Science is for Westerners what the Catholic Church was for Cortés and Pizarro

1941. Simone Weil is struck by a collection of recently published writings by Max Planck. She sees in Planck, much more than in Einstein, the person who has caused a “radical break in the development of science.” The idea of quanta is “extraordinary and subversive in itself,” even if perhaps it is wrong, in some of its applications. But it will become the new foundation of the world. There is then a strange fact: as soon as Planck moves away from quanta, everything he says is banal. He speaks like a decent man “in the ordinary meaning of the word,” possessed of good sense, “which is already much.” But no more. So the world is said to be based on a science it cannot understand, discovered by a man who, beyond science, has nothing meaningful to say. And yet it is “in the name of science that we, white people […] walk the terrestrial globe as its masters, treading, at every step, on some treasure.” Science is for Westerners what the Catholic Church was for Cortés and Pizarro. Except that these still had some idea about what the sacraments were.

Two years later, in London, Simone Weil wrote the Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Toward Mankind. She wanted to single out some unshakable principles. And she questioned what to rely on. Religion was no longer of use, as it was now something “for Sunday morning.” And science? Only nonbelievers, who yet believe in everyday science, “have a triumphant feeling of inner unity.” A feeling that is illusory, however. Their morality is “in contradiction with science no less than the religion of others.”

Science, in fact, is not moral. Inasmuch as no rules of behavior are offered. Weil reaches these conclusions: “Hitler has seen it clearly. What’s more, he lets many people see it, wherever there is the presence or menace of the SS, and even further away. Today only unreserved adherence to a totalitarian system, brown, red or other, can give, so to speak, a solid illusion of inner unity. This is why it constitutes such a strong temptation for so many souls in disarray.”

Roberto Calasso
The Unnameable Present