In Le Hasard et la Nécessité, Jacques Monod argues for a worldview based on scientific knowledge that acknowledges that humans are the product of chance. He believes that the contradiction between scientific progress and materialist values is the source of modern anxiety, and that humans must overcome their existential crisis by rejecting materialism and adopting a socialist ideal based on scientific ethics.
Le Hasard et la Nécessité Chapter 9: The Kingdom and the Maw of Darkness
In the final chapter, titled “The Kingdom and the Fall of Darkness,” Jacques Monod emphasizes the need to accept our situation in the world, which has been thrown into it by chance, but also to move away from materialistic values and to base both our judgments and our actions on scientific knowledge. He argues that modern people are caught in a contradiction: they enjoy the conveniences of science, but they also seek to quell their existential anxiety by pursuing materialistic values. However, he takes a somewhat extreme position, warning that if science continues to develop in this state, it will eventually destroy our souls and lead us into the darkness.
Humans as cultural evolution
Initially, humans were animals that survived through physical evolution like any other species, but at some point, we became the only species to discover the world of “ideas” – the ability to reconstruct and express our subjective thoughts in addition to information related to survival, such as food and shelter. From then on, human mental evolution proceeded very rapidly, and the evolution of ideas and language led to cultural evolution. This allowed humans to unite in groups, overcome physical limitations, and become a powerful species that dominated the environment. It was no longer competition between humans and animals that mattered to humans, but competition between humans, and cultural conditions such as group cohesion became the key factor in human evolution rather than physical conditions.
This shows that humans are evolving in a way that betrays Darwin’s theory of natural selection. The physically frail and less intelligent are no longer culled. The conditions of natural selection that helped species survive and evolve in the past have become irrelevant in the modern era in the name of culture and morality. This is a potential “threat”. In addition, humans are faced with the traumatic situation of having to redefine their relationship with the world according to objective knowledge from nature. This is a crisis for human beings, who have been convinced of their meaning by the distinction between man and nature, endowing them with a soul. In the midst of this anxiety, various ideas emerged to organize human thought. Like the evolution of species, ideas evolved through selection and culling, and the most powerful of these were those that calmed the anxiety within man.
An essential explanation of existence and society
The aforementioned human anxiety extends to the question of why individuals should behave properly as members of society and adhere to norms. Today, we have inherited the need to resolve these anxieties, and humans have sought to explain themselves and the world in a variety of ways in order to do so. These explanations have formed the basis of cultures, including mythology, religion, philosophy, and science. These explanations take the form of stories, in which the source of power that drives individuals and groups is expressed in the form of a hero or prophet, a transcendent law, or a central concept or idea.
The uncomfortable coexistence of “explanations” and science
Science sprouted among anxious humans because they saw it as a framework for knowledge and practice. The development of science has allowed humans to enjoy the convenience of life and material wealth, but progress without fully digesting the meaning and ideas of science has led to a crisis. Science fundamentally denies the materialistic attitude and allows only complete objectivity. Science is effectively at odds with so much of our spiritual heritage, which has helped to eliminate individual existential anxiety and foster group cohesion. However, most modern people ignore the fundamental message of science and enjoy its convenience. On the one hand, they pursue many materialistic values that strongly connect them to the world in order to relieve their existential anxiety. However, events such as the degradation of the natural environment and the dropping of the atomic bomb made it impossible to ignore the potential destructive power of science any longer. The remnants of science have been rejected, and modern people have become ambivalent, unable to reject science outright but still believing in moralism. But science is not subject to any moral judgment. When confronted with the worldview of science, we realize that humans are just an accidental product of the universe, and that human-centered values are also an invention of humans.
Values and knowledge
The author rejects the idea that values and knowledge are two different domains. First, the criteria of value and knowledge cannot be separated in behavior. To perform an action is to recognize the value of the action and to acquire new knowledge through existing knowledge. In addition, the act of defining what is true or false presupposes a value judgment. The axioms that define an object as the absolute standard of knowledge are not prior knowledge, but only the result of value judgments. For this reason, the author views the process of selecting axioms that form the basis of knowledge as an ethical judgment, which he defines as the ethics of knowledge.
Unlike teleological values, which assume that nature imposes norms on humans, the ethics of knowledge is an anthropocentric ethics in which humans choose their own standards and act accordingly. This ethic empowered the human spirit, allowing humans to overcome the limitations of nature and achieve scientific progress.
The ethics of knowledge
So, can an ethic of knowledge completely replace materialistic faith? The author believes that if humans actively pursue true knowledge, they can overcome individual and societal anxieties, and to some extent, they can be freed from the guilt caused by the gap between animal instincts and lofty ideas. By acknowledging our animal nature, we can also honor the positive forces within us, such as creation and effort. Thus, Jacques Monod sees human beings who follow the ethics of knowledge as beings who affirm themselves and strive to realize their ideals.
Furthermore, the author is convinced that the ethics of knowledge will play the ultimate role in realizing the ideal of “socialism.” Jacques Monet’s argument is understandable when we recall that in the early 1900s, just before Monet was born, socialist parties were formed in many European countries and socialist ideas were popular in France. France had a successful revolution but struggled to establish a socialist party, and Jacques Monnet seems to sympathize with the frustrations of young people in the process. However, he emphasizes that in order for socialism to succeed, only an ideology based on the ethics of knowledge can be valid, rejecting the illusion of a watered-down theory. He concludes the chapter by presenting the extremes of “kingdom” and “darkness” to illustrate the crossroads at which French youth are standing and the opposite outcome.
My thoughts
Jacques Monod ends his long journey from the contingency of life to make a powerful argument about humans and society. As a scientist, I was impressed by his insights into the fundamental insecurities of human existence, the rise of the water theory, and the need for science to be based on an ethics of knowledge. However, I felt that the allotted time was only about one-ninth of the book, which did not fully explain the ideas behind the book.
First, the author’s use of the term “ethics of knowledge” can be confusing. As a worldview in contrast to materialism, the ethics of knowledge represents an independent worldview in which humans voluntarily adopt values rather than derive meaning from nature. On the other hand, when it is said that the ethics of knowledge follows the axiom of objectivity, the meaning is more narrowly interpreted. When the ethics of knowledge is understood in the latter sense, it is difficult to understand how subjective and personal experiences such as “art” and “poetry” coexist with the ethics of knowledge.
It is also not fully explained why the first half of the book mentions human cultural evolution and its possible genetic decline. I had hoped that Jacques Monod would provide a solution to this problem later on, but in the end, it is hard to see how the ethics of knowledge or socialist ideals he emphasizes can prevent genetic decline. Rather, one wonders if socialist arguments would exacerbate the problem that Jacques Monod outlined by reducing the unfairness of competition due to genetic differences.
