Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

IN DEFENSE OF DESTRUCTIVE CRITICISM (A Dialogue between a Critic C and an Apologist A in an Unnamed Medical School) PETR SKRABANEK* C: I propose that we exchange our usual roles. It is your habit to accuse me of destructive criticism. On this occasion let me defend criticism against your attack, destructive as it may be. A: You know that I hate to be destructively critical; it is your perverse pleasure. Lucifer is the patron saint of your negativistic revolt. Ortega y Gasset was right when he said that the only true revolt is creation—the revolt against nothingness [I]. C: Don't quote Ortega as the Devil quotes the Bible. Ortega spoke as a philosopher; he was not concerned with the refutation of medical theories. A: I grant you that he did not speak as a scientist. His point, nevertheless , does not lose its sharpness. To create ideas is a positive activity, while you, on the other hand, seem to enjoy demolishing what others have built with love. C: You know the story about Potemkin, the lover of Catherine II. She entrusted him with money with which to improve the muzhiks' lot. Potemkin squandered the money on pleasure instead of using it for building villages as he was expected to do. When Catherine went to inspect them, Potemkin fooled her by hastily having erected only the front walls facing the road along which her equipage was to travel. I suspect that you prefer instinctively Potemkin's villages to an empty space. Why not pull the sham gables down? How could you criticise Potemkin's constructions constructively? A: You are not being fair. Your Potemkin's village is a case of the ""Department of Community Health, University of Dublin, Trinity College, 196 Pearse Street, Dublin 2, Ireland.© 1986 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1-5982/87/300 1 -05 1 3$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 30, 1 ¦ Autumn 1986 \ 19 Emperor's New Clothes. There is nothing wrong with calling a sham a sham. What I mean is something different. God created a beautiful world, and it was Lucifer who was jealous. C: What on earth was there for Lucifer to create? An anti-Creation? He only refused to sing praises. Besides, scientific theories and God's creation have little in common, metaphors aside. Even the highest achievements of the human mind have no eternal validity. Look what happened to Newton's laws, believed by Kant to be a priori true. Einstein put an end to it. A: Einstein was not out to get Newton, mind you. It was not a question of sour grapes. He improved on Newton. That's what constructive criticism is about. C: It's all very well, if you are an Einstein—the best armchair researcher , by the way, we've ever had. But what about the lesser mortals, like ourselves. Listen to this short passage from John Locke, who makes the point ever so humbly: "The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity; but everyone must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in the age that produces such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton , with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge" [2]. A: You are groping for straws. You try tojustify your maliciousjoy in destroying the work of others. C: Not a good work, which I admire as much as you do. However, one should be permitted to identify error without being required to correct it. Everyone would profit from it. The weeding out and extermination of pests are not pleasurable activities, but they serve to enhance the pleasures ofa well-kept garden. Why shouldn't one be free to say that a piano is out of tune, without knowing how to tune it, or, to take it a step further, to tune a piano without being able to...