Spiritual Yearning in Science with Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan (Part 4 of Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age)

Is science a path to cosmic connection? 

In this fourth episode of our series from the November 2024 symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age held at McGill University, I share results of an ongoing study on Meaning and Mystery in Science, which explores the spiritual experiences of non-religious scientists, and how the practice of science might evoke awe, wonder, and a sense of the transcendent.

We open the episode with a poetry reading from Marie Trotter, and following my presentation is a discussion with Dr. Rob Gilbert, Dr. Rajeev Bhargava, and Dr. Galen Watts.

Here’s a summary of the episode:

1. Marie Trotter opens the episode with original poetry, exploring themes of fragility, hope, and beauty, drawing inspiration from Klimt's paintings
2. Findings from the Meaning and Mystery in Science study reveal how non-religious scientists experience enchantment and spiritual yearning through their work
3. Bhargava notes that spiritual yearning is often disrupted by ideological, social, and political forces, which we need to contend with more seriously
4. Watts explores the idea of science as play, contrasting the childlike enchantment of discovery with the institutionalized pressures of professional science
5. Gilbert highlights the danger of self-satisfaction in science, arguing that humility and vulnerability are essential for true insight 

This episode is sponsored by:
John Templeton Foundation (https://www.templeton.org/)
Templeton Religion Trust (https://templetonreligiontrust.org/)

Transcript

Brandon: I'm Brandon Vaidyanathan, and this is Beauty at Work — the podcast that seeks to expand our understanding of beauty, what it is, how it works, and why it matters for the work we do. This season of the podcast is sponsored by John Templeton Foundation and Templeton Religion Trust.

Hey, everyone. This is the fourth episode from our International Symposium on Spiritual Yearning in a Disenchanted Age, held at McGill University in Montreal in November 2024. In this episode, I will present data from our ongoing study on meaning and mystery in science, which we conducted on four countries—the US, UK, Italy, and India—to understand how science evokes our desire for what Charles Taylor calls "cosmic connection." We begin with a second poetry reading from Marie Trotter, a doctoral candidate in English at McGill University, who will share a couple of original poems. Let's get started.

Marie: I realized I have come to think of your gifts as meager and scant. Needle pricks upon the window. The millisecond ironic inharmonious chant of the drill fixing the escalator. And the fingertip rain attending to the bend in my elbow, and the hand of the child so trusting unconscious upon my neck. Such gifts, such trivial breaks in the monotony glass. Smash through, my God, I ask you. And leave me bleeding at the splintering event. And afterwards, no veil, no wall, no mirror, no twin spirits. Only one.

This last poem is called Hope I, and it's after a painting by Klimt. There are a series of paintings by him of different figures of hope, so I encourage you to look those up. Hope is the pregnant woman that Klimt painted and you saw on the gallery wall. She stared out at you watching her and noting her body round with readiness, the skull above her head like a crown. Her hair was a flame and her eyes saw you, not the dark figures behind her. Her hands held her world together instead of hiding her bare breast. She has made herself vulnerable to being seen. She has not covered herself with the star-dipped fabric or the tapestry of eyes who, like her, are watching you, curious. Nowhere in the room can any of us find shame. In her hair, she wears flowers. She has adorned herself with fragile touches of beauty, all so that she can wait and see. Thank you.

Brandon: So I'm going to share with you some work that integrates a couple of projects on scientists, both looking at the beauty of science that Robert talked about, as well as this quest for enchantment and even the sort of deeper spiritual yearnings or longings that animate the practice of science, or at least that scientists encounter in the work they do. I was very struck by Charles' opening comments, because there are many ways in which I think my own sort of spiritual quest has been edified by a lot of the non-religious scientists I've been speaking to and the kind of sincerity with which they— maybe that's not even the right word. It's the kind of innocence with which they present some of these longings, desires in ways that I don't quite encounter in the world of people of faith, who I think are much less vulnerable and perhaps in many contexts, I think, have to keep up appearances or maybe have just cut themselves off from that space of longing where there's a lot more certainty around the answers to questions that they ought to be asking or the questions that ought to be asking themselves within us. And so this has been a personally very rewarding journey. I think it, to some degree, gets at the question that Naomi asked about whether science could serve as a system of knowledge that points beyond itself. And I think that is a question that emerges from these conversations.

