healthy realism of the eyes of reason, leads us to reject every scientistic claim, which, frankly, as I see it, is not so widespread among scientists, and here we can agree with Giorello. Thus, it does not seem very plausible that he, of all people, has missed this nuance and fallen into this misunderstanding; it would be like saying that words like “future” and “futurism” are perfectly interchangeable, which is impossible! In any case, a few days later, Giorello himself, this time in the Corriere della Sera metropolitan Milan insert, expressed this wish: “I would like to see church bell towers and minarets rising together in the skies of Lombardy,” so, maybe… Let’s get away from trying to figure out what may lie behind this and enter the real world. What I am about to say does not aim at being an answer to Giorello, nor is it an obligatory defense of Fr Giussani (he has no need of this). Rather, it is an attempt to communicate what Fr Giussani, through his works and his friendship (which has been my great privilege), has meant to the growth of my activity as a scientist and researcher, that engages me and others who practice this “trade” in a daily labor to try to expand the boundaries of knowledge and add some small certainties to the laborious search for truth and its various components. What strikes me deeply about Fr Giussani is his (I almost want to say) insistence on placing at the center of every debate the problem of truth and how to achieve knowledge of it–in other words, the method and dynamic of knowledge. I have noticed, especially, a fundamental element of this latter aspect, which is beauty as a synonym of truth and the accompaniment of two feelings: wonder and gratuitousness. Along the course of the dynamic of knowledge, Fr Giussani has taught me that the only knowledge possible for man is affective knowledge [that which comes through an affection]. In order to understand what it means to know, it is not enough to know genetics or the biochemical reactions of the brain, which nonetheless regulate its functioning. We know what strikes us. We are made up of what has struck us, facts and persons, as Giussani reminds us in his book when he quotes a letter from Marx to his wife: “But love, not for Feuerbach’s man, not for Moleschott’s metabolism, not for the proletariat, but the love for the beloved, for you, makes man a man anew.” Affection derives from affectus, “struck.” Knowledge often comes through intellectual suffering, which is vain unless it is sustained by affection. But knowing has no use except for acting; knowing is being struck, i.e., attracted, fascinated; beauty is necessary as a reverberation of truth, as correspondence in seeing something that is made for me. Beauty is the meaning of things; it is the mediator through which man expresses his capacity for becoming lovingly aware of what is around him and moving toward a higher stage of knowledge of reality. But beauty is also mystery and, in true love, possession coincides with being possessed, i.e., with the recognition that the sense, the ultimate meaning of things and of our own life is an Other. Beauty conforms with the truth. It cannot help being consonant with nature and reason, and is reflected in creation as the splendor of truth. Giussani says, “The contemplation of beauty is the ultimate end of the human gaze”–contemplation not as a sentimental reaction but as rational tension, which is translated into a clearness of gaze, moved and capable of recognizing the beauty, i.e., the truth and, as such, the prime mover, of the dynamic of knowledge of the truth, i.e., of the scientific method. Wonder is the feeling Fr Giussani has taught me for grasping beauty, i.e., truth. He says, “There is a first evidence and a wonder imbued in the attitude of the true researcher: the marvel of the presence that attracts me; this is how research is triggered in me.” Wonder is a fundamental element of the problem of knowledge, because it is the feeling that comes over me as I fathom the relationship between me and reality. It is also the one that envelops me when the reality (as Psalm 8 reminds us) that each individual person is a relationship with the Infinite and that the “I” is the self-awareness of the world, of the cosmos, of the self, becomes uncontainable. Wonder at the mystery of a creation that can be contemplated and understood, at least in part, by one of its creatures, can be perceived also in those who may have very different philosophical and theological positions, but are characterized by profound intellectual honesty. This is the case of one of today’s best-known scientific popularizers, Edoardo Boncinelli. In his commentary on the second canto of Dante’s Inferno, which appeared recently in the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, he wrote about reason (represented by Virgil): it is “the expression of a cognitive and normative hybris, what positions us halfway between the animals and the angels, but makes us also understand that we are neither one nor the other, but rather an anomaly, a lapse, a virus in the computer of the world. But also the only ones capable of noticing it.” Viruses gifted with self-awareness–not bad! The second feeling that accompanies beauty