Political science

Kenneth Minogue

The Limits of Human Nature edited by Jonathan Benthall (Allen Lane, DI.) One of the indestructible projects of the modern world is that of bringing together experts in different fields to focus their specialised knowledge upon a single problem. The academic world, for example, contains experts who study minds, animal behaviour, organisms, cultures, communication, the soul, and similar entities which might be expected to add up to 'man,' rather as Dr Frankenstein made a man out of a collection of disparate bits. Like the passion for coalition governments which always appears at times of crisis, this project depends upon the assumption that an assemblage of the best parts will add up to the best whole. It is as if we could create the perfect woman out of Garbo's face and Monroe's body. The Limits of Human Nature is an orgy of interdisciplinary cross-fertilisation in exactly this sense, and any sophisticated reader will see at once that, academically speaking, it rests upon a mistake. Such a reader, however, would be unwise to jump immediately to the conclusion that it is valueless. The experts assembled here cannot communicate as exponents of specialised disciplines, but they can meet so long as they transpose what they know into thoughts and images comprehensible to the public at large. The inevitable result of the enterprise is popularisation.

The obvious thing about the popularisation of science is that it is a raid upon specialisation in the name of whatever moral, social and political opinions the writers already have. It is an exercise in justification rather than inquiry. Hence it is that, apart from Alan Ryan on Hobbes and Rousseau (whose subject matter allows him to stick to his lase), all the writers assembled here by Jonathan Benthall present us with a familiar range of moral opinions on human questions, about whose fundamentals 'science' has nothing to say. It is no surprise to discover that Raymond Williams regards 'social darwinism' as a pretty immoral ideology, or that Arthur Koestler considers man a bit of a misfit in the universe, but they are both entirely typical in presenting fundamentally rhetorical arguments which rest upon racy bits of scientific discourse for support. This is, one might say, a literature of science faction. It is significant that one of the best of these essays is by Cornelius Ernst, the only theologian in the company, for theology is the one subject represented in the book whose central preoccupation actually is the nature of man. The other disciplines are trespassers within the field. We learn much from the contributors about the social cohesion of the higher primates, genetic codes, deep structures, the relation between nature and nurture in determining human behaviour, and other similarly current intellectual preoccupations. Every so often we run into uninformative jargon, as when we are told that "it does seem undeniable that an activity like language-understanding must involve the interaction of dynamic processes" but in general the essays are clear and lucid. It is an attractive collection, and so long as one does not mistake it for what it is not, a valuable one.

All the contributors, however, are haunted by one bogus question which becomes the basis of the final contribution of Robert M. Young. This is the issue of whether or not science is itself ideological, and consequently riddled with political assumptions. The real answer to this question is that it is not science, but popularised science, which is thoroughly political. If, for example, an ethnologist argues that hierarchial social arrangements are a standard feature of primate behaviour, and therefore that attempts to introduce social equality are biologically doomed, then he is clearly not presenting a scientific argument but a rather common political justification. To jump to the conclusion that it is science itself which is ideological is, these days, a common leap, but that does not save it from being a vulgar error, vulgar because it rests upon ignorance of what scientists are up to. For it is clear enbugh that scientists deal in hypotheses constructed out of the abstract technicalities of the discipline in which they deal, and that

• from the propositions of these hypotheses nothing political is or could be logically implied. In order that moral or political implications should be derjved, the hypotheses must first be converted into ordinary discourse by the process I have called popularisation. The actual situation is lucidly and economically stated in a contribution in this collection by Liam Hudson: ". . . the impartial observer is a mythical beast . . . the first step towards any rigorous and impartial understanding seems to lie in the acceptance that the psychologist, like the people round him, is fallible." Indeed so, but that does not prevent the psychologist from constructing a body of theory that is in some sense at least, scientific. It simply means that when a 'scientist' turns into an 'expert' he is engaging in a different kind of activity.

One is thus at first disposed to sympathise with Mr Young's comments upon the general difficulties of exploring the limits of human nature, but this sympathy is soon dissipated when one discbvers that he had converted the contingent difficulties of scientific inquiry into an essential feature of all science. The best way of communicating what is wrong with this contribution is by attending to the coterie use of two crucial words. The first is 'critical' and the second is 'naive.' Mr Young is a great one for something that he calls "the critical approach," but like many other who use this expression as a shibboleth, he employs the term 'critical' to approve of those who ask his questions and arrive at his answers. The only serious way to be critical in this field is to keep before one's mind the question of whether it is true that such and such a social consequence follows from such and such a proposition supposedly supported by 'science.' The question of truth, however, is here evaded by the presentation of the doctrine that scientists are merely reflectors of something called (quite uncritically) "the social order." Instead of a rigorous argument, we are presented with lengthy textual citations from modern masters like Wilhelm Reich and the later writings of Marcuse to the effect that "scientific consciousness is political consciousness." No evidence whatever is presented for this unlikely equation, but those inclined to reject it are abused as having "deferential attitudes," whilst those who accpet it are praised as taking "a critical view of science, one which demystifies the treatment of men as things completely assimilable to the laws of the natural sciences as now under

stood and as illegitimately generalised."

