What's the Big Idea?

With a straight face, a young engineer recently told me that science, with a boost from high-performance computers, soon will eradicate all human disease, and just the other day I heard a woman on the radio earnestly promise that human strife, from domestic abuse to world war, would promptly cease if everyone practiced transcendental meditation. Both reminded me of Trotsky’s boast that after the revolution, “The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx.”

Let’s briefly ponder Marx’s inclusion in such company, then move on to the main event: Hubris has never been in short supply and gurus are never without followers. Some people need all-inclusive explanations, the wackier and more comprehensive the better. In the latest issue of New English Review, Theodore Dalrymple looks at the latest claimant to the Unified Field Theory of human behavior: Neuroscience. The Good Doctor attended a recent conference on neuropsychiatry, and uses the occasion to examine the messianic claims for imminent human self-understanding. In “Do the Impossible: Know Thyself,” he writes:

“Those who say that we are on the verge of a huge increase in self-understanding are claiming that enlightenment will suddenly be reached under the scientific bo tree. The enlightenment will have to be sudden rather than gradual because, if it were gradual, we should already be able to point to an increase in human contentment and self-control brought about by our already increased knowledge. But even the most advanced societies are just as full of angst, or poor impulse control, of existential bewilderment, of adherence to clearly irrational doctrines, as ever they were. There is no sign that, Prozac and neurosurgery notwithstanding, any of this is about to change fundamentally.”

I admire Dalrymple’s ease at taking a mundane event – a scientific conference – and turning it into an anatomy of human nature, and doing it concisely and with wit and broad learning. Two years ago, the BBC ran a contest to name the “greatest philosopher,” and the twits among its listeners chose the aforementioned Karl Marx. Running a distant second was the rightful winner, David Hume, and at the end of his essay, Dalrymple rallies Hume to his cause:

“In my opinion, the great philosopher David Hume understood why human self-understanding was forever beyond our reach. It is not a coincidence that he always expressed himself with irony, for the deepest irony possible is that of the existence of a creature, Man, who forever seeks something that is beyond his understanding.

“Hume was simultaneously a figure of the enlightenment and the anti-enlightenment. He saw that reason and consideration of the evidence are all that a rational man can rely upon, yet they are eternally insufficient for Man as he is situated. In short, there cannot be such a thing as the wholly rational man. Reason, he said, is the slave of the passions; and in addition, no statement of value follows logically from any statement of fact. But we cannot live without evaluations.

“Ergo, self-understanding is not around the corner and never will be. We shall never be able seamlessly to join knowledge and action. To which I add, not in any religious sense: thank God.”