My latest: on the late Albert Borgmann, in HHR

This morning The Hedgehog Review published an essay of mine called “The Gift of Reality.” It’s an extended introduction to and exposition of the life and writings of the late Albert Borgmann, including a review of his last book, published posthumously last January. Here’s a sample paragraph from the middle of the piece:

At the same time, while Borgmann may have been a critic of liberalism, he argued that “it should be corrected and completed rather than abandoned.” In this he reads as a less polemical Christopher Lasch or Wendell Berry, fellow democrats whose political vision—consisting among other things of family, fidelity, fortitude, piety, honor, honest work, local community, neighborliness, and thrift—is likewise invested in preserving and respecting reality. Such a vision is simultaneously homeless on the national stage and the richest fruit of the American political tradition.

Click here to read the whole thing.

Expertise

Expertise is under attack is a common theme in journalism and academic writing today. I don’t doubt it, and I don’t doubt its importance. Expertise is real and the loss of public confidence in persons whose office, education, training, or experience have historically granted them some measure of authority is an all too real problem. Implicit distrust of the very notion of authority, the very suggestion of expertise, makes a common life impossible, in more ways than one.

But there is a fundamental misunderstanding in defenses of expertise, and not only in high-minded venues. Even at the ordinary level of daily life or—where I spend my days—in the academy and the classroom, there is a basic confusion regarding what expertise is, what credentials are, and how either ought to function in social relations.

I wrote about this at length in my essay for The New Atlantis a year ago, titled “Statistics as Storytelling.” I won’t rehash that argument here. Let me do my best to boil it down into its basic components. I’ll spell it out in six principles.

The first principle of expertise is a defined scope of competence. An “expert”—if I’m honest, I hate that term; it’s a weasel word, invariably used to enhance status or dismiss objections; but I’ll keep using it here, since it’s the one in circulation—possesses some relevant knowledge about a particular domain: embryology, archeology, Greek sculpture, Moby-Dick. If the Melville scholar comments on anything outside her expertise, therefore, she is by definition no longer an expert, and thus bears no authority worthy of deference or respect. This is the Richard Dawkins phenomenon: He is welcome to speak and to write about philosophy and theology, but he does not do so as a philosopher or theologian, but as an evolutionary biologist addressing questions and subjects outside the scope of his formal training.

The second principle of expertise is that, without exception, all members of the same field, whether delimited by discipline or study or practice or training, disagree with one another about matters crucial to the field to which they belong. Expertise, in other words, is not about unanimity or agreement; it is about membership in a group defined by disagreement and disputation. It is about being party to the contest that is the field; being part of the argument that constitutes the guild. Expertise is not consensus: it’s the very opposite. It’s the entry point into a world of bitter, sometimes rancorous, conflict.

That doesn’t mean that everything is thereby in question. One must agree about certain things to disagree about others. Intelligible disagreement presupposes prior agreement. 2 + 2 = 4 is a premise for mathematicians’ arguments; certain claims build on others. That’s true of every realm of knowledge. But the interesting thing is always what’s not agreed upon. And outsiders are always surprised by just how little is agreed upon, even by like-minded experts in the same field.

The third principle of expertise is that, whenever and wherever what is called for in a given moment or in response to a certain question is not a set of empirical facts but a judgment, then the presumptive force of expertise is immediately qualified. There is no such thing as expertise in judgment. Or rather, there is, but one cannot be credentialed in it, for its name is wisdom. Wisdom is not and cannot be the result of formal education. It does not come with a degree or diploma. There are no letters to append to your name that signify wisdom. The least learned or educated person in the world may be wise, and the smartest or most educated person in the world may be foolish. (Indeed, Christians say that’s the normal run of things.) Good sense comes from living. Prudence is a virtue. Neither is the domain of an expert. There are no experts in good judgment, in wisdom, in prudence. As often as not, expertise functions as an obstacle to it, or a shield from it.

The fourth principle of expertise, then, is that typically what expertise provides is a set of facts or conditions, sometimes necessary but never sufficient, for the possibility of exercising wise judgment. It is true that I know more about Christian theology than most believers in the pews. That does not, in any way, mean that I am more likely to be right than they are about this or that Christian doctrine. A monk of Mount Athos is far wiser to submit to Orthodox tradition than to listen to me, even if I’ve read more Orthodox theologians than he has. A lifelong elderly believer who has never read theology may have keener insight into the mystery of the Eucharist than I do. True, I know the date of the second Ecumenical Council, and she may not. That’s not at issue though. What’s at issue is whether my expertise, such as it is, is either necessary or sufficient for knowing sound doctrine. And it is not. (If you’d like to meet a passel of heretical PhDs in theology, I can arrange an introduction.)

The same goes for biblical scholars. Knowledge of Greek gives you a leg up on having some plausible sense of what St. Paul might have had in mind in the mid-50s, writing to Corinth. But it doesn’t ensure that your exegesis of any New Testament text will be right, or even more likely to be right than the exegesis of an ordinary believer in the pew, ignorant of Greek as well as first-century Greco-Roman culture. Why? First, because New Testament scholars themselves don’t agree about how to read the text. The Pauline guild is that group of experts than which there is no more cantankerous or quarrelsome. Second, because the New Testament is Holy Scripture, and what God has kept from the learned he has revealed to the simple. That is, what God has to say in and through the canon may just as well bypass the intricacies of academic method as be accessed by them. In my experience, that is often the case.

The fifth principle of expertise is that all fields or domains that presuppose or assert normative (rather than empirical) claims logically may and necessarily will come into conflict. This is usually most quickly revealed in anthropology. An economist supposes homo sapiens to be a utility-maximizer, say, while the therapist sees a self-actualizer, and the theologian a sinner in need of Christ. To be sure, some aspects of these visions might be harmonious. But not all. Each, for example, takes a different and mutually opposed view of desire. Are all desires good? Are all to be affirmed or fulfilled? Is desire as such self-validating? And so on. The theologian is not departing from her realm in contesting the claims of the economist or the therapist, for the ground being contested is common to the three of them. It concerns the nature and purpose of the human person. Hence, when areas of expertise overlap, it is wholly proper for argument to ensue. No one’s view is invalidated in advance by dint of lacking the relevant credentials.

The sixth principle of expertise is that sometimes experts are wrong. It may be some group of experts, or all of them. The error may be partial or complete. But experts are wrong, and in fact, regularly so. That is to be expected, since there are no angelic experts, only human ones. The practice of knowledge is just that: a practice, and so subject to all the ordinary human foibles: vanity, greed, oversight, shortsightedness, limitations of every kind, fallibility, haste, contempt, and the rest. Sometimes we want something to be true when it isn’t. Sometimes we wish something were good when it isn’t. Sometimes we can’t stand the thought that our enemy isn’t wrong, and we work overtime to show that he is, or might be. Sometimes our blinders—the products of inheritance, culture, genetics, generation, education, prejudice, peers, parents, friends, what have you—keep us from seeing what is right in front of our noses. Whatever the reason, experts are far from infallible. The one thing you can take to the bank is that every expert in every field at this present moment believes something profoundly wrong or untrue in relation to his or her field, not to mention other fields. That includes me. The problem is just that none of us knows which one of our beliefs is the wrong one, amid all the right ones.

For experts of all kinds, the upshot should be a severe and sincere humility about the range and competence of our knowledge. For normal folks, such humility should be the expectation of experts, not the exception; and when it isn’t present, they are not wrong to be skeptical.

