James Le Fanu: Why Us? (The limitations of science)

by John Clinch , Friday, June 19, 2009, 18:30 (5634 days ago) @ John Clinch

Part 5 (final) - The irony of his position is that if such a force of nature is ever identified it will be science that does it. And if Mr LeFanu is there, he'll doubtless be standing on the sidelines, pointing out some other gap in our knowledge and declaiming, "Science as a project has failed since it has failed to explain that." He forgets Wittgenstein's dictum "There is nothing supernatural about the world, but that it is" and, as a consequence, makes a monumental category error. - LeFanu concludes his book with a passage lamenting the lack of "enchantment" in the world in the wake of "narrow, materialist" science. Viewed charitably, this is a sort of Romanticist reaction to what he perceives of as a reductionist and un-poetic rationalism. However, he seems to forget that the enchanted world was a demon-haunted one: in a world governed by pre-scientific thinking, where Man supposedly once stood proudly "on his pedestal," as LeFanu puts it, the consequences for advocating the wrong kind of magic were grave indeed. In the world of enchantment, Giordano Bruno was burnt alive in Rome in 1600 for his speculations on the universe, including on whether there were beings on other planets. Now, as a consequence of the debasing and narrow, materialistic science LeFanu rails against, we scan the skies heroically in the hope that we can confirm that same thing. I know which world I prefer. - It is perhaps a bit unfair to conclude with an ad hominem point but I will anyway. I've never read LeFanu's Telegraph column but I've done a bit of Googling. In his medical column, I learn, he has recommended that a reader visit an acupuncturist. He is also on record as advising parents not to have their children immunised with the MMR vaccine. And, so a paediatrician friend of mine has told me, he adopts a bizarre denialist position on shaken-baby syndrome. Are these the actions of a man that respects science? I think they are rather the actions of someone who doesn't properly understand it or who is happy to play fast-and-loose with it. Several of the people he mentions as influences at the end of his book are of the same mould (Rupert Sheldrake, for example is a well-known crank.) - Maverick LeFanu may be but, of course, that ought be another big red flag: mavericks are sometimes right but they are almost always wrong. - c.2009 John Clinch