in the dynamic of knowledge, gratuitousness, is expressed by Giussani in these words: “Gratuitousness is the supreme expression of the relationship man has with the Infinite.” It is thus the position man holds in front of the ideal, i.e., in front of Destiny. Gratuitousness stretches out toward the truth, toward what can be sympathetic to a value, no matter where it comes from. In my work, this is the objectivity, in freedom, of the scientific method. This profound openness is not the fruit of calculation; it is a human stance, a way of being. It is perhaps one of the greatest riches for a researcher, for a scientist: openness to what is possible. In conclusion, I would like to recall the experience of many Meetings, which are held every summer in Rimini, Italy; their themes have shown the resonance of Fr Giussani’s passion for the whole of reality in all its components, science and technology included, and I and many other scientists of different backgrounds have been invited to them. I remember in particular that many of my colleagues who were strangers to Fr Giussani’s thought and works were amazed by the passion for knowledge that was breathed there and for the openness and welcome shown to them, despite awareness of their sometimes antithetical positions. With this feeling of openness and welcome, we express the desire, paraphrasing Giorello, to see “church bell towers and minarets rising together in the skies of Ryad and Teheran.” *Researcher at the National Tumor Institute, Milan (Italy) That’s Enough Obscurantism, Fr Giussani by Giulio Giorello The following is a disparaging opinion piece, directed at the thought of Msgr Giussani, printed recently in the weekly magazine of the Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera “ All the arts and sciences are held in the highest consideration now, but at the same time they are thoroughly disdained.” These are not the words of a scientist of today, but of Martin Luther. He added that we should not be surprised at this, “since Christ Himself, who is the greatest gift, is held in supreme disdain in the world.” Several centuries after the Protestant Reformation, “disdain” for science and technology (which our ancestors called “art”!) still seems to be around. Some go so far as to say that “the birth certificate of the technological age” is marked by “the Nazi experiment,” as Umberto Galimberti wrote. And there are those who, like Luigi Giussani, while conceding some value to the “achievements [sic!]” of technological and scientific enterprise, say that scientism is “a blanket of bacteria” that has spread through “the mentality of the people.” I have never met, at least among scientists, anyone suffering from this disease; but, seeing that men of faith and of thought do not stop stigmatizing it, I am beginning to suspect that there must be something good in scientism. After all, for Giussani, it is the “conception of scientific progress that uses it as a measure for evaluating every form of development.” Is that all there is to it? In reality, the two major totalitarian systems of the last century (Nazism and Communism) burned the works of scientists and artists and insisted on mobilizing technology to serve their will for power, with the result that they lost the competition with the free countries of the West. As Carlo Rubbia observed in Corriere della Sera, another name for this freedom is “renewal,” not only of technological abilities, but also of the consequences. It could be useful here to recall the scenes from E. Till’s movie Luther, in which the Lutheran “print shop” wins out over the bonfires (of books) ordered by the ecclesiastical authorities. A sixteenth-century man still obsessed by the devil, the “good” Martin had understood that a technology like printing was “the greatest gift for communicating the word of Christ in every tongue”–or, to put it more bluntly, the meaning of things. (Corriere della Sera Magazine, May 20, 2004) Several figures from the world of science have replied to Giorello, writing letters. We reprint some of them here, which were copied to us by their authors. Massimo Robberto European Space Agency and Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD Last week, I was in Italy, near Siena, for the congress in honor of Ed Salpeter and his Initial Mass Function, and I happened to read in your newspaper the short article by Giulio Giorello entitled, “That’s Enough Obscurantism, Fr Giussani.” Both because I have known and followed Fr Giussani for some time, and some echo of his work also reaches us in the United States, and because I am a scientist by profession and have been drawn into this discussion, I feel duty-bound to make a brief reply. In his short article, Giorello explains that the term “scientism” draws an imaginary line in culture and history. On one side are Luther with Christ, Rubbia and the meaning of things, science, technology, art, and Gutenberg. On the other are Fr Giussani, Galimberti, Nazism, and Communism. There should be no room for hesitation, but aside from my esteem for Fr Giussani, the unusual and let us even say grotesque teams fielded by Giorello have forced me to sit up and pay attention. Probably, if I had had other things on my mind