The 20th century's greatest error

The start of the new year is a good time to look back. Lately I've been looking back at the course of the last hundred years or so, most of which comprise the 20th century.

In many respects it was a bad century. There were world wars and mass murders. Hundreds of millions died on the battlefields, and scores of millions more died in genocidal campaigns masterminded by tyrants.

Some people attribute these calamities to the rise of statism. But statism has always been with us. It remains with us today. Louis XIV was a statist. So are Hillary Clinton and John McCain. What was new in the 20th century was not statism but scientism -- which is not science per se, but the idea that science supersedes all other lines and methods of inquiry and can explain and beneficently modify every aspect of human existence. Scientism is the view of science as God.

It's not hard to see why this view became popular -- indeed, became the conventional wisdom -- in the 20th century. That century witnessed an unprecedented explosion of scientific knowledge and technological progress. I had a relative who was born in 1898 and lived until 1975. She entered a world in which the automobile was a newfangled contraption and lived to see men walk on the moon. Such remarkable advancements in such a short period of time cannot help but boggle the mind. Most minds in the 20th century were suitably boggled.

Along with the rise of scientism came the near deification of scientists themselves. Watch the 1936 movie Things to Come , with a screenplay by H.G. Wells, and you'll see Raymond Massey heroically leading a cadre of superscientists known as the Airmen, who rescue civilization and establish a technocratic utopia. Two decades later Ayn Rand produced her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, which similarly depicted the men of Reason -- emphatically including the prime movers in science and technology -- as saviors of a deteriorating world. Most science-fiction movies of the 1950s portrayed their scientist heroes as steely-eyed, rock-jawed savants, coolly dispassionate, unflappably irrational, and always able to save the day. Doubts about the new scientific utopia that the god Science was due to deliver did not surface until the 1970s, and by then the secular religion of scientism had already done its damage.

But what damage did it do? There are at least three areas in which blind devotion to science has had pernicious results.

First and most obviously, there is the development of atomic and nuclear bombs. Whatever good things may be said about nuclear energy, the fact remains that the human race -- not previously known for its pacific tendencies -- now has the power to blow itself off the face of the planet. This cannot be a good thing. When Robert Oppenheimer, one of the developers of the atomic bomb, witnessed the first test of the new weapon, he reportedly thought, "Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds." This is a reference to the Hindu deity Shiva. The Bomb was God. More precisely, the Bomb was a demigod produced by the one true god, Science.

Second, there is the plethora of genocidal extinctions practiced by totalitarian regimes throughout the century. These extinctions were motivated by the same base human passions that have always moved sadists and murderers, but they were justified, excused, and touted in the name of science -- specifically, the science of eugenics, which was extraordinarily fashionable and influential in the early decades of the last century. The mass elimination of entire classes or races was seen as a perhaps distasteful but unquestionably necessary step in the improvement of the human species as a whole.

The appeal of communism was based, in considerable part, on its claims to represent a scientific, rational approach to society as opposed to the free-for-all of the marketplace. As late as the 1950s, it was the conventional wisdom even in the West that the Soviet Union would eventually lead the world in science and technology, inasmuch as its system was grounded in ratiocination rather than tradition. This veneer of scientific respectability gave communism an enormous advantage in a world that ritualistically genuflected before the altar of science.

Even Nazism, a hodgepodge of rationalist and irrationalist notions reflecting the fragmented psyche of Adolf Hitler himself, relied on the scientific claims of the eugenicists to justify the wholesale destruction of Jews and other allegedly inferior human specimens. The sacrifice of so many lives might be painful to some of the more sensitive Nazis, but scientism is hardly the first religion to require painful sacrifices.

Third, there is the gradual devaluation of human life in general, a necessary consequence of the scientistic (not scientific) dogma that the universe is ultimately meaningless, a product of blind natural forces interacting in mechanistic ways. If life is a purposeless accident, as the acolytes of this religion continually assure us, than no individual life can have any particular purpose or meaning or value. The fact that the adherents of scientism go on to contradict themselves by asserting that the pursuit of scientific truth in itself gives their lives purpose, meaning, and value is irrelevant. They are already on record as saying the opposite, and they are in no position to retract it.

As science became increasingly deified throughout the early and middle years of the last century, more and more people came to feel that life is all sound and fury, signifying nothing -- hence the rise of philosophical movements like Existentialism, and the widespread complaints of alienation, angst, and anomie. Hence also the reactionary rise of religious fundamentalism in various forms. If the secular world is insisting that people's lives are inevitably empty, there will never be a shortage of people who seek fulfillment in some nonsecular realm.