One of the things that I've been noticing lately is, perhaps, we are on the cusp of or already are well into some sort of a New Romanticism. There are articles being written about this in Psychology Today and in The Guardian with folks like Tara who've written extensively on this, New York Times. David Brooks has written on it. Even in the business world, there are folks like Tim Liebrecht who started the House of Beautiful Business, which is a kind of Neo-Romantic movement in the business world. So there's something going on, where there's a pushback against the rationalism that you're seeing in Silicon Valley, in the tech world especially, and a hunger for something. Then some of the symptoms of this are, I think, the loneliness epidemic. But the turning towards the spiritual among folks in the tech community, behind some of this is this perceived conflict between the rational and the emotional, or between science and religion and all of these sorts of conflicts fairly recent. I mean, this is an AI-generated image of the science-religion conflict. See what our AI overlords think of us. The science-religion conflict, it's only a 19th century invention with folks like Draper and White making the sort of argument that there's some intrinsic and necessary conflict between the domains of the rational and the spiritual or the scientific and the religious. I mean, one of the drivers that's assumed behind this is disenchantment. Weber talks a lot about this demagification, and Hans Joas talks also about the desacralization and the detranscendentalization that are implied in the notion of disenchantment.

But when you talk to scientists themselves, you get a very different story. And so the research that I've been doing for more than a decade now with a number of colleagues has surveyed and interviewed scientists in many countries. It's very clear that for the vast majority of physicists and biologists in several countries, there's no perceived conflict between science and religion. Like Stephen Jay Gould, "non-overlapping magisteria," separate realms that don't come into contact with each other. There's even the possibility of compatibility. And even among atheists that we've studied, there are many who consider themselves spiritual atheists, including our friend Richard Dawkins who is now proclaiming himself to be spiritual. But what does he mean by that? What is this word referring to, and what kinds of longings or yearnings is this trying to express? That's been a big part of the work I've been trying to do in a project that we're calling Meaning and Mystery in Science. We're trying to get at how scientists in different national contexts experience the sort of enchantment that Rob has been talking about, and how the practice of science might be relevant to deeper desires for connection to self, others, nature and even a higher power, and the factors that then facilitate or inhibit this kind of yearning. Especially, for those scientists who are non-religious, in the sense that they are not part of any kind of faith community and they don't have any religious affiliation, so what kind of language do they have for this? How do they articulate these yearnings, and what do they do with these longings once they emerge, if at all they do? There's a question as to whether or not these longings are universal. Because some people we talked to claim that they don't experience them. There's a question of, well, what do you do about that? How do you make sense of that?

So what I want to share with you just is a lot of interview data that comes out of this project and some of the things I heard that have really moved me and I've been trying to think about what are these categories telling us. Very briefly, the methodology here for this work is to look at physicists and biologists, mainly because physics and biology are two of the basic sciences that are seen to be in some tension with religion. The focus of this work is in four countries: the US, UK, Italy, and India. In 2021-2022, we surveyed nationally representative samples of physicists and biologists in these four countries. More than 3,000 completed surveys. Then we did in-depth, hour-long interviews primarily on the role of beauty in science, as well as awe and wonder and experience of the sublime and so on. Then this past year, we've been doing more in-depth interviews for some of them, two to three hours at length, trying to understand the spiritual yearnings of these scientists. Just to tell you a little bit about what the demographics look like, 44% of scientists in these countries consider themselves to be neither spiritual nor religious. 20% consider themselves to be religious but not spiritual. Many of them are in India. So these are folks who say, "I belong to a particular faith community. I participate in the traditions and the rituals. I think it's mostly nonsense. But my spouse is devout, so we do the pujas at home." Or they might say, "I'm a Muslim. This is part of my identity. I do participate in Ramzan. I fast, and so forth. But I don't really believe any of the spiritual content." Italians, you find similarly folks who affiliate with Catholicism but consider themselves to be not spiritual. Then you have many who consider themselves to be spiritual but not religious — that's the group I'm most interested in for the purposes of this next few minutes — and then the people who are both spiritual and religious. So they're conventionally religious, and they also have some kind of inner life that matters to them. But I'm mainly going to talk about this particular category here. That's what we've been spending time really trying to understand, as well as some of the folks who are in this category who claim to be not spiritual in any way at all.

