Wieseltier bristles at my suggestion that science is distinguished by the value it places on the thorough-going intelligibility of the world—on the relentless search beyond the explanation of a phenomenon for a still deeper explanation of the explicans. Yet he legislates that the humanities may tolerate no such curiosity. The humanities are “autonomous,” he stipulates, and explanation must stop with “the irreducible reality of inwardness, and its autonomy as a category of understanding.” Begging the question, Wieseltier thinks it is incriminating that I “deny that the differences between the various realms of human existence, and between the disciplines that investigate them, are final,” that I “transgress the borders between realms,” that I “reject the momentous distinction between the study of the natural world and the study of the human world.” Yes, I do all these things, and fortunately, so do many of the humanities scholars with whom I have interacted over the decades, who have no interest in halting their search for explanation at Wieseltier’s border fence.

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that even the most science-indifferent humanities scholar would accept Wieseltier’s insistence that the interpretation of works of art must be restricted to pure “meaning” without attention to “technical matters.” They would be surprised to learn, for example, that meter and sound in poetry, lighting and perspective in painting, pitch and rhythm in music, and other phenomena at the border of art and science are irrelevant to understanding the meaning of a work. But then Wieseltier’s incuriosity extends to an examination of meaning as well. Tautologies such as “a man’s experience of his father is his experience of his father” seem to satisfy him, while genuinely startling new insights from the sciences—the theory of parent-offspring conflict, the paucity of lasting effects of the family environment on the formation of personality, the constructive nature of autobiographical memory—are flattened in his telling to “a hunt for phenotypes,” of “outcomes fixed by chromosomes.” Talk about reductionism!

Wieseltier is also offended by the suggestion that another value of science is worthy of emulation, namely that the acquisition of knowledge is hard and often requires laborious empirical tests. Let me explain what I mean with an example. In defending religion, Wieseltier writes, “Only a small minority of believers in any of the scriptural religions, for example, have ever taken scripture literally.” Really? How does he know? Wieseltier writes as if his say-so is all we need to move on to the next step of his argument. Let’s put aside the astonishing “have ever” part of the claim, and confine ourselves to the present. Recent polls show that between 30 percent (Gallup) to 60 percent (Rasmussen) of Americans believe that the Bible is “the actual word of God to be taken literally, word for word”—hardly “a small minority.” Figures for believers in the world’s other scriptural religions are even higher: According to a recent Pew survey, between 54 and 93 percent of Muslims in the countries surveyed believe that the Quran should be read “literally, word for word.” The point is not that Wieseltier is factually mistaken in this assertion. The point is that a more scientific mindset would recognize that an empirical proposition demands empirical verification. The era in which an essayist can get away with ex cathedra pronouncements on factual questions in social science is coming to an end.

The very possibility of a synthetic understanding of human affairs, in which knowledge from the sciences can contribute to the humanities without taking them over, is inconceivable to Wieseltier. Beginning with its tasteless title, his article steadily escalates the paranoia, tilting at the position I explicitly disavow, namely that science is “all there is,” that it is “a sufficient approach to ... the human universe,” that the humanities must “submit to the sciences, and be subsumed by them,” that they must be the “handmaiden of the sciences, and dependent upon the sciences for their advance and even their survival,” that a “a scientific explanation, will expose the underlying sameness” and “absorb all the realms into a single realm, into their realm.” If you are a scholar in the humanities, and fear that my essay advocates any of these lunatic positions, I am here to tell you: relax. As I wrote, and firmly believe, “the promise of science is to enrich and diversify the intellectual tools of humanistic scholarship, not to obliterate them.”