Euphemism

Most Eugenists are Euphemists. I mean merely that short words startle them, while long words soothe them. And they are utterly incapable of translating the one into the other, however obviously they mean the same thing. Say to them "The persuasive and even coercive powers of the citizen should enable him to make sure that the burden of longevity in the previous generation does not become disproportionate and intolerable, especially to the females"; say this to them and they will sway slightly to and fro like babies sent to sleep in cradles. Say to them "Murder your mother," and they sit up quite suddenly. Yet the two sentences, in cold logic, are exactly the same. Say to them "It is not improbable that a period may arrive when the narrow if once useful distinction between the anthropoid homo and the other animals, which has been modified on so many moral points, may be modified also even in regard to the important question of the extension of human diet"; say this to them, and beauty born of murmuring sound will pass into their face. But say to them, in a simple, manly, hearty way "Let's eat a man!" and their surprise is quite surprising. Yet the sentences say just the same thing. Now, if anyone thinks these two instances extravagant, I will refer to two actual cases from the Eugenic discussions. When Sir Oliver Lodge spoke of the methods "of the stud-farm" many Eugenists exclaimed against the crudity of the suggestion. Yet long before that one of the ablest champions in the other interest had written "What nonsense this education is! Who could educate a racehorse or a greyhound?" Which most certainly either means nothing, or the human stud-farm. Or again, when I spoke of people "being married forcibly by the police," another distinguished Eugenist almost achieved high spirits in his hearty assurance that no such thing had ever come into their heads. Yet a few days after I saw a Eugenist pronouncement, to the effect that the State ought to extend its powers in this area. The State can only be that corporation which men permit to employ compulsion; and this area can only be the area of sexual selection. I mean somewhat more than an idle jest when I say that the policeman will generally be found in that area. But I willingly admit that the policeman who looks after weddings will be like the policeman who looks after wedding-presents. He will be in plain clothes. I do not mean that a man in blue with a helmet will drag the bride and bridegroom to the altar. I do mean that nobody that man in blue is told to arrest will even dare to come near the church. Sir Oliver did not mean that men would be tied up in stables and scrubbed down by grooms. He meant that they would undergo a loss of liberty which to men is even more infamous. He meant that the only formula important to Eugenists would be "by Smith out of Jones." Such a formula is one of the shortest in the world; and is certainly the shortest way with the Euphemists.

—G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), chapter 2. This is an important, witty, and morally serious work; I’d not read it until this fall. There are passages of uncommon common sense and deep Christian wisdom (as in this passage), against one of the perennial evils of the modern age. And yet, occasionally, Chesterton’s own prejudices stand in the way of his overall point. The more-than-stray asides about Jews (and once or twice about black Africans) reveal either his own incomplete internalization of the very point he is seeking to make about eugenics’ evil (namely, that it segregates humanity into breeds and races, some of whom are supposedly superior to others) or, what is in a sense worse, his willingness to play to the crowd with a cheap joke about Exotic Others, the falsity of which he understands all too well but chooses to ignore just to get a laugh. In any case, the book is well worth a read, but Chesterton’s own failures are intermittently on display. Probably the best way to interpret that fact is to use it as an occasion for recognition: namely, that one’s own burning moral passions, especially those one is unquestionably right about, are likely, as with Chesterton, not yet entirely or consistently comprehended, much less enacted, either in word or deed. We are none of us wholly converted in this life.

Blakely, Singal, and “stories”

I have a new piece in the latest issue of The New Atlantis called “Statistics as Storytelling.” The print journal is in subscribers’ hands; the issue will be online sometime this week, I imagine. (It’s jam-packed full of goodness, by the way: Nicholas Carr, Matthew Crawford, Phil Christman, Ari Schulman, Caitrin Keiper, Addison Del Mastro, and many others.) My piece is a long essay review of Jason Blakely’s book We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. I’ll link to it in a separate post once it’s up.

You might think of the book as forming a kind of pincer movement with Jesse Singal’s book The Quick Fix: Why Fad Psychology Can’t Cure Our Social Ills. Whereas Blakeley’s book is an academic work building on a particular philosophical tradition (Gadamer, Taylor, MacIntyre, et al), Singal’s is a trade book meant for a wide readership. Each chapter is a systematic take-down of the latest fad in “Primeworld,” or the TED Talk–ification of the social sciences, especially psychology.

I mention Singal’s book in the review, but I don’t engage it much more than a sentence or two. I have to say, I wasn’t prepared for just how good The Quick Fix is. Which is a way of saying that I thought the book would partake, at least a wee bit, of the very phenomenon it is criticizing. But it doesn’t. Its depth and breadth of research is impressive. The detail is painstaking. The dismantling is patient, fair, and deserved in every case. Moreover, Singal’s leftist credentials strengthen the book’s persuasive power, simultaneously preventing dismissals of his arguments (“oh, this is just a reactionary/anti-academic screed that doesn’t support progressive values”) and bolstering his counter-proposals (as in, e.g., when he suggests that attending to systems, policies, and institutions will improve the actual lives of people of color, as opposed to pained introspection by well-meaning white liberals).

