Yesterday, the monstrous shooting of innocent people in a Tuscon, AZ shopping center parking lot, was not only an act against these persons, including a 9 year old child, a U.S. Congresswoman, and Federal Judge, and husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters of the 20 people that were shot or killed, but an act of extreme “intolerance.”

Many years ago, when I was teaching courses on science and human values, the text and video component of this graduate course for teachers was Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man. Bronowski was a British mathematician and scientist (1908 – 1974). He was also a poet, author and creator of the popular BBC documentary series, The Ascent of Man videos, and text.  I also used Bronowski’s important book, Science and Human Values, a profound book on human creativity and human dignity.

In light of yesterday’s bloodshed, and the invectiveness that has pervaded not only Arizona, but the entire country over the past few years, I felt that Bronowski’s work was relevant.  Much of this abusive language and activity is the result of the bigotry, racism, winged talk, and hate groups that have grown over the past ten years.  This is well documented by The Southern Poverty Law Center.

An important concept that is relevant here is the principle of tolerance. Tolerance is a fair, objective, and permissive attitude toward those whose opinions, practices, race, religion, nationality, etc., differ from one’s own. In the course that that I taught so many years ago, one of the 13 video programs (and Chapter 11 in Bronowski’s book–the Ascent of Man), and entitled Knowledge or Certainty, Bronowski explores the nature of knowledge and raises questions about the certainty of our knowledge, and how as human beings we should view knowledge.  As Bronowski helps us understand, one of the important principles of science that emerged in the 20th Century was The Heisenberg Principle of Uncertainty.  It was important to me at the time that Bronowski used this concept from quantum mechanics, and applied to knowledge in what Bronowski called “the real world.”  After Saturday’s massacre in Arizona, and throughout the matrix of hate that seems to pervades the backdrop of our political lives, the principle is important for us to understand.

Here is what Bronowski had to say about the Principle of Uncertainty and why he renamed it the Principle of Tolerance:

The Principle of Uncertainty is a bad name. In science or outside of it we are not uncertain; our knowledge is merely confined, within a certain tolerance. We should call it the Principle of Tolerance. And I propose that name in two senses: First, in the engineering sense, science has progressed, step by step, the most successful enterprise in the ascent of man, because it has understood that the exchange of information between man and nature, and man and man, can only take place with a certain tolerance. But second, I also use the word, passionately, about the real world.

All knowledge, all information between human beings, can only be exchanged within a play of tolerance. And that is true whether the exchange is in science, or in literature, or in religion, or in politics, or in any form of thought that aspires to dogma. It’s a major tragedy of my lifetime and yours that scientists were refining, to the most exquisite precision, the Principle of Tolerance, and turning their backs on the fact that all around them, tolerance was crashing to the ground beyond repair. The Principle of Uncertainty or, in my phrase, the Principle of Tolerance, fixed once for all the realization that all knowledge is limited.

It is an irony of history that at the very time when this was being worked out there should rise, under Hitler in Germany and other tyrants elsewhere, a counter-conception: a principle of monstrous certainty. When the future looks back on the 1930s it will think of them as a crucial confrontation of culture as I have been expounding it, the ascent of man, against the throwback to the despots’ belief that they have absolute certainty. It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false: tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

In the end, the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: ‘I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ: Think it possible you may be mistaken.’ We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.’