Leituras pela manhã - 'we need a new Romanticism'

‘People thought they could explain and conquer nature – yet … they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.’ Havel was not against industry, he was just for labour relations and protection of the environment.
~Václav Havel, 1984, citado por Jim Kozubek in Enlightenment rationality is not enough: we need a new Romanticism

We are now on the verge of a new revolution in control over life through the gene-editing tool Crispr-Cas9, which has given us the ability to tinker with the colour of butterfly wings and alter the heritable genetic code of humans. In this uncharted territory, where ethical issues are rife, we can get blindsided by sinking too much of our faith into science, and losing our sense of humanity or belief in human rights.

Science should inform values such as vaccine and climate policy, but it must not determine all values. For instance, life scientists are pricing new drugs as high as the market will allow: a gene therapy to restore vision for $850,000; the first genetically engineered immune system T-cell to fight cancer for $475,000, eight times the median income in the United States despite manufacturing cost estimates of $25,000. Medicine or extortion? Humanitarians, not scientists, must decide.

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.’
The tension that typified Romanticism – that nature exists beyond the dominion of human reason – requires active contemplation and conscience. Evolution is true, and science meaningful, but glib or mercenary extrapolations of what science shows put us all at risk.

All the way back in 1817, the poet John Keats called this ‘negative capability’: the capacity to sustain uncertainty and a sense of doubt. In his lecture ‘The Will to Believe’ (1896), the psychologist William James complained that ‘scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives’, and explained in his dissenting opinion that ‘Science has organised this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with this method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all.’

Precisely because scientific institutional authority has become a paradigm, it must have a counterculture.

(excertos)