Adam Rutherford is nervous. The science writer and broadcaster is worried about the publication of his remarkable new book on the vexed subject of science and race, How to Argue With a Racist. Even though his training is in genetics, he is still concerned that he got all the science right. It is, after all, an extremely complex area. And he tells me, in an interview which you can listen to below, that there are some aspects of it that only a few people in the world really understand.
But not only that. He is also grabbing, with both hands, a live rail of the contemporary culture wars: Laurence Fox, Meghan Markle, the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism, racism returning to the football terraces. And he doesn’t shy away from asking the dangerous questions: Why has no white man won the 100 metres at the Olympics since 1980? Are Ashkenazi Jews cleverer than anyone else?
Rutherford is also doing something rare among people who write about science: he is addressing, full-on, the history of the complicity of science and the Enlightenment with racism itself. Last year, he gave the Voltaire lecture for Humanists UK. Voltaire, he told them, was a racist. Voltaire wrote things such as:
“Our wise men have said that man was created in the image of God. Now here is a lovely image of the divine maker: a flat and black nose with little or hardly any intelligence.” (Romans: Les Lettres D’amabed. 1769)
Voltaire was not alone. The Swedish naturalist, Carl Linnaeus, who founded the taxonomical classification of living things that we still use today — Homo sapiens etc — categorised various types of people, linking physical features with what he believed to be character features. The group he called Afer — after Africa — were lazy, the females of the species were cunning and without shame. These associations were built into ‘race science’ from the very beginning. Little wonder Kehinde Andrews described the Enlightenment to me in his Confessions as “white man’s identity politics”.
Scientists have not always been good at this sort of self-critical attention to their subject. I suspect that the reason for this may be in part an overconfidence that self-criticism is built into the scientific method and that it is, therefore, already taken care of. This can sometimes mean that scientists allow themselves to get on with the business of science unperturbed by the wider moral implications of their work. Indeed, this has almost become a badge of pride: just follow the evidence, wherever it leads.
Over the years, Adam and I have rehearsed many of the rather tired old debates about science and religion. He goes: the inquisition and witch-burning; I go: nuclear weapons and a sea full of plastic. It’s all a bit knock-about, really — pub debates of the sort beloved of Twitter. But the conversation gets far more interesting when we start discussing what science might learn from the failure of religion. And, in particular, what science as the now dominant interpretative mechanism might take away from the mistakes made by the dominant interpretative mechanism that it has replaced.
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