Perowne’s scientific rationalism is itself a form of faith

Evidence

Perowne is an archrationalist, taking comfort in his professional capabilities and the ordered certainties offered by science. In particular, he is committed to a Darwinian perspective that offers a more acceptable mythology than creationism’s supernatural explanations. Darwin’s summation—“There is grandeur in this view of life”—in the final paragraphs of Origin of Species becomes Perowne’s credo as he considers the validity of the evolutionary viewpoint: “If he ever got the call, he’d make use of evolution. What better creation myth? An unimaginable sweep of time, numberless generations spawning by infinitesimal steps complex beauty out of inert matter, driven on by the blind furies of random mutation, natural selection and environmental change, with the tragedy of forms continually dying, and lately the wonder of minds emerging and with them morality, love, art, cities—and the unprecedented bonus of this story happening to be demonstrably true.” His positivist convictions and the pleasure he takes in the terminology and techniques of brain surgery at times give him feelings of godlike power. His life is ruled by decision and precision, having no space for the irrational or the random, and he dismisses the religious mindset as a “problem of reference”: “In Henry’s view such reasoning belongs on a spectrum at whose far end, rearing like an abandoned temple, lies psychosis” (17). Control is all, and Perowne is happiest in those spaces where he can exert the most command and filter out random threats to his equanimity: his luxurious Bloomsbury townhouse with its imposing library and wine cellar, his expensive car, and the operating theater. However, as the delusions of divinity suggest, Perowne’s convictions themselves have something of the quality of religious faith, and his hubris means that, from the outset, in the historical moment of threat he inhabits there is always the sense that he is riding for a fall. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 105

Categorization

• XREF: Perowne’s faith-like rationalism echoes the hubris of Changez in The Reluctant Fundamentalist — both protagonists’ self-assurance is structurally tied to their eventual undoing. — connects to: Exact science’s faith that things resemble themselves courts pataphysics — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 361
• SEED: The ‘creed of rationalism as its own faith’ framing applies directly to analyzing Changez’s pre-9/11 American self-confidence as a form of belief set up to collapse.