Presently, there are a growing crowd of people who accept the principle that scientific knowledge is the most authoritative truth we are capable of achieving. With this idea accepted, anyone who does not share it becomes an ideological opponent (or enemy) or among the generous, a sort of second-class citizen unworthy of participation in the decisions that effect us all.
It has all of the trappings of any human tribe: “We believe this, which defines us, and you do not, which defines you as an outsider.” “You reject our truth, therefore, you are wrong, less relevant, and your opinion or your experience of truth is of little or no value.”
Once upon a time, the supremacy of scientific truth was an idea I endorsed. After all, what were the alternatives? The claims of truth from conflicted religions? Philosophical relativism? As I’ve aged, many of the scientific “truths” I had known as facts were replaced by other scientific truths.
It is fair to say that the strength of science is not its facts, but its methods. Science (and rationalism) gives us a very powerful set of tools to look at and understand our world with. These tools, along the way, have by accident or otherwise, been responsible for many of the defining characteristics of the last 500 years, and what many of us would consider to be the crowning achievements of humanity.
With such a glowing CV, it’s very easy to imagine the scientific method an privileged source of new understanding: a fount of new truths and understandings that could directly lead to our increased control, understanding and perhaps even enjoyment of this world.
Then something a bit more subtle came to surface: furcation. Yesterdays truths don’t so quickly disappear, and continue to underwrite today’s understandings, even as today’s truths make them invalid: Our current facts do not inform our current understandings, so they often exist out of context.
Consider the case where one science (Egyptology or Archaeology) produces a time-line for ancient Egyptian civilization, and another science, such as Geology comes up with a different time-line.
The geologist’s timeline threatens the archaeologist’s timeline, and thus threatens some of the foundational truths of Egyptology as they’re mostly accepted through the field and in turn, historical studies. It becomes a game of politics, and anti-scientific behavior (that is, intentionally preventing one line of questioning from developing to preserve favored, established “truths.”)
As I was reading the geologist’s comments 1 about weathering in the area of the Sphinx, I realized that I didn’t have the background to be able to agree or disagree. With a trip to Egypt and 3-4 years of school, maybe it would be otherwise, but how many facts do I accept as facts that I have no means of proving or disproving? More importantly, how is that different to religious faith?
If I cannot prove something to myself to be a fact, it is not a fact: It is a belief — nothing more, nothing less. To believe something simply on the basis of another person’s say-so is an act of faith.
For the sake of argument, or the sake of important political decision-making, we may accept a set of beliefs (and legitimate facts) as shared: we can call these facts — but even this, without investigation, remain beliefs.
Cascades of magisterial titles, the blessings of authority and a nest of citations do not change the reality that accepting another person’s facts, unproven to yourself as your own remains an act of faith — in the facts and if by reputation, even more so in the people offering them than the given narrative itself.
That faith may well be reinforced by regular evidence: penicillin, space shuttles, microprocessors, pasteurized food, submarines, global communications go a long way towards practically proving the presumed facts that produced the success — but it doesn’t change the nature of calling one set of beliefs facts, and the rest beliefs.
Put another way: each of us works with a very small set of facts and a great deal of folklore.
The nature of facts and beliefs are especially relevant today when we are regularly expected to accept as true propositions with serious consequences for health, freedom, safety and the future potential of humanity mostly on faith.
How many facts do I accept as facts that I have no means of proving or disproving? More importantly, how is that different to religious faith?
While we are experiencing an epidemic of cancer, we’re expected to trust the scientific processes that tell us the chemicals in our food, air and water are safe — even though those same processes declared safe the compounds and processes that are now known to be highly toxic and polluting our water and air.
The strength of the scientific method produces the results, but the weakness of a scientific fact used as basis for decision-making has potentially long-term, catastrophic effects. Laws and regulations built on out of date or improper science don’t have to be catastrophic to provide an example.
We are expected to somehow accept responsibility for global warming as if it is a consequence of our individual choices, rather than those made by the corporations and governments that produce the pollutants and the means of pollution (and typically employ the scientists and engineers) and provide the choices we choose among, and the information by which those choices are made.
I am not a climate change denier as much as I am worried about The Therefore. The Therefores have a history of coming out badly. A Therefore refers to clause that follows a generally accepted statement. In absurd form: The sun will almost certainly appear tomorrow morning, Therefore, we must ban mashed potatoes. Climate change, therefore, carbon credit scheme. DNA test results, therefore electric chair or glorious liberation.
Briefly, consider typical formats for the American fast-food restaurant: Drive-through, and drive-in or park-and-eat. If you consider how many vehicles are idling at drive-through windows, 24 hours a day all over America, you could make a meaningful impact in emissions by simply banning the window.