So is science disenchanting to scientists? We asked scientists whether the practice of science strips away the meaning and mystery and magic from reality, as many seem to think. There's a unanimous rejection of that idea. Scientists say there's no way that science is disenchanting. Rather, it heightens the sense of mystery and magic. They're very comfortable using those terms in ways that I found surprising. Just to give you one example from an Italian biologist who told us, "When you see something that you still cannot explain from a scientific point of view — because science does not absolutely explain everything around us or inside us, so there's a sense of that acknowledgement of the limitations of science — then a little sense of magic remains. When something happens and you don't know why but you see it's working. When you study how a cell works, which means millions of processes all interconnected, intersected, orchestrated to each other." That theme keeps coming up over and over again in our interviews. That sense of how everything is connected, a sense of harmony. You consider that there are billions of these cells in your body that as long as everything goes well are working in a coordinated and effective way. This is actually a breathtaking insight.

Again, from a scientific point of view, one might not say that this is a scientific insight. But for this person, individually, there's something around that encounter with the intersection of things, with the connectivity of things. I'm not speaking about how this was created because I don't believe in creation. I don't believe in God. I believe in evolution. Again, that science-religion tension does seem to creep in every now and then. I don't know if there are higher powers involved in any way. I don't think so. And so there are all of these different themes that we hear over and over again. And in trying to make sense of this kind of enchantment — by enchantment, what we mean is the sense of awe and wonder that is connecting the person to some object or agent beyond the self that they're perceiving as intrinsically meaningful. So that kind of experience of enchantment — we find there are three main modalities: what we're calling transcendent, imminent and then liminal. Transcendent is the folks who are primarily both spiritual and religious, who see there being a super empirical reality and that science points to God or some higher power, maybe fate. But there is something beyond the material that these experiences of awe and wonder are pointing them to. Then there are folks who are completely within the imminent frame, their buffered selves. And yet, even among those folks, it seems like there is some kind of desire to — they even talk about transcendence. But they're very clear that it's something that pulls me out of myself. But it ultimately has to be explained completely within the material world. That there are people like Alan Lightman at MIT who call themselves 'spiritual materialists.' They are committed to the ontology of materialism, and yet they want to have their spiritual cake and eat it too. The liminal category is the more interesting one, where there seems to be two possibilities. One is just an uncertainty where like the previous scientists you heard, and even this particular scientist who says, "I'm not sure that I agree with all the people in the church about a divine being. I'm more thinking of divine as being broader than that, I guess. I can't help but evoke that feeling of grandeur and awe when I'm working in nature. If there is a God, I guess I feel closer to God when I'm out there." This person identifies as a Protestant. But they're really not sure. They're not sure about whether they can commit to the existence of God. They're also thinking of divine as broader than God as we typically understand it. Many of the scientists we talked to are expressing what sounds like pantheism, which is rejecting the duality of the material and the spiritual and saying it's all one thing. There are, I guess, two ways you can go. You can say it's all material, or it's all God or some God-like thing, right? And so those are the kinds of modalities we're hearing.

