Winner of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2023

SHANE CONNEELY

Catriona Crowe, one of the prize’s judges said at the award ceremony today, 13th August 2023, in Kilkenny: "Our theme this year for the Hubert Butler Essay Prize was “How far can we trust science?” The recent appearance of Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer has created new interest in the dilemmas confronting scientists in the exercise of their often awesome powers, in the tension between solving a practical problem and the implications of that solution. During the pandemic, we became used to admiring and even venerating scientists for their ingenuity and speed in creating life-saving vaccines, unless we were in the grip of highly unscientific conspiracy theories such as the efficacy of swallowing bleach, or beliefs that the vaccine manufacturers were implanting chips into our doses of vaccine to facilitate mass surveillance. By and large, science, in the form of the vaccines and public health measures won, and millions of lives were saved as a result.

J Robert Oppenheimer was faced with fiendishly difficult moral decisions about the use to which his creation, the first atomic bomb, was to be put, and he didn’t even have control over those decisions. It is to the credit of Christopher Nolan, and our own Cillian Murphy, who gives a superlative performance as Oppenheimer, that the difficulty, moral ambiguity and moral consequences of the Manhattan Project are not elided or evaded, and that Oppenheimer’s tortured regret at the destruction of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is fully apparent.  People leave the cinema asking questions instead of proclaiming certainty, which is surely what the scientific method is all about.

We were very pleased with the quality and versatility of the essays we received this year, 19 in all. Subjects covered included climate change, artificial intelligence, cosmology, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, vaccines, genetic modification, the “post-truth world”, religion, and a delightful essay on history as a science. As you can see, plenty of room for heroes and villains in that range of ideas. Also dealt with was what scientists call “the hard problem”: the unknown mechanism through which humans are self-aware. AI, now exemplified in the evils of Chatbots and the bane of teachers’ lives, came in for most attention. You’ll be relieved to hear that most of our essayists don’t believe the machines are going to outsmart us and turn us into slaves.

The winning essay, by Shane Conneely, who works for Chambers Ireland, begins by rejoicing in the vast quantity of information about science available on YouTube from experts in various fields, all anxious to explain complicated and vital processes to us for nothing. Then he points out that, despite this cornucopia of scientific knowledge waiting for us, most of us, perforce, trust science every day by using objects and processes which we do not understand: “Whether it is washing machines or WhatsApp, we are surrounded by things we use in spite of our ignorance.”

The essay moves on to question the characters of many scientists in the past: Ronald Fischer, statistician and racist, Francis Galton, polymath, statistician and the father of eugenics, James Watson, discoverer of DNA and racist, and the odious Richard Lynn, until 2018 a professor emeritus of psychology in the University of Ulster and unashamed racist and white supremacist. Lynn doesn’t even have the virtue of useful scientific research to his credit, unlike the other three. Conneely uses him as an example of both bad scientific process and unwillingness to learn from peers because of his motivations.

The question of who or what to trust – science, scientists, other interests – is the basic issue in this essay. Sometimes we have to separate the science from the scientist, as with Fischer, Galton and Watson: their odious views do not detract from the brilliance of their scientific scholarship. George Orwell provided us with a handy guide to this process when he wrote that Salvador Dali, surrealist painter and ardent fascist, was “a magnificent draughtsman and a disgusting human being”.

Conneely concludes with an exploration of the hard problem of consciousness: he doubts that neuroscience can answer the question of how we know who we are. Another villain, Elon Musk, gets called out for his futile, expensive and cruel attempts to do just that. Plucking out the heart of our mystery, to adapt Hamlet, will probably take more than algorithms and scanners. The essay ends with a visit to Sarajevo, in a nod to our presiding genius, Hubert Butler, where the author discerns murderous intentionality in the bullet holes at head level to be found all along its buildings, but points out that science cannot get to the root of that intentionality. “Science is only one of those things that we do, and we can only trust it as far as we can trust each other.”

