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Truman Shrugged
"It’s a whole lot easier than actually studying those subjects and understanding their principles."
This sentiment is all too prevalent in our society, even among scientists and some Objectivists, let alone the average blue-collar worker or lifetime welfare recipient. I think that the problem starts at about the time of early puberty which is when most children are progressing from their multiplication tables to introductory algebra. Multiplication can be memorized, but Algebra (which Rand was studying to her delight while on her death bed) requires abstract comprehension. Must people seem just to give up, to memorize words and to try to mimic their use as they hear others speaking. At least Objectivists should know enough not to fall into this habit. It doesn't require us to know everything - just to know enough to know what we don't know well enough to opine upon as if we were experts.
To use your case in point, physicists had down most of classical physics at the end of the 19th century. The laws of motion and thermodynamics had been formulated. The principles of the conservation of mass and energy were understood. There were just a few enigmas, the apparent absence of the aether (demonstrated by Michelson & Morley) and the unexplained longevity of the sun, for example. Semi-sophisticated theologians grasped the fact that the sun could not be powered for more than a few dozen millennia by chemical means as proof that the earth was only as old as Reverend Paley had calculated, birthday October 15, 4,004 BC. Scientists knew enough to know that they didn't indeed understand what powered the sun. But they also knew that assuming that Shiva had set up the spectacle as a grand joke was no explanation either.
Then Becquerel and the Curies discovered radiation, and within 20 years, Einstein came up with E=mc^2. Although we still have phenomena which we do not fully grasp, the paradigm of explaining ignorance by an appeal to miracles had once again been disproven. Before urea was synthesized inorganically some two centuries ago, it had been assumed that organic substances were somehow unique only to living creatures, and that the life force could not be explained through physicochemical means. Now there is not one serious biologist who posits an elan vital or thinks that there is anything at all missing or mysterious in our comprehension of the essence of metabolism and reproduction. It is only those who refuse to do the work who see something mysterious about mitosis and cell-membrane potentials.
Of course, nowadays we still don't even have a proper vocabulary to fully explicate the nature of consciousness, free will, or perhaps the structure of spacetime on the smallest (quatuum foam) and largest (big bang) known scales. But anyone who studies these things in sufficient depth, while they will admit they are not understood, will not claim that we have to resort to the miraculous to explain them. Objectivists on occasion fall into a somewhat similar trap. We hold such things as free will to be axiomatically true. In and of itself this is sufficient for our purposes, but it is not an explanation of the underlying mechanism. Aristotle took gravity and fire as givens, and as these things are undeniably existent phenomena, it didn't pay anyone like Bishop Berkeley to deny their objective existence. Yet neither were the nature of gravity or fire explained by niggling scholastic debates on the minutiae of the Aristotelian ideas of the five elements or on the teleological desire of heavy objects to rest at the center of the geocentric universe. Rand's texts and ideas shouldn't become for us a new Talmud where we search in an isolated ivory tower for the answers to cosmological questions which philosophy can help frame coherently, but which science must answer. That volition exists is undeniable. What volition is is not a secret that we can either chalk up to the will of the gods or hope to find by ever more close scrutiny of the Randian canon.
Even Truman finally escaped.
Ted Keer
(Edited by Ted Keer on 8/01, 4:12pm)
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