All of these experiences we find are evoking desires for deeper connection to nature, self, others, and God. These are the sort of main objects of spiritual yearning as we're conceptualizing it. And so we asked scientists to share with us stories of, when you had moments of profound connection to nature, when have you longed for moments of deeper connection than you already have experienced, et cetera? We were moved by many of the stories we heard. I'll walk you through some examples of connection to each of these four objects. And so this is one scientist as a biologist talking about doing her scientific work on a boat. There was, she said, bioluminescence across the whole ocean. When you're swimming in the water, your whole body glowed. The fish around you would also glow the moment they moved. That sense of understanding that all of these little glowing lights are individual organisms that are glowing for their own reasons, that was a profound experience of I suppose a real emotional connection with that. It was very touching. But then, that sense of "I'm just this swirling part of this glowing tapestry," that's where I would say I felt spiritual. I wouldn't say it felt that way because I felt a stronger connection to a higher power or God or gods. I think, for me, I suppose it felt spiritual just in that sense of being connected and being part of that whole tapestry of being and being a small and, in that moment, insignificant part of that tapestry of being. So there is the sense of clearly awe, the sense of being confronted with a vastness of things but also with the profound connectivity of things. It's deeply significant. It's not clear to this person and, again, to all the scientists we talked to how this is relevant to their scientific lives. But I think, as Rob has argued, it is a fuel. That without these experiences, would the practice of science be significant and meaningful and would they be able to sustain that work? Another example of connection to nature comes from a scientist, a US biologist, who talks about birds and hearing the birds and feeling a sense of connection to other living things. Then whenever you hear the wind, you're kind of getting more big picture and thinking about the connection between what's the wind interacting with — the leaves, and how the wind got there. I don't know. What's wind on like a cosmic scale? It's just more, something bigger than you to focus on, which is the closest I'll get to something spiritual. And so that term is something that makes sense in the experience of connectivity to everything and to that kind of contemplation of how all things are connected. The moments that scientific practice affords for this kind of contemplation are really seen as valuable.

Connection to self is an interesting theme. And so the connection to nature is pretty obvious for people who are working, biologists working in the field and it's a regular part of life. Connection to self varies. There's a lot of variance here in what this means. There are some scientists who feel more connected to themselves when they do scientific work. This one scientist in India told us, "I think it helps me understand myself more because I like spending time doing introspection. When I'm analyzing data, meeting people, when I make mistakes, that helps me learn more about myself." But you also find people who are disconnected from their selves because of science. We've heard from many graduate students in postdocs, "I do feel like I'm missing something, and maybe that's the nature of graduate school. I don't know about other people. But I've lost a sense of self because everything is just wrapped up and working. I yearn to have the connection that I had whenever I was younger." There's a lot written in outlets like nature and other major scientific periodicals about a growing mental health crisis in science. And a lot of it has to do with this alienation and disconnection that graduate students and postdocs are feeling. Some in the scientific community feel very closely connected to their scientific tribes and feel a deep sense of meaning and connection there, but others feel completely disconnected from that.

There's another kind of, you know, these are the kinds of reasons why it becomes challenging to categorize some of these data. And we're still working on analyzing it. So here's one kind of idiosyncratic example. One Italian biologist told us, "It happens that I think intensely about a thing or a person especially at work. I think intensely that I have to work with a person. And after a few days, that person comes into contact with me. I have a spirit of observation for these things." Maybe they're manifesting something. I don't know. "I've acknowledged that they happen. And even if I don't know why, I've always accepted these things. They came and went. I have these colleagues with whom I'm in clear connection." So there's some kind of, whether it's premonition or some other kind of experience of connection. There are some scientists who say, "I experienced these weird things." There are people who felt connected to places. One scientist told me about visiting Stonehenge and feeling an aura or a presence. This person is an atheist and rejects the ontological reality of extra material forces, and yet they can't shake off that there's something here, and I don't know what it is. And it's spooky. And so there are also these spooky moments of connection to others, also some very moving experiences of people being very vulnerable with us, sharing with us. Like this one UK physicist who told me that his father died when he was very young. He said, "I truly felt abandoned as I was growing older. My mother had remarried a very abusive man who was not particularly present. All that is in the past, but it does affect you. And I think my strongest feeling of yearning today would be to have that feeling of being safe and okay and just myself and accepted. My strongest yearning is that feeling of acceptance and safety that I did not get when I was little." That's a lot of what drives his own desire for connection to others around him, even in the scientific community. Still, others told us, "I don't know what you're talking about." Or maybe, "I think I understand what you're after, but it's not what I experience." One scientist told us, "I think you're looking for something more profound than I've ever felt. I do have meaningful conversations with others. I enjoy them very much, but I think that's different from what you're trying to get at." So what does it mean to experience to yearn for a deep connection to someone else? And in what sense is that spiritual? There are scientists who would say that their relationships with others in the scientific community is in the category of spiritual, and there are others who would say it's not. Then there are still others who tell us, "I don't understand what you mean by connection. Can you give me a definition, and how are you measuring it and so forth? That is very challenging to communicate.

