Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth Century American Intellectual History. - book reviews

When I entered the graduate program in philosophy at Harvard in the fall of 1956, I did not expect to find many Catholics, either on the faculty or among my fellow students. I was right: There were none at all among my teachers and only two or three among the students.

But I was not prepared for the large proportion of Jews in what I thought would be a WASP enclave. Nor was I prepared for the envy I experienced, wishing I had had their background of Jewish intellectual culture, and even more wishing that Catholics would be accepted with the same welcoming embrace they received. That embrace of Catholics was not to be. It soon become evident that the philosophy department, along with much of the rest of the university, was a resolutely secular place, not hospitable to believers of any kind, but particularly not to Catholics. Moreover, as I was gradually to discover, this was true of most of the elite American universities, and surely most of their philosophy departments. Only in history, literature, and the classics could some exceptions to that general rule be found, but not many.

Jews had a distinct advantage in this atmosphere. They benefited from the guilty reaction against the anti-Semitism of the prewar university and the massive murder of European Jews by the Nazis. They also benefited from their enthusiastic embrace of modernism and science, and the eagerness with which they joined liberal and ex-Protestants in working to rid the university and American culture more generally of their historical relationship to Christianity. It was that Christianity, after all, which was responsible for the anti-Semitism that had in great part made it so hard for them to gain a toehold in the universities prior to the war; and it was the pervasive notion that America is a Christian nation that provided the backdrop for that behavior. T.S. Eliot's notorious 1934 statement that, if one wants a Christian society, "any large number of freethinking Jews is undesirable," was not forgotten either.

The love of science, strong among secular Jews, was a particular help in entering into, and helping to shape, the new secular order. Science was becoming the cultural icon of educated people and the secular university the new church. J. Robert Oppenheimer - surely one of the most prominent Jews and scientists of his era - stressed in his 1953 Reith Lecture in London the ultimate harmony between the interests of science and the interests of humankind: "Our faith - our binding, quiet faith - that knowledge is good and good in itself." In the hands of the sociologist Robert Merton, science was not just the royal road to knowledge, it was also the key to a successful democracy. As for the academy, Walter Lippmann wrote in the New Republic in 1966, that "there has fallen to the universities a unique, indispensable, and capital function in the intellectual and spiritual life of modern society." The universities he had in mind were the secular, decidedly nonreligious kind that were by then the norm for the best in higher education.

Protestants, particularly of the liberal kind, already had a leg up in this new academic world - which they, so to speak, owned anyway - and the secular Jew was a welcome ally. Up at least to the Kennedy years, Catholics just did not count. Even worse, their record during the Spanish Civil War, their embrace of medievalism (as signaled by Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain), and their generally conservative, authoritarian ways hardly commended them to the new times and the new crowd. While the church had long proclaimed the compatibility of religion and science, that stance is far removed from the belief, expressed earlier by Charles Sanders Peirce, that all methods of "fixing belief" other than science will fail. Only true believers of the new kind were wanted, and Catholics were a touch too skeptical, too removed from the requisite idolatry, to qualify.

This whole story (apart from a few Catholic embellishments I add to those he provides) is laid out with commendable clarity and subtlety in David Hollinger's new book. Hollinger, a professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, is one of the nation's most gifted cultural observers, and the story he tells here of the role of Jews in the secularization of the American university has not been well told before. That story helps to explain the Harvard I encountered in the mid-1950s.

About the same time I was reading Hollinger's book I read the Winter 1997 issue of Daedalus ($7.95, 351 pp.), devoted to an analysis of the past fifty years of American academic culture, with a special emphasis on philosophy, literary studies, economics, and political science. What the articles in that issue - mainly written by older participants in the fields they are describing - make clear is the remarkable extent to which the trends noted by Hollinger remain potent. Philosophy, economics, and political science are still sciencestruck, even if there are some significant deviations here and there. Science provides the model of reliable knowledge, and in its communal efforts the model as well for the gaining of knowledge, open yet rigorous, tolerant yet skeptical. While there is a Christian professional society for philosophers, it would be wildly hilarious to suggest that religion has anywhere near the sway and the prestige of science.