But there’s one point of discrepancy between Singal and Blakely, and I’m not sure whether it is merely rhetorical or rises to the level of a substantive disagreement. As the title of my review suggests, Blakely interprets social science as a way of making sense of the world through narrative interpretation. But he doesn’t think this is the problem; the problem is that public and popularizing practitioners of social science do not believe this is what they are doing; indeed their cache comes in the dubious supposition that it is precisely not what they are doing, since their art (excuse me, science) is empirical, not humanistic. His argument, then, is not that we need to do away with the social sciences. It’s that they need to be integrated into a larger humanistic approach to the great and never-ending cultural task of interpreting reality through stories. Stories are how human beings make meaning out of the flux of life; they are unavoidable and in fact crucial to even the hardest of hard scientific ways of understanding the world. “Facts” mean nothing apart from context, and for human being that context is ineluctably narrative in shape. What that means is that we need to be aware of what we are doing and, furthermore, we need to develop nuanced and sophisticated ways of depicting reality in complex stories that, for all their subjective character, are nonetheless true.

Compare that account with the following, which comes from pages 277–279 in the Conclusion (titled “Escape from Primeworld”) to The Quick Fix:

As we've seen, there are myriad reasons half-baked behavioral science catches on, and those reasons often have to do with the cultural or institutional context of a given idea—the problem it is attempting to solve, the societal currents it is riding, and so on. As we conclude this book, it's worth taking stock of the more general, less context-specific reasons why bad social science spreads and what the consequences might be, particularly when it comes to Primeworld accounts.

The simplest reasons half-baked ideas tend to prevail is that all else being equal, the human brain has an easier time latching onto simple and monocausal accounts than to complicated and multicausal ones. Such accounts are more likely to be accepted as true and to spread. Our brains are built to be drawn to quick, elegant-seeming answers.

The legendary sociologist Charles Tilly nicely explains this in his account of human storytelling, Why? What Happens When People Give Reasons . . . and Why. He writes, “Stories provide simplified cause-effect accounts of puzzling, unexpected, dramatic, problematic, or exemplary events. Relying on widely available knowledge rather than technical expertise, they help make the world intelligible.” Tilly calls storytelling “one of [the] great social interventions” of the human species, precisely because of its ability to simplify and boil down. But this is the same reason stories can lead us astray. “In our complex world, causes and effects always join in complicated ways,” he writes. “Simultaneous causation, incremental effects, environmental effects, mistakes, unintended consequences, and feedback make physical, biological, and social processes the devil's own work-or the Lord’s—to explain in detail. Stories exclude these inconvenient complications.”

Think of all the stories that have fueled half-baked psychology: “Soldiers can resist PTSD if their resilience is boosted”; “Women can close the workplace gender gap if they feel an enhanced sense of power”; “Poor kids can catch up to their richer peers if they develop more grit.” In emphasizing one particular causal claim about deeply complicated systems and outcomes, these and the other blockbuster hits of contemporary psychology elide tremendous amounts of important detail.

It's likely that just as our brains prefer simple stories, within psychology, too, the professional incentives point toward the development of simpler rather than more complex theories. People who study human nature aren't immune to the siren call of simplicity. In a reply to one of her papers, the psychologist Nina Strohminger criticizes this tendency rather eloquently: “The fetishization of parsimony means that unwieldy theories are often dismissed on these grounds alone. . . No doubt there is something less satisfying about settling for inelegance, but the best theories won't always feel right. Elegance is not a suitable heuristic for veracity.” Scientists often have good reason to prefer parsimony—Occam's razor has its uses—but still: simple-seeming explanations of complex phenomena warrant skepticism.

Of course, simple and elegant and appealing theories are more likely to pay. If you're a psychologist in the twenty-first century, particularly a young one, you face a daunting landscape when it comes to making a name and therefore a career for yourself. Funding is being cut left and right, and the ongoing adjunctification of academia certainly hasn't spared psychology. There's one silver lining, though: the public is more interested in behavioral science than ever before. That's especially true if you can tell a simple, exciting, and above all new story about a subject of great societal concern.

I regret that Singal—and Tilly—use the trope of stories and storytelling for the in itself accurate point they want to make. What they have in view is simplistic or reductive theories of complex phenomena that, because the human mind craves parsimony and the masses love a straightforward tale, gain popularity both in the academy and in intellectual journalism by comparison to the unsexy, the muddled, the multi-factored, the epistemically incomplete explanation. But that has nothing to do with the human propensity for narrative. Tilly’s account is itself a story, perhaps overly reductive: Humans tell stories to cut through the clutter, and this disposition to storytelling explains why fad psychology has such a grip on our collective imagination as a society. But my observing this isn’t a criticism. Every legible sentence and assertion in an argument is unavoidably a kind of compressed story and necessarily, always and everywhere, simplified relative to an exhaustive explanation of the subject in question. Which is just another way of saying it’s human beings doing the thinking and talking. That isn’t an obstacle in the way of our knowledge. It’s how we know anything at all.

