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The basic assumption is that there exist objective universal laws governing all natural phenomena, that these laws can be ascertained by scientific enquiry, and that once such laws are known, we can, starting from any set of initial conditions, predict perfectly the future and the past. It is often argued that this concept of science is merely a secularization of Christian thought, representing merely a substitution of "nature" for God, and that the requisite assumption of certainty is derived from and is parallel to the truths of religious profession. I do not wish here to start a theological discussion per se, but it has always struck me that the belief in an omnipotent God, a view common at least to the so-called Western religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), is in fact both logically and morally incompatible with a belief in certainty, or at least in any human certainty. For if God is omnipotent, then humans cannot constrain him by edicting what they believe is eternally true, or God would not then be omnipotent. No doubt, the scientists of early modern times, many of whom were quite pious, may have thought they were arguing theses consonant with the reigning theology, and no doubt many theologians of the time gave them cause to think that, but it is simply not true that a belief in scientific certainty is a necessary complement to religious belief systems. Furthermore, the belief in certainty is now under severe, and I would say very telling, attack within natural science itself. I need only refer you to Ilya Prigogine's latest book, La fin des certitudes[2], in which he argues that, even in the inner sanctum of natural science, dynamic systems in mechanics, the systems are governed by the arrow of time and move inevitably far from equilibrium. These new views are called the science of complexity, partly because they argue that Newtonian certitudes hold true only in very constrained, very simple systems, but also because they argue that the universe manifests the evolutionary development of complexity, and that the overwhelming majority of situations cannot be explained by assumptions of linear equilibria and time-reversibility. [2] Paris: Odile Jacob, 1996. (In English: The End of Certainty (New York: Free Press, 1997.) The third conclusion is that in human social systems, the most complex systems in the universe, therefore the hardest to analyze, the struggle for the good society is a continuing one. Furthermore, it is precisely in periods of transition from one historical system to another one (whose nature we cannot know in advance) that human struggle takes on the most meaning. Or to put it another way, it is only in such times of transition that what we call free will outweighs the pressures of the existing system to return to equilibria. Thus, fundamental change is possible albeit never certain, and this fact makes claims on our moral responsibility to act rationally, in good faith, and with strength to seek a better historical system. We cannot know what this would look like in structural terms, but we can lay out the criteria on the basis of which we would call an historical system substantively rational. It is a system that is largely egalitarian and largely democratic. Far from seeing any conflict between these two objectives, I would argue that they are intrinsically linked to each other. An historical system cannot be egalitarian if it is not democratic, because an undemocratic system is one that distributes power unequally, and this means that it will also distribute all other things unequally. And it cannot be democratic if it is not egalitarian, since an inegalitarian system means that some have more material means than others and therefore inevitably will have more political power. The fourth conclusion I draw is that uncertainty is wondrous, and that certainty, were it to be real, would be moral death. If we were certain of the future, there could be no moral compulsion to do anything. We would be free to indulge every passion and pursue every egoism, since all actions fall within the certainty that has been ordained. If everything is uncertain, then the future is open to creativity, not merely human creativity but the creativity of all nature. It is open to possibility, and therefore to a better world. But we can only get there as we are ready to invest our moral energies in its achievement, and as we are ready to struggle with those who, under whatever guise and for whatever excuse, prefer an inegalitarian, undemocratic world. (Go to top of paper) (Go to top of list of papers)
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I. Wallerstein, "Uncertainty and Creativity" (Go to Fernand Braudel Center Home Page)
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