By simply moving to a drive-in or traditional park-and-eat format, the engine is not sitting in a line idling — it’s stopped. That single, simple change would probably have an impact on oil prices themselves… which brings us around to the frame of the global conversations we do and specifically do not have about our culture’s scientific truths:
Having a conversation about the domains in play is important: If very real climate change is the excuse to ram through something like carbon credits that will nearly guarantee the maximum pollution the created market can bear (and thus artificially raise the cost of doing business while having no real positive impact on the problem that justifies it,) but no one has mentioned banned drive-through service windows… we can, by priorities and political will, see that climate change, like any other threat real or projected, will be a justification for policy more than a motivation for meaningful change. The narratives with the most utility will be the most zealously defended.
When a powerful consensus is heavily invested into a scientific fact, it begins to be nearly inseparable from its ideological baggage. Anyone who questions these constantly shifting platforms of claims is treated as the Catholic church treated those who questioned or disagreed with its doctrines: branded heretics (or global warming deniers, anti-vaxers, anti-science, etc. ) because harming the argument harms its utility.
The Catholic Church analogy is worthy, not because of the religious aspect, but because of the rational aspect: In the modern context, it’s presented as a cage-match between science and the catholic hierarchy, but it can also be seen as an example of the problem of basing political decision-making on scientific truth:
The Catholic Church has a long tradition of scholarship, and at one time, the project of marrying Aristotlean truths (essentially, the first draft form of modern science) and philosophy to their doctrine and theology. They wanted a rational (in the Greek sense) foundation for their cosmology, and Aristotle delivered.
The problem was that Aristotle, as bright as he was, and as much as he contributed, wasn’t entirely correct about things — notably, the nature of the solar system. More nuanced observation and fewer a priori facts lead to a revolution in the ideas about the nature of the heavens.
So the problem was not that Gallileo’s observations contradicted the church’s teachings, but rather, that they contradicted Aristotle, whose teachings the church had made essentially inseparable from their cosmology and doctrine:
The church was simply ill-prepared to embrace new ideas because it had built quite structure on old ones that were, for most of its history, the best science had to offer, and it reacted just as people today do when some important aspect of their weltanschauung is challenged: often, an apparently small belief (or “fact”) is a critical support for important and familiar ideas and narratives that would be painful, expensive or even result in loss of face to accept changes to.
Those doing the shouting refuse to recognize their own religiosity in the issue but have no problem adding religious persons to the various categories of heretics precisely because they accept propositions on faith, with obvious exceptions for those whose religious beliefs defer to their scientific beliefs.
In the anti-vaxxer crowd there are strands. Some, for example, are simply categorically opposed to vaccines and believe they will harm their children. They’re not acting on information, but rather, a lack of it.
Other people smeared with the label anti-vaxxer would include myself: I am opposed to using vaccines with the preservative Thiomersal on the same rational grounds that I avoid foods with the preservative BHT (Butylated hydroxytoluene,) in them, but I am not categorically opposed to vaccination. Nonetheless, my position requires me to assert the right of individual choice in vaccinations, which is synonymous with anti-vaxxer to the more hysterical voices in that crowd.
The lack of nuance in the anti-vaxxer labelling campaign reflects the same lack of information (and respect for legitimate concerns and caution about controversial issues) as the worst case of uninformed, hysterical anti-vaxxers.
Many of those shouting down anti-vaxxers would claim, for example, that someone who has concerns about vaccination and refuses to vaccinate their children creates a risk — presumably to other similarly unvaccinated children and adults, and this is a public health crisis that requires forcing the heretics to accept what the Nuremberg trials established as point one of the Nuremberg Code was morally and ethically wrong, namely, informed consent, free of coercion:
1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.
This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved, as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that, before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject, there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person, which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.
The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.
The informed part of informed consent brings us back to Scientism2: If there is an issue so very critical that consent is irrelevant in the eyes of many, then the issue is important enough to educate the public, and have an open discussion about.
That, of course, would get in the way of condemning the heretics and take all of the fun out of being “right.”
The present circumstance is essentially technocracy3, where an ill-informed, ill-educated public is expected to accept the decrees of equally ignorant government officials, informed by scientists funded by often malevolent corporations and those with vested interests in specific outcomes.
From this perspective, science is a handmaiden to corporate, military and political concerns, regardless of what it might be in more ideal circumstances. It so happens that we live in less than ideal circumstances in this regard, and have for some time.
My personal favorite example is Psychiatry’s role in opening the door for “race science” and similar Rorschach-esque expressions of malevolence to manifest as the slaughter of millions:
Germany’s WWII death camps began as psychiatric institutions which liquidated patients in the name of Eugenics4 – their means and personnel were the initial staff of the death camps of the holocaust 5, to cite one example. Another might be the 225,000 people who died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 6 as a result of physicists actively working to give politicians, forever, a weapon that would imperil mankind. Those politicians proceeded to use it not once, but twice, on a civilian population whose government was actively trying to surrender.
To wave those things off as “the past” or “politics, not science” deflects from the point that science enabled these things, created these things, and their endorsement and credibility greased the skids for the politicians to engage such means.
It continues today: Psychologists design, approve and sometimes implement the tortures, on site, at Guantanamo Bay with the approval of the American Psychological Association7.
