In any event, would the altruists envisioned by Lonergan be able to work together in the spirit of eusociality with the kind of secular-humanist altruists envisioned by Professor Wilson?
Professor Wilson mentions "the two great branches of learning, science and the humanities." At first blush, this sounds like he is preparing to set up another one of his disjunctive contrasts. Indeed, the disjunctive contrast between the spirit of science and the spirit of the humanities is a commonplace. Surprisingly, Professor Wilson plans to discuss the unity of knowledge in this subsection of his book.
Professor Wilson claims that science and the humanities "have arisen from the same wellspring of creative thought." Amen, I say to that.
C. G. Jung, M.D. (1875-1961), the Swiss psychiatrist and psychological theorist, considered the unconscious to be the wellspring of creative thought. And so did the American cultural historian and theorist Walter J. Ong, S.J. (1912-2003), who received his Ph.D. in English from HarvardUniversity in 1955.
So if science and the humanities arise from the same wellspring of creativity, as Professor Wilson claims, and if the unconscious is the wellspring of creative thought, as Jung and Ong claim, then shouldn't we try to figure out more effective ways to tap into the wellspring of creative thought?
I would say that this is what we should concentrate our time and attention on figuring out.
But Professor Wilson's attention does not go in this direction.
However, he does note that "a large part of human creativity is generated by the inevitable and necessary conflict between the individual and group levels of natural selection." No doubt this is true.
Subsequently, Professor Wilson says, "Science builds and tests competitive hypotheses from evidence and imagination." He clearly recognizes here the role of imagination in science. More importantly, he recognizes the useful way in which science has incorporated the spirit of conflict in testing competing hypotheses.
In Ong's book FIGHTING FOR LIFE: CONTEST, SEXUALITY, AND CONSCIOUSNESS (1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Ong extensively discusses the spirit of conflict and testing, which he refers to as the agonistic spirit. (The Greek word "agon" means contest, struggle.)
However, Professor Wilson says that "the founders of the Romantic tradition of literature, including some of the greatest poets of all time, [rejected] the presumption of the Enlightenment worldview" during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that he champions. This observation is true enough.
However, I should point out that Professor Wilson does not give evidence of knowing anything in particular about Western cultural history before Copernicus and Galileo.
In Ong's book RHETORIC, ROMANCE, AND TECHNOLOGY: STUDIES IN THE INTERACTION OF EXPRESSION AND CULTURE (1971), Ong does give evidence of knowing Western cultural history from antiquity down to the present time. He offers a more comprehensive account of the historical emergence of both the Romantic tradition in literature and the arts, and the technoscientific era exemplified in the Industrial Revolution.
Finally, I should mention the passage in which Professor Wilson manifests a little humor at his own expense:
"When Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978, I dismissed it as a minor achievement for a scientist, scarcely worth listing. When I won the same prize the following year, it wondrously became a major literary award of which scientists should take special note."
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