J.M. Coetzee’s Words of Thanks

Esteemed Rector, you and your colleagues have done me a great honour in awarding me this degree, thereby allowing me to call myself a proud graduate of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.  

As you well know, this University was founded as a free university precisely in order to keep it free of dogma, whether Catholic or Protestant, free to pursue the Enlightenment ideal of free intellectual inquiry. The University went on to play a notable part in the great expansion of scientific knowledge that took place in the latter half of the 19th century and the whole of the 20th century.  

It was my fate to spend the first six decades of my life in the 20th century, a time when the sciences flourished unimpeded. Now, in the last decades of my life, it seems to be my fate to see the sciences under attack in a way which they can never have expected.  

The attack has taken place most forcefully in the United States, a state that was – paradoxically - founded on Enlightenment principles, where an anti-scientific, anti-progressive, anti-Enlightenment movement has taken power which is suspicious of many branches of scientific knowledge and hostile to the ideal of free inquiry embodied in the modern university.  

We see this hostility expressed most dramatically in two fields: in climate science and in medical science. Anthropogenic climate change is denounced as a hoax perpetrated by a closed cabal of scientists, while established practices in preventative medicine like childhood vaccination are treated as a sinister plot to weaken the race. 

I am not here tonight in the role of lecturer. But I cannot let the occasion pass without offering a word of advice, as a man whose roots lie in the 20th century, to teachers and students of the 21st century facing this new and astonishing attack on free inquiry.  

My word of advice is this. That the anti-scientific movement is not made up solely of stupid, benighted people who have fallen prey to nonsensical conspiracy theories. It includes intelligent people who find the self-certainty, the lack of humility, of the typical scientific mindset troubling. In particular, they have trouble understanding scientific predictions based on probability. 

If the temperature rises by 1.5 degrees there is a 90% probability that the sea level will rise by a metre, say the scientists. Ordinary people don’t understand statements like these – not really, not in their full ramifications. When they are in a cynical mood, people say that couching promises and predictions in terms of probabilities is simply science’s escape clause, its way of ensuring that the scientist is never wrong.  

We throw the word probable around easily, it is part of our everyday language; but probability is actually a difficult concept, even for philosophers. Practitioners of the sciences, including the social sciences, who rely heavily on the mathematics of probability as a way of talking about the future, should think hard about what probability means in their practice and find ways of explaining their practice in a way that ordinary people can understand. Much is at stake in the present intellectual and political climate, not least the standing of science in the eyes of the public, and the reputation of the modern university.

That is all I wanted to say. Thank you, everyone, for your attention. 

picture © simon van rompay