In my view, then, Singal’s closing nod to the dangers of “storytelling” is not in material disagreement with Blakeley’s proposal. If the two books form a pincer movement, I would describe their relationship in this way: Blakely’s provides the necessary philosophical framework for a workable theory and practice of science—which is what Singal wants, a reliable habitus of public-facing social sciences like psychology—while Singal’s book shows, in glorious gory detail (through well-told vignettes, by the way!), what Blakely lacks the space to unfold in full: the manifold dysfunctions of scientism in its current dominant ideological form.

Take up and read them both. They make for quite the one-two punch.

A condition of our humanity

But is there not ultimately something dehumanizing about Deudney’s deterministic vision of the future, which paints human action and choice as entirely constrained by the material conditions described by his geopolitics? He might have argued that there are perennial problems of the organization of national and international politics, that space expansionists have not sufficiently considered those problems because of their utopian assumptions, and that unless they take them seriously their enterprise is not likely to go well. But instead he argues that his theory allows him to predict outcomes in a more or less distant future that are sufficiently fated as to motivate us today to start down a path of renunciation, as if there is no possibility for human beings to meet the novel challenges of law and order that he suggests will arise in alien environments. This outlook is all the more problematic given that, absent any breakthroughs in space propulsion systems, we will have a long time to think about, and adjust to, most of Deudney’s most troublesome scenarios. And here it is also worth noting that the most immediate threats, which are and have long been based in our space-transported nuclear arsenals, suggest (so far) a record of how prudence and ingenuity can navigate highly dangerous waters.

Lest the picture I am painting seem too rosy, I must add that we should have the right expectations for what it would mean to “meet” those challenges. Certainly expansion into space may be accomplished in ways that are more or less dangerous, but in any case “safe” is not on the table. Nor should we want it to be. “Spam in a can” or not, the early astronauts were heroes. We should want heroes, but heroism requires danger. That many professed shock when the idea was floated that early Mars explorers might have to accept that they would die on Mars is a sign of how far we miss the real value of our space enterprise as falling within the realm of the “noble and beautiful.” It would be better to return in triumph, to age and pass away gracefully surrounded by loved ones, and admired by a respectful public! But to die on Mars — to say on Mars what Titus Oates said in the wastes of Antarctica, “I am just going outside and may be some time” — would be in its own way a noble end, a death worth commemorating beyond the private griefs that all of us will experience and cause.

The story changes for species-level risks, but perhaps not so radically as some might think. We should certainly seek to avoid destroying ourselves spectacularly by a profligate lack of concern with maintaining a human future, but we should also seek to avoid constantly eroding and degrading our humanity by always taking the “safe” course, by the effort to recreate for ourselves a world without risks or tradeoffs. Deudney exposes how this kind of techno-utopianism is at the heart of his space expansionists, but in the end seems a little unclear himself on the extent to which the fragility of human life is not a problem to be solved but a condition of our humanity.

—Charles T. Rubin, “The Case Against the Case Against Space,” in The New Atlantis 64 (Spring 2021): 90–98

Peter van Inwagen on disciplinary hubris, relevant expertise, expectations of deference, and ordinary prudence

In the early 1990s the philosopher Peter van Inwagen wrote an essay called "Critical Studies of the New Testament and the User of the New Testament." It is a long, detailed philosophical investigation of the epistemic nature, or status, of academic biblical scholarship; specifically, it asks whether ordinary Christians or readers of the Bible ought to consult such scholarship, or defer to its judgments, prior to or in the course of their readings of the Bible or accompanying theological judgments. After many pages, his answer is a firm No. Here are the final paragraphs of the essay (bolded emphases are mine):

I conclude that there is no reason for me to think that Critical Studies have established that the New Testament narratives are historically unreliable. In fact, there is no reason for me to think that they have established any important thesis about the New Testament. I might, of course, change my mind if I knew more. But how much time shall I devote to coming to know more? My own theological writings, insofar as they draw on contemporary knowledge, draw on formal logic, cos­mology, and evolutionary biology. I need to know a great deal more about these subjects than I do. How much time shall I take away from my study of them to devote to New Testament studies (as opposed to the study of the New Testament)? The answer seems to me to be: very little. I would suggest that various seminaries and divinity schools might consider devoting a portion of their curricula to these subjects (not to mention the systematic study of the Fathers!), even if this had to be done at the expense of some of the time currently devoted to Critical Studies.