Finding connection to God or a higher power, this was sort of rejected by most of our respondents. But every now and then, we hear even among some of the spiritual but not religious some interesting experiences. Like this one Indian biologist, who was trained as a dancer in this form of dance called "Kathak," she said, "I think when I dance, I feel more connected to a higher power. Because there's so much feeling that rushes through it. You learn new steps and techniques. You try to express yourself. I think that's a way for me to feel more connected to myself and to a spiritual being. Because you feel like your audience is God. Someone is sitting out there, and you dance for them. You don't want to prove you're worth to anyone. You're just dancing for someone, for some power. And I think dancing is one way that I feel connected to nature, to God, to myself. But that's true for my scientific journey as well. I have no one to prove it to. I have a question that I'm trying to talk to the spiritual being about. And it helps me." And so there's this relationship between our practice of dance. Then there are others who've talked about yoga as a practice that they engage in, which also bleeds over into their scientific practice and helps them sort of see those practices as spiritually relevant. Again, this sort of relationship between nature and God also comes up quite a bit. There's one scientist who talk to us about being in the mountains and, "Feeling not only my body at that moment but a little bit of everything around it. My consciousness had expanded a little outside. I wasn't concentrating on myself, but I had the impression of being in contact with this place as if someone else had given me a taste of their consciousness. I don't know how to express it. My state was not in the usual state. It expanded. And I said to myself, 'I've met God.' In other words, someone has brought me to him for a moment in his state, and I felt that I was experiencing these moments differently. I don't know how to explain it other than I met God." So there are similar kinds of struggles to express that something has happened here that's significant. I don't quite have the language for it other than, I can say with certainty, that this is what I would call God and it's happened here and from many scientists who are not religious.

Besides self, other, nature or God, there are the three other main objects of yearning that have repeatedly come up. The first is understanding, that desire to recognize, as Rob said, this is how things are. That yearning for things to fit together for the hidden order or inner logic of things, to make itself manifest. That is a profound experience of beauty, but it's also a profound desire that motivates scientific practice. Desire for peace, peace with oneself, peace with, you know, it could be in relation to the situation in the world, in relation to things like climate change, wanting things to come to some kind of order and a longing for direction. I don't know where am I going next, and what am I doing with my life. So those are the other kinds of things where they're yearning for some clarity. So those are the categories that we've been trying to just sort of, that we think all the things that were coming across fit into these seven buckets.

There's various contexts in which these yearnings come up. As we've seen, spending time in nature is very common. The ways in which scientific life gives rise to a sense of something missing is really important, especially as one gets caught up in the careerism and the sort of publish-or-perish nature of academia. They feel something is missing. They've lost a sense of self sometimes. Contemplating a scientific insight or even just being able to grasp some sense of whether it's their own idea, whether it's a discovery or a theory that's already established, the wonder, the experience can be evocative of this yearning. Practices like yoga, or dancing, or music, transitional life phases, when you're finishing up graduate school, finishing up a postdoc, getting married, those sorts of things. Bereavement is really important and lots of stories of grief that evoke yearning when people close to you pass away. There are also many obstacles. One that we came across often is a sense of self-satisfaction, which we're trying to make sense of, which is some people say, "I'm not yearning for anything. I don't see why I would need to. My life is good. I'm perfectly happy, perfectly satisfied. There's nothing missing. I have no deeper desires." The institutional context makes it hard for many to think about, "Yeah, I have these yearnings, but I mean I don't see how they're relevant to my life as a scientist." There are questions of theodicy, especially in relation to God or higher power or an obstacle, where we encounter people with a lot of anger against the God concept, which is, "How can God allow the innocent children to die, et cetera?" And so I've rejected religion for those reasons. Skepticism around whether these yearnings are really worth or they just sort of, "I feel these things, but are they really important? I don't know." Belief systems. We talk to some scientists who are Buddhist and say, "We're taught not to yearn. We're taught not to have desires. It's not a good thing." I had one Buddhist scientist I talked to. I said, "Well, in your moments of weakness when you do yearn, what do you yearn for?" He said, "Well, what I really want is faster technological progress," which I thought was a very strange object of yearning.