and had read this quickly then turned the page, I would have retained from my reading a vague “cultural” judgment and fed a certain sense of irritation, or aversion for Giussani and I suppose also his friends. Perhaps this is the type of reading the author expects from his audience, and is his goal. But anyone who has a minimal amount of intellectual honesty will have noticed that the accusation of obscurantism is not supported convincingly, to use a classic euphemism of our scientific jargon which corresponds with the more common “does not exist.” The point, which is not easy to find in the short but murky article, lies in the equivocation between, I quote, “science and technology (which our ancestors called ‘art’!)” and “scientism,” understood by Giussani as “the conception of scientific progress that uses it as the measure for evaluating every form of development.” It seems to me that Giussani synthesizes in a phrase a central axiom of modern culture: everything that science can do is good by definition. I say modern, not contemporary, because this is not something new in recent years, but dates from the second half of the nineteenth century, the years of the triumph of classical physics but also of the infamous “isms”–materialism, Marxism…–which had to be “scientific” in order to have a legitimate place in cultural salons. The question, as is well-known, has become crucial again in recent years because of the explosion of the biological and medical sciences, genetics, or genetechnology, if I may be allowed the neologism. The fact that a certain kind of scientism has penetrated the dominant mentality is evident in the widespread difficulty in understanding if and how to limit the use of cloning, stem cells, or certain fertilization techniques. Everything is always and in every case good just because it is “scientific.” On the contrary, while it is good that science discovers new things and opens up new possibilities, this does not necessarily mean that all these things are good, in other words are ultimately suitable for man. In actuality, this is a naïve illusion, disproved countless times, and often at a very high price, by history. Giorgio Ambrosio Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Batavia, IL Dear Editor: I am writing with regard to the article by Giulio Giorello that appeared in the May 20th Corriere Magazine. It truly amazed me, even more so since it was written by someone whose clarity and profundity I have often admired. In this article, science and scientism are confused, and from this emerges the thesis that whoever is critical of scientism has perforce to be an enemy of science and technology, to the point of being branded “obscurantist.” I am a scientist. I began my career at Italy’s National Institute of Nuclear Physics and have been working for six years at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the leading high-energy nuclear physics laboratory in the United States. I love science (with a special preference for physics), and I marvel constantly at the heights of technological achievement that mankind has been able to reach and continues to go beyond (and to which I try, in my own field, to make some small contribution). But I also share the criticism of scientism that Giorello brands in his article as obscurantism. Scientism, as the claim to view and explain all of reality using the methods that are suited only to a part of it (those proper to science, in this case), is subject to the objection that Hamlet made to Horatius: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy…” I am reminded of a colleague, a physicist, who some years ago told me about his joy in discovering in mathematics a source of certainty (“Finally!”), to the point of shaping his career in that direction. But the use of this instrument–which had shown itself to be so fecund in his profession, held to be the only source of certainty in every sphere of reality–yielded terrible results in the area of bringing up his son. I do not want to get involved in a criticism of scientism (this is not what I was trained to do), but I want to tell you what I have seen, with sadness and sometimes with pain, in my colleagues and friends. There is a mentality, which I would not know how to define better than with the term “scientistic,” which tends to reduce the horizon of reality to what we can measure and manipulate with mathematical or scientific instruments. And this reduction of the horizon makes the journey of life more difficult. For someone who falls in love, conceiving of love as the mere outcome of a biochemical affinity will not help that relationship to grow. Even less will this mentality help in raising a family and in educating children. As for Fr Giussani, whom I had the opportunity to know when I was still working in Italy, I must say that I have never met a person like him, with such a great interest and passion for all of reality, science and technology included, but above all with such a great respect for the use of reason–to the point that some of his observations on the relationship between method and object and on the dynamic of knowledge have proven very useful for my career as a scientist. In short, he is anything but an obscurantist.