I am absolutely not arguing that science a universally evil monolithic cartel. Even in these circumstances, scientific truths are often critically important truths. That this document itself is globally available is a testament to the heights we’ve risen to through science and engineering. I’ve leveled criticisms that are specifically meant to underline the point that scientific truths are not privileged, and Science doesn’t happen in vacuum.
With a notable few exceptions, the people paying for the science expect results, which have social and political, therefore moral and ethical consequences, as well as economic ones. This is a different circumstance than we had in the era of generally publically-funded science, but stands as a criticism precisely for this reason.
Scientific truths have underwritten some of the most dangerous and destructive of human endeavors, and repeatedly demonstrate science in a service role producing fruits neither apolitical nor benign. Even an example that is almost comical today, like Lysenkoism 8 demonstrates that science always exists in an ideological context, which can have profound effects until or unless that particular truth is exchanged for a better one.
“That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.” -Jacob Bronowski
My point is a criticism of those who take science as a religion — who take scientific truth as the absolute truth, especially those lacking a capacity for scientific, rational and logical reasoning. The core frustration I am addressing is that many of the cheerleaders of politicized scientific causes are essentially scientifically illiterate. The combination of ignorance, arrogance and enthusiasm are dangerous in any context.
I am extremely concerned that we’re building the arguments to undo the protections we’ve only so recently acquired. The enforced herd-immunity argument 9 for vaccination is the same kind of Greater Good argument that underwrote things such as medical experimentation on prisoners, children and orphans. That it’s bogged down in name-calling is only too convenient for those who stand to benefit most, and saves them energy otherwise spent protecting and polishing their dubious reputations.
I’m glad to see reasoned statements like Jeffrey Singer’s:
As a medical doctor I am a strong advocate of vaccination against communicable and infectious diseases. I am irritated by the hysteria and pseudo-science behind much of the anti-vaccination literature and rhetoric. In my perfect world, everyone would agree with me and voluntarily get vaccinated against the gamut of nasty diseases for which we have vaccines. (In my perfect world, pregnant women also wouldn’t smoke tobacco or drink alcohol until after delivery.)
But free societies are sometimes messy. To live in a free society, one must be willing to tolerate people who make bad decisions and bad choices, as long as they don’t directly infringe on the rights of others.
A strong argument can be made that it is self-defense to quarantine people who are infected with a disease-producing organism and are objectively threatening the contamination of others. But in such a case, the use of force against the disease carrier is based upon evidence that the carrier is contagious and may infect others.
Any mass immunization program that uses compulsion rather than persuasion will, on balance, do more harm to the well being of a free people than any good it was intended to convey.
I want to step away from hot-button issues and break it down to the root:
My argument against unconsidered embrace of any given scientific truth as an absolute basis for compulsion and political decision-making is the same as my argument against the death penalty: Developments in forensics, as well as social justice efforts to revisit questionable cases regularly lead to overturning death sentences, some of which were granted no doubt to the political complicity of applied science, just as developments in science let us know that sometimes yesterday’s ideas aren’t quite so hot as we thought. The precautionary principle whether in regulatory or development contexts is absolutely essential.
The standards have to be higher than, “the experts agree.” If we do not understand what it is the experts agree to and why they agree to it, then it might as well be “the wizards agree.”
- Robert M. Schoch, The Great Sphinx
http://www.robertschoch.com/sphinxcontent.html - “Scientism is belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism - Technocracy |tekˈnäkrəsē|, noun ( pl. -cies)
the government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts.- an instance or application of this.
- an elite of technical experts.
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Greek tekhnē ‘art, craft’ + -cracy .
- Eugenics (from Greek εὐγενής eugenes “well-born” from εὖ eu, “good, well” and γένος genos, “race, stock, kin”) is the belief and practice which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population. It is a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of people with desired traits (positive eugenics), or reduced reproduction and or sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits (negative eugenics), or both.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics - Psychiatry’s role in the holocaust, Peter R. Breggin, 1993
- Children of the Atomic Bomb, a UCLA Physician’s Eyewitness Report
- The APA and Guantanamo: Actions, not Words
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dangerous-ideas/201504/the-apa-and-guantanamo-actions-not-words - “Lysenkoism began in the late 1920s and formally ended in 1964. Lysenkoism was built on theories of the heritability of acquired characteristics that Lysenko named “Michurinism”. These theories depart from accepted evolutionary theory and Mendelian inheritance. Lysenkoism is used metaphorically to describe the manipulation or distortion of the scientific process as a way to reach a predetermined conclusion as dictated by an ideological bias, often related to social or political objectives.”
- “Herd immunity (also called herd effect,community immunity,population immunity, or social immunity) is a form of indirect protection from infectious disease that occurs when a large percentage of a population has become immune to an infection, thereby providing a measure of protection for individuals who are not immune. In a population in which a large number of individuals are immune, chains of infection are likely to be disrupted, which stops or slows the spread of disease. The greater the proportion of individuals in a community who are immune, the smaller the probability that those who are not immune will come into contact with an infectious individual.” From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herd_immunity