But beyond disenchantment, there are two other themes that came up that are really important. One is disillusionment with the scientific vocation and just the nature of academia and the nature of science with the publish-or-perish pressures and so forth and the difficulty in finding permanent jobs and demoralization with what scientific advances have done to our planet. There's a lot of climate grief that scientists are trying to process and don't quite know how to. And even if they say, "I would love to go back to the mountains or these places where I've experienced spiritual connection, I feel guilty putting myself on an aircraft and flying there." So there's a tension between the reality that we're in and what one might want to pursue. Finally, these are questions that I'm left with at the end. It's, is science a locus of cosmic connection? Can scientific theories and models provide a subtler language that restores cosmic wonder in an age of disenchantment? I mean, there are some things that you can't express, except in the language of mathematics. So when scientists say that they are moved by the elegance of some of those equations or formulas, what do they mean there? Echoing what Rob said, can science have a unique form of interspace? And if it does, will scientists take this seriously as a third domain between the subjective and the objective? How might science maybe better need to integrate with poetry and other forms of art to function more fully as a spiritual resource? How do we make sense of those scientists who tell us they have no yearnings for connection?

Finally, I'm still scratching my head around, to what extent the things that scientists are talking about fit within the concept of spiritual? What is the scope of that concept? There are scientists who tell us, "I really feel a sense of spiritual connection to my colleagues at CERN, the big particle accelerator, and the sense of we're all in the same thing together, et cetera." But others might say, "Well, that's just sort of a social bond that you share with people who are professionally similar to you. Why would you call that spiritual?" And so those are interesting questions as to what do we mean by that concept and how should we define it. I think, especially for those of us who are social scientists, we want to try to operationalize these things. It's helpful to figure out what are the limits there. So thanks. I would love to get questions that you might have for Naomi and Rob and myself perhaps for a few minutes, or comments. It doesn't have to be questions.

Dr. Rob: A very quick comment on self-satisfaction. In fact, you clarified my understanding. I mean, the center talking about people being a bit buffered. You're talking about people being comfortable. But there's also an element in which I resonated with it in your abstract. Because one of the problems with scientists is, if they're kind of closed, if it's too career-focused, too self-satisfied, too ambitious, I think it can blinker them to things that they see. I think it can be a hindrance. I mean, if they're very brilliant and very insightful, maybe it's okay. But I think it's an interesting thing that if it's not a decentering, that's what I'm saying, if there's not a humility in front of what you're studying, if there's not a willingness to be moved by it, I think that can be a barrier to actually perceiving what's in front of you. That's an element of the self-satisfaction as well. So it's not just they're saying, "Oh, we don't need this." Actually, maybe they'd be better scientists if they were a little bit more vulnerable.

Rajeev: Thank you very much. This is really quite exciting and fulfilling to be present over here. I keep feeling that these are a search or a path to cosmic connection and the spiritual yearning constantly disrupted by one certain kinds of ideologies, which are intellectual disturbances and disruptions, dogma and social disruptions. For example, in India, this constant oppression, to be explained by caste hierarchies or this communal issue and, finally, political disruptions. I mean, the rising tide of authoritarianism, the control that strong men are exercising. I find that some of the most forceful yearnings in the past—I was talking about 15th century—all were accompanied by social critique and of critique of people within their own religious traditions who are constantly interrupting any form of spiritual yearning. So what I'm saying is that these two really go hand in hand. The spiritual yearning or cosmic connection really is a huge disruption caused by so many factors. That a person who is yearning for something beyond oneself has to constantly not just dialogue with but dialogue critically with and sometimes even forcefully attack all those factors, people who embody those factors. I think these are some things that we should simultaneously talk about rather than talk only about one and not about the other.

Dr. Galen: This was just in response to Robert's really fascinating talk. So the first thing, I love the way that you brought attention to the way this kind of mechanistic model is actually in some sense kind of imposed, as it were, by scientists. Right? The world is not actually — I mean, it's more creative, dynamic. We impose it on, and there's a kind of poeticism about this. I loved the way you talk about, you know, it made me think about science as this sort of playful activity. We hypothesize. We fantasize, right? We play with equipment, but they're toys. So it made me think about, if it's the case, then we can think about science as a kind of play, in the way that children play. There's something there. But I also wonder whether something happens, and there is something distinctive not just in quantity but in quality between the kind of play that you find among children, which does seem to me as close to enchantment for a four-year-old and a two-year-old as it comes, and then the kind of play that happens among professional scientists who are, as we've learned, subject to all kinds of pressures, career, and so on. One way of thinking about this — this is sort of maybe Weberian — is as you move out of the play of a child, into the play of, say, a professional practicing scientist, you kept saying that the mechanism model is amazing because it works. Right? That suggests to me a certain kind of, that there's this emphasis on mastering the world, on world mastery, which I do see as characteristic of not just science but the modern world. I mean, Weber would have said it, the modern world more generally, a feature of rationalization.