Economics, perhaps now the queen of the social sciences because of its status in public policy, remains a tight little ship, taken up with mathematics and modeling, untouched for the most part by the feminism or multiculturalism that have otherwise so infused the university. It is really only in literary studies - and of course in the special feminist and ethnic studies programs - that what many think of as the combined chaos and political correctness of the contemporary university have any serious hold. It is not that way in economics, engineering, policy studies, chemistry, physics, or biology, and not much in philosophy either.

The serious intellectual money in our society goes to the sciences, not literary or feminist or ethnic studies, much less postmodernist musings. The hundreds of millions of dollars each year that the leading universities gain from federal and state research money (but mainly the former) far outpace the pittance that goes to the humanities. The annual budget for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation is approaching nearly $18 billion a year and rising. The National Endowment for the Humanities gets less than $150 million and its budget is falling. Those figures tell a story not only about pecking orders, but they also show the enormous success of James Conant and others after World War II in radically upgrading the place of science in the university and the larger society. Research science, once the province of wellto-do gentlemen, often using their own money, got hitched to Truth, Democracy, Tolerance, and - Money.

Vice-President Al Gore recently wrote, in the journal Science, of the "sacred circle of progress and prosperity." That circle goes unmentioned in Hollinger's book, but is worthy of attention. Science has plenty of cultural clout on its own, but it is the impossibility any longer of separating science and big money that merits attention. They feed upon each other, and they are crucial to the financial well-being of the elite universities, with their heavy dependence upon federal grants. Much else in the university, particularly in literary studies, seems a kind of side show, an entertaining diversion from the serious business of cashing in on empirical reality, a reality never in doubt among scientists.

As even-handed as he is in his historical analysis, Professor Hollinger confesses at the end of his book that: "Science alone is not a sufficient foundation for culture, but were it within my power to design a multiculturalist pentecost, a jubilee morning when the curse of Babel shall be revoked and the dispersed children of Adam and Eve return to Eden to testify with cloven tongues of fire, the language in which they would testify would be the language of Newton and Locke, the language of intersubjective reason, the language of science."

The religious imagery in that passage is obvious. Not so obvious is its connection with Hollinger's expression of puzzlement about American culture. Why, he asks, has it remained so religious, and why has not secularism triumphed the way it has in much of Europe? He does not pursue those questions, but his book does help to explain why such a gulf has opened up between the university, which has embraced secularism with a passion, and the rest of society.

My own guess is that, save for the Religious Right (and then not all of it), most Americans like it that way. They want to be tough, secular, and scientific in their public lives (which is where money and power lie), and religious in their private lives (where it will give them comfort but not cause them social problems). Thus our legislators, many if not most of them religious, see no conflict at all between putting up huge amounts of money for science, and the implicit secular perspective that lies behind it, while at the same time bemoaning a loss of morality and religious faith in our society. They just don't quite get it.

A final and stray thought occurs to me. One of the very few Catholics to ascend to the top rank of American philosophers, Alasdair MacIntyre, has come to fit perfectly into that earlier stereotype of the Catholic thinker: reactionary in his cast of mind, drawn to Aristotle and the medievals for his philosophical heroes, and utterly out of step with his secular, analytic colleagues. Yet this seems to me somehow far more commendable than the model of John F. Kennedy, who purchased pluralistic respectability for Catholics in ways not always savory, just a little too adaptable. of course it is probably true that MacIntyre would not have made it to the top if he had started his career with his present views. They are no more acceptable in mainstream philosophy today than they were forty years ago. As it turned out, the secular Jews who embraced science came to the academic gaming table with far better cards to play than the religious believer, much less those believers who thought Aquinas had something to say.

Daniel Callahan is director of international programs for the Hastings Center and the author, most recently, of The Troubled Dream of Life: In Search of a Peaceful Death (Simon & Schuster).

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