Enlightenment rationality is not enough: we need a new Romanticism

Enlightenment rationality is not enough: we need a new Romanticism

With science becoming a brutal game of market forces and patent controls, the skeptics and Romantics among us must weigh in, and we already are. In one study that provides free genome sequencing for newborns, only 7 per cent of parents wanted to take part, suggesting that the public is cautious about how data might be abused by insurers, business and government. Pinker’s solution to the distortion is investing science with secular humanism, an elastic concept of goodness that plies against financial pressures. But can we depend on technologists for such a benevolent spirit? Right now, in biotech, only the market rules. Modern-day Romantics have a right to be concerned about the motives of scientists, if not of science itself.

The energising force of Romanticism is that it promotes humanity against the forward progress of science and the rise of scientism – the broad, commercial, facile manipulation of science beyond anything that evidence allows. Romantic artists, who accepted our decentralised position in the universe of Galileo, painted people small against expansive backdrops of nature – the sheer expanse emphasising a tension between science as an organising principle and the inexplicable mysteries of the natural world. According to the science historian Steven Shapin at Harvard University, our modern fascination with science derives from unease with this tension – or perhaps the sense that, since nothing much matters anymore, at least science must. ‘Resurgent scientism,’ he wrote in 2015, ‘is less an effective solution to problems posed by the relationship between is and ought than a symptom of the malaise accompanying their separation.’