You described science as being, for yourself at least, valuable in itself. But I do wonder whether that's actually true when it's institutionalized. So is science intrinsically valuable, or is it just a way to better master the world and wield it for our own human purposes? In which case you could think about it as play, but it's a different kind of play than the child who isn't necessarily trying to wield it for a specific purpose so they can get — it's a question of ends rather than means, right? So is it more than a means, another way of putting it? And just to sort of follow from this, what you described, you said that scientists like yourself, there's a kind of you could call it — I mean, to be proper, you could call it kind of faith. You have to have faith that science is worth doing to engage in it at all. I have to say Weber argues this in his famous essay on Science as a Vocation. In fact, that's the idea of science as a vocation. Science is something that the scientist, as it were, has to commit themselves to. He even thought of it as a kind of faith. But ironically, he didn't see that as contradicting his claim in the same lecture that the world was disenchanted. In fact, he had this kind of view of science that he said that it's sort of a — he used all kind of machismo metaphors, the effeminate kind of like scientists who see science as leading to enchantment. Right? Those of us who are kind of manly scientists accept that the world is cold and meaningless. But we commit to it nonetheless. We follow our daemon, and we believe in it. It's the kind of subjectivist faith, you could say, for Weber. Right? It's really about a personal commitment to this. But it doesn't necessarily tell us about the world more broadly. He was committed to the view that the world was disenchanted. So I don't know whether — maybe Weber was wrong. Maybe he was being hypocrite. But I'd be curious, not that you have to know Weber, how to think through that question.

Dr. Rob: There would be more to say. On the first point, that's a very interesting issue about different kinds of play. I suppose a couple of things. One thing is, of course, there's other games like chess, various games, those sort of board games which are all about world domination, right? So there are ways in which play itself kind of starts to tip over into thinking about mastery, okay? But more fundamentally, I suppose what I'd say is, I think that you're right, that the kind of science as a system and aspects of it are definitely pretty disenchanting. Right? Actually, the way scientists behave can be pretty disenchanting because they can behave very badly. I suppose, my point is kind of more basically that the thing that makes somebody wants to become a scientist, particularly when they're younger, and establishing themselves, what keeps them at it is a sort of more childlike, more innocent approach. Then they kind of get spoiled potentially. Or not. Not always. Some people remain — Max Perutz's obituary in the Times ended, Max Perutz was a wonderful man or a wonderful human being. The great can be good. That's because great people often aren't very good. But Perutz was actually quite a good man, as well as being a great scientist. And so I suppose the point is that people can maintain an innocence or an idealism, but many people become very kind of slightly spoiled by — the funny thing is, I think, what keeps people at it, what causes people to become scientists and stay up overnight doing the work they need to do and really sacrificing other interests too is a kind of more childlike aspect to it, particularly when they're young. But you're right. You're right. The play becomes pretty serious, pretty deadly at times. I think I can't comment at all on Weber. But in terms of the issue of commitment, yeah, I mean, I think there's also — yes, I mean, I think you're right. I think there's a difference. That's an interesting point to have made. It's an interesting distinction. Because it's true that I would say that there's a kind of you need a faith, a commitment, as you were saying, Weber said. And I suppose there are ways in which that can be just sort of followed in a sort of rote way, rather than it being something which you're resonating with. And so it could even be a little bit analogous to what Brandon was talking about, in terms of people who observe particular forms of life because they're associated with a particular religious tradition and the difference between that and actually believing in the religion.

(outro)

Brandon: Alright, folks. That's a wrap for this episode. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with someone who would find it of interest. Also, please subscribe and leave us a review if you haven't already. Thanks, and see you next time.