We have two runners-up, Stuart Begley and Desmond Traynor. Begley begins with a glorious description of the physical act of listening to Henryk Gorecki’s Copernican Symphony, composed to mark the 500th birthday of the great astronomer. He then concludes that an account of the merely physical act of listening is insufficient to describe the full experience of hearing the music. That requires unscientific subjective language, which bring us again to the hard problem of self-awareness. He excavates the scientific response to the problem and finds it wanting. Along the way, he draws our attention to some of the many scientific mistakes of the past, including the interesting idea that “women engaged in higher education deplete energy that should otherwise be used in procreation.” Smart, hard-working Moms everywhere, take note. He concludes, as does our winner, that the purely physical approach to the location of human consciousness is doomed to fail.

Desmond Traynor begins with a quote from Bertrand Russell: ‘Science in itself appears to me neutral, that is to say, it increases men’s power whether for good or for evil.’ He uses Arthur Koestler, Thomas Kuhn and our own John Banville to illustrate the necessity for paradigm shifts in knowledge to advance science, and has a terrific quote from CP Snow on the invincible and contemptuous ignorance of certain humanities luminaries when it comes to science, which ends: “So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.” He points out the dangers of disinformation with the example of Cambridge Analytica’s decisive influence in both the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump. Then he takes us on a thoroughly enjoyable tour of science fiction books and movies, and their representations of human beings’ interactions with cleverer machines. Remember Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey? He brings us back to Oppenheimer with JG Ballard’s justification for dropping the bombs on Japan – they saved his family’s lives. And he quotes the great Lou Reed on the miracle of isotopes as cancer treatment. His final question is: “how far can we trust humans?”

All of these essays are serious and learned explorations of the question we asked, and it was difficult to choose between them. The takeaway would seem to be that we can trust the scientific process if it is carried out properly, but not all scientists and certainly not all humans. Discernment is needed, and that takes some effort. In a world riddled with misinformation, disinformation, and “alternative facts”, we all need to be educated about how to find credible and trustworthy sources of information. Hubert Butler’s marvellous essays are among those sources, and it is to the credit of Lilliput Press that we can still read them and educate ourselves on subjects which will always matter. - Catriona Crowe, August 2023"

On being awarded the prize Shane Conneely said, ““I’m obviously grateful to the organisers and the judges of the Hubert Butler Essay Prize 2023, and not just for selecting my essay. I’m grateful to them for creating the opportunity to have a think about these ideas and also set them down in ink. Most of all, I’m grateful to them for the introduction to Hubert Butler.

“My first encounter with Hubert was a couple of years ago when I saw another winning essay in print, and after a bit of googling his work proved fruitless, I made the journey to Lilliput Press’s shop and bought Prof. Foster’s book there. It has been a joy to dip in and out of Hubert’s work. Whether it is his attempts at securing asylum for Viennese Jews, the class conflicts and insecurities of Leningrad academics, or the true tale of who didn’t dig up Tara, Butler had an enormously empathetic eye for people, even as history obliterated them. 

“I’m especially grateful to the organisers for inspiring me to set aside some time to think and write about things which are not my usual domain. I touch off this gently in my essay, but it is hard to find and justify the time it takes to set out your thoughts on paper. In previous years, I wasn’t organised enough to write a piece for submission, or maybe I wasn’t confident enough about having something sufficiently interesting to say. 

“This is the first time that I have submitted anything to a competition like this, so what I’ll say to next year’s winner is that you shouldn’t hold yourself back, and I look forward to reading the thoughts you’ll soon be sharing with us.””

Shane Conneely is first, a storyteller, his day job sees him leading the Chambers Ireland policy team in his attempt to reshape the world for the better, albeit through the media of crunched numbers and graphs, or interminable submissions which a captive audience of civil servants have to wade their way though. If not talking or writing or reading, Shane has probably thrown a tent onto a bicycle and has disappeared off to see how far across the continent his legs will take him. He is curious, is full of notions, and is delighted to be the winner of the 2023 Hubert Butler Essay Prize.

Read Shane’s winning essay here.

John Banville, Honorary Patron of the Prize said, "A timely and intricately argued essay on the limits of what we can do in, and expect of, science and its poor relation, technology."

The prize was judged by Catriona Crowe, Roy Foster (Chair), Nicholas Grene, and Barbara Schwepcke and is designed to reflect Hubert Butler’s interest in the common ground between the European nation states that emerged after the First World War; his concern with the position of religious and ethnic minorities; his life and writings as an encapsulation of the mantra ‘Think globally, act locally’; the importance of the individual conscience; and his work with refugees.