 Let me close by considering a tu quoque. Is not philosophy open to many of the charges I have brought against Critical Studies? Is not philosophy argument without end? Is not what philosophers agree about just precisely nothing? Are not the methods and arguments of many philosophers (especially those who reach extreme conclusions) so bad that an outsider encountering them for the first time might well charitably conclude that he must be missing something? Must one not devote years of systematic study to philosophy before one is competent to think philosophically about whether we have free will or whether there is an objective morality or whether knowledge is possible?—and yet, is one not entitled to believe in free will and knowledge and morality even if one has never read a single page of philosophy?

Ego quoque. If you are not a philosopher, you would be crazy to go to the philosophers to find anything out—other than what it is that the philosophers say. If a philosopher tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something—that there is free will, say, or that morality is only convention—you should tell him that philosophy has not earned the right to make such demands. Philosophy is, I think, valuable. It is a good thing for the study of philosophy to be pursued, both by experts and by amateurs. But from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by experts, the conclusion does not follow that that field of study comprises experts who can tell you things you need to attend to before you can practice a religion or join a political party or become a conscientious objector. And from the premise that it is a good thing for a certain field of study to be pursued by amateurs, the conclusion does not follow that anyone is under an obligation to become an amateur in that field.

This is very close to some of the depreciatory statements I have made about the authority of Critical Studies. Since I regard philosophy as a Good Thing, it should be clear that I do not suppose that my arguments lend any support to the conclusion that the critical study of the New Testament is not a Good Thing. Whether it is, I have no idea. I don't know enough about it to know whether it is. I have argued only that the very little I do know about Critical Studies is sufficient to establish that users of the New Testament need not—but I have said nothing against their doing so—attend very carefully to it. (God, Knowledge, and Mystery [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995], 189–190)

The choice quote here, reduced to a general maxim:

If an [expert in X] tells you that you must, on methodological grounds, since he is the expert, take his word for something, you should tell him that [X] has not earned the right to make such demands.

One cannot substitute just anything for "X," but one can substitute most things, and certainly anything outside the hardest of hard disciplines. Any and all discursive practices and realms of knowledge in which prudence is required or normative questions are involved, or in which ongoing contestation, adjudication, and dissent are prominent or at least typical, are by definition substitutable for "X." Moreover, if a legitimate expert in X attempts to mandate deference to her authority, but in this case regarding not X but Y, the attempt is patently fallacious, mendacious, confused, and absurd. One owes such an attempt and such an expert little more than an eye-roll, though laughter and mockery are warranted.

Let the reader understand.

Mary Midgley on living forever among the boys playing computer-games in the solitudes of space

"It has for some time been proposed that Homo sapiens should colonize space, and should, for convenience in this project, transform himself mechanically into non-organic forms. This project is now held to look increasingly feasible, on the grounds that computer software is the same whatever kind of hardware it runs on, and that minds are only a kind of computer software. Thus, as the eminent Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson puts it:

'It is impossible to set any limit to the variety of forms that life may assume. . . . It is conceivable that in another 10¹⁰ years life could evolve away from flesh and blood and become embodied in an interstellar black cloud . . . or in a sentient computer . . .'

"Our successors can thus not only avoid ordinary death, but also survive (if you care to call it surviving) the heat-death of the universe, and sit about in electronic form exchanging opinions in an otherwise empty cosmos. This, Dyson thinks, would restore the meaning to life, which has otherwise been drained from it by the thought that final destruction is unavoidable.

"Could fear and hatred of the flesh go further? Behind this life Bernal's prophecy, which we have noted earlier, a prophecy to which Dyson acknowledges his debt, that,

'As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the warm, dense atmosphere of the planets, the advantage of containing no organic material at all . . . would be increasingly felt. . . . Bodies at this time would be left far behind . . .'

"Reason, in fact, can at last divorce the unsatisfactory wife he has been complaining of since the eighteenth century, and can live comfortably forever among the boys playing computer-games in the solitudes of space. Is that not touching?"

—Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (Routledge, 2004, 2011) 142-143