This is so much a man of straw that Mr Young is forced to move outside the contributors to this volume in order to find material, and the most casual inspection of the book's contents will make it clear that none of the contributors is as simple-minded as Mr Young suggests. Hence it is not surprising that he resorts to describing those who dispute that science has "political assumptions" and that it is "in the service of a particular social order" not as wrong but as 'naive,' which is the standard term for characterising those who have not had the benefit of the Marxist revelation. There are interesting things to be said about the relation between scientific popularisation and political attitudes, but Mr Young has preferred merely to state — uncritically — what is currently the fashionable wisdom.

Kenneth Minogue's latest book, The Concept of a University, was published earlier this year. high-powered salesmanship and wilful desecration of other people's secret gardens, in favour of the lost innocence of 'Steamboat Willie' and 'Mickey's Trailer.'

At which point did the infallibility of the Disney machine no longer apply? In Christopher Finch's text, which combines as much candour as is possible in a prestige operation of this kind, we are told that in 1936 H. G. Wells, on a visit to Hollywood, described Disney as a genius. Looking once more at the series of shorts which prompted Wells to say such a thing, I am inclined to agree. Some of the most memorable images ever imprinted on the retina of my recollection are Disney images, and when I recall the superlative surrealism of a pearl like Goofy as an Olympic athlete, I wonder once more why people make such a fuss of a wet fish like Snow White. Goofy is one of the inspired fictious strokes of our era and in the days when he shared the kingdom with Donald and Pluto, after the sad and frankly mysterious disappearance of Clarabelle Cow and Horace Horsecollar, but before the takeover by feature-length sentimentalists like Bambi and Dumbo, Disney's art was surely at its zenith.

And then, on page 286 on this mighty book (it weighs half a stone) we get the following brave confession by Mr Finch:

The next feature, "Alice in Wonderland," failed because it did not capture the sophisticated atmosphere of Lewis Carroll's book and also lacks, except in a few isolated scenes, the authority of the Disney touch.

Here we are confronted with both of the two factors in the Disney equation which give us so many misgivings about his eventual place in the scheme of things. In reading The Art of Disney it becomes more apparent on every page that the time passed years and years ago when a Disney film was a film by Disney. Everything was done in committee, and time after time in the text we are brought up short by the news that this or that stroke of brilliance, which we had always thought of as a Disney stroke, in fact had been performed by one of his hirelings. Where does Disney end and Disney Enterprises begin? Whose hand is guiding the brush on which frames?

But suppose we concede and agree to give Disney the credit for sparking off the whole business, which irrefutably he did. That still leaves the wretched mess of Alice in Wonderland, to say nothing of subsequent disasters like The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and Winnie the Pooh. I know that Winnie has been one of the greatest financial bonanzas any moviemaker ever enjoyed, and that trillions of children, my own included, have derived limitless joy from the Disney Pooh images. And indeed those images are superb in themselves. But they have precious little to do with A. A. Milne's Pooh; similarly Disney's Mowgli (idiotically pronounced Moe Glee) and Shere Khan (even more idiotically pronounced Sheer Can) constitute so wholesale a despoliation of the originals that I doubt if even Kipling deserves such treatment.

It seems that there were, and still are, two things that the Disney outfit has shown itself incapable of doing. First, it is not to be trusted with cartoon images of human beings, all of which turn out to be compromises between the cute and the mawkish, typified by the hideous Disney version of Peter Pan, which admittedly was given a flying start so far as hideousness is concerned, by its creator, Sir James Barrie. And second, the Disney brigade has no faint idea of what, where or why England is or was, and should therefore be barred by divine act from attempting the transmutation into celluloid of any of the classic English children's stories.

The second half of The Art of Disney shows the advance, if that is the right word, from Mickey to Mary Poppins, via the eccentric route of The Living Desert, and in looking

back, for the very first time in my life, on the Disney process in its entirety, I have to say that for all its failures, its excesses of poor taste, its desecration of poor old defenceless Bill the Lizard and Moley, it has achieved literally miracles. The pink elephant sequence in "Dumbo" should alone get Disney off with a light sentence at the bar of heaven, and as for the glories of the early days, the several virtues of The Art of Disney include the magnificent clarity of the reproductions, the loving care with which the techniques of the assorted artists have been revealed, the sheer delight with which those who designed the book were respectful towards the raw material at their disposal. A book, in fact which is no more reviewable than Mickey ever was.