It’s hard to imagine someone getting so much wrong in a single review of David Deutsch’s new The Beginning of Infinity, but Victoria Pyncheon gives it a good stab in “Galileo And the Woes of Quantum Physicists” at Forbes blog “SheNegotiates” (November 22, 2011):
Deutsch believes in the existence of objective, verifiable scientific truth for everything – including morality – an area of human life almost no one agrees is subject to proof. Except for Deutsch. It is an article of faith (or science) for Deutsch that we progress from moral wrong to moral right. As examples he cites the current consensus ”that slavery is an abomination, that women should be free to go out to work, that autopsies should be legal, [and] that promotion in the armed forces should not depend on skin colour.” These truisms, Deutsch notes, were “highly controversial only a matter of decades ago, and originally the opposite positions were taken for granted.”
Nonsense. Leave the shrinking Western world, and you will find no such consensus even today. And the consensus that exists in the fading West was achieved, most often, in the teeth of the science of the day. It was Christians, black and white, who said slavery (and segregation) were an abomination; scientists were either silent or on the side of racist eugenics. Remember, eugenics was once a science.
It was Western women who decided that women were equal, not scientists, and it takes no great amount of historical digging to discover that most of the early women’s rights activists were explicitly Christian or Jewish – in an age when a lot of “science” suggested that women couldn’t handle the stuff men did.
How did we reach near consensus in such a short period of time? By applying the scientific method to social, cultural and political problems. Deutsch explains that any truth-seeking system works toward consensus because everyone working in the system is gradually eliminating errors and converging on objective truths. But not any truth will do. To achieve consensus, truth must seem useful to a large number of people. If it is not useful, it will not be adopted.
Then Deutsch doesn’t have anything useful to tell us. In a number of African countries today, slavery is “useful to a large number of people” and emancipation is not. In a number of Middle Eastern communities, honor killing is “useful to a large number of people” and safety for women is not.
Note that none of that is due to a lack of science, as such. One of the most oppressive countries for women is Iran, which is a credible nuclear threat. And you don’t get to be a credible nuclear threat by dancing around a fire, mumbling spells.
If Deutsch’s formula is as Pyncheon describes, it will do no good at all, and maybe harm. She should stick to writing about negotiation.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose