Beauty and science

Last night, I was reading through Czesław Miłosz’s last book of poems before his death, Second Space, and ran across a poem entitled, “Scientists.”  I braced myself, because science and poetry seldom meet, and when they do, science usually comes out of it the worse for wear.  I was not disappointed:

The beauty of nature is suspect.
Oh yes, the splendor of flowers.
Science is concerned to deprive us of illusions.
Though why it is eager to do so is unclear.

Science is all about depriving mankind of illusions.  It’s a “candle in the dark,” to demystify a “demon-haunted world,” to use Carl Sagan’s words.  By reducing every conceivable system into its component parts and describing them as fully as possible, scientists seek to understand from a materialistic perspective how everything in the world works.  If it were to remain within the arena of methodologic materialism–that is, restricting itself to natural explanations for the sake of reproducible and understandable experimental results–then I, and I suspect also Miłosz, would have no problem with science.  But some scientists, notably popularizers like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, persist in making the philosophical error of equating methodology with metaphysics.  It is the proselytic fervor of metaphysical materialism that leads scientists to be “concerned to deprive us of illusion,” not the scientific method.

But I suspect that Miłosz is driving at something deeper here than simply the demystification of the world.  Just because I understand the development and composition of a flower does not mean that I cannot appreciate its beauty.  But, the language of science, and its past (and current, for that matter) actions are at issue.  Continuing the poem:

The battles among genes, traits that secure success, gains and losses.
My God, what language these people speak
In their white coats. Charles Darwin
At least had pangs of conscience
Making public a theory that was, as he said, devilish.

He goes on, in the rest of the poem, to point out some of the horrors inflicted upon mankind under the aegis of science–in particular, eugenics. “My God, what language these people speak/In their white coats.” By accepting metaphysical materialism, much of science has lost sight–lost the conception even–of beauty. Dignity also loses its meaning, because under the microscope, we all look much the same, and those that don’t look like the majority can be labeled defective. Materialism at its core is dehumanizing, not just debeautifying.

What is ironic, however, is that a passionate appreciation of beauty has driven many great scientific discoveries. We know–even if we don’t know how we know–that an elegant, harmonious system is more likely to be true. Existence of elements, and more recently of subatomic particles, have been predicted correctly based upon their adherence to a beautiful pattern. Mathematicians often speak of elegance. This rightness guides scientists toward greater truth, and I suspect if they would heed Miłosz’s warnings, they would see the beauty in humans, and nature, again.