In all of this, I don't mean to say that there's anything wrong with science as such. What is wrong is the over-valuation of science and of scientists. What is wrong is the uncritical assumption that science is a uniquely beneficent enterprise, dedicated only to truth and progress, and that scientists have somehow escaped the common human condition of bias, prejudice, pettiness, and other ego driven limitations. What is wrong is the notion that science, in contradistinction to all other human activities, is objective and therefore always trustworthy. In other words, what is wrong is making science into God.

It was a very costly error, as the mass graves, the mass disillusionment, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction all attest. I think we have now learned to be properly skeptical of science and not to bow before its priests and sacred rites.

The question is, have we learned too late?

Comments

[Bob Wallace]

The Nazis were strongly influenced by evolutionary theory -- "survival of the fittest."

[Tom]

the belief in science is no different from the belief in religion. for those with power, the belief of people is easily manipulated to seize more control and riches. in the middle age, we've seen how Catholicism exerted its power of oppression. in the last hundred years, we've seen how science wrecked its havoc onto mankind. however, that's not to say that they're all bad. The Church has its benefits to the people as well- even with the crusade, a trade route from europe to asia was established as a result, facilitating the culture exchange and tolerance. like science, the greatest benefits were found in medicine, wellness of being (entertainment), transportation, and communications.

but since science is such a new thing compared with the belief of religion, people are so overwhelmed by the progress of science that they dont think about the implication of their actions.

does faster cars make us happier? or a bigger TV, or a faster personal computer? why are we so concerned with speed, size and portability? do they all make our lives better? do you really need someone to call you no matter where you are, or that you have to read email no matter where you go?

is faster really better?

[chaos_engineer]

The Nazis were strongly influenced by evolutionary theory -- "survival of the fittest."

Huh? If they'd been influenced by evolutionary theory, then they would have just sat back and let evolution take its course. "Inferior" genes would have become less common over time and "superor" genes more common. (Note that in evolutionary terms you can't talk about a "master race" and "lesser races"...at best, there are groups with a lot of unique beneficial genes, and groups with fewer unique beneficial genes. Given time, beneficial genes from both groups will spread throughout the population as a whole.)

No, the Nazis might have used a comic-book technobabble parody of evolution, but their main influence was the oldest of them all: "Those guys over there aren't like me and my friends. They have foreign customs, and a strange way of speaking, and they eat weird food. I don't understand them and it frightens me. If they were all to vanish somehow, then maybe I wouldn't have to be afraid anymore. If I can convince myself that they aren't human, I won't feel so bad about killing them."

None of us is immune to this. You can see how it starts in this very blog entry: "Why were there so many murders in the 20th Century? I can't imagine people like me would have been responsible; after all, I'm a good person! It must have been the fault of The Others, probably those wicked, wicked Scientism-ists and Secularists! Why, I'll bet that Scientism-ists worship the atomic bomb as a demigod, like in that 'Beneath the Planet of the Apes' movie!"

I think Solzhenitsyn said it best... (In "The Gulag Archipelago", his memoir about life in the Soviet prison camps.)

"It was granted to me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. It was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart, and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. Even within hearts overwhlemed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained; and even in the best of all hearts, there remains a small corner of evil."

[Michael Prescott]

>It must have been the fault of The Others, probably those wicked, wicked Scientism-ists and Secularists!

Scientism is not evil, just mistaken.

Eugenics was based on a popular interpretation of Darwinism. See A Jealous God, by Pamela R. Winnick.

I agree with the Solzhenitsyn quote, but certain erroneous beliefs can push us closer to the dark side of our nature.

[John_C]

How is Scientism mistaken? Are you saying blind faith in science is bad and has not always served mankind?

I guess we come up against that dogma and limitations of Scientism when analyzing the paranormal. Many "scientists" and skeptics who rely on science dismiss the paranormal based on a strict adherence to scientific principals (even when the evidence contradicts their scientific dogma).

[drew hempel]

Yes we are too late -- because mathematics is structurally based on "deep disharmony" -- this is due to the equipartition principle of phonetic language with "containment of infinity" -- http://nonduality.com/hempel.htm for details.

What remains? Nonlocal consciousness.

[Bob Wallace]

Not only were the Nazis influenced by evolutionary theory, they picked up their eugenics from the U.S.

As for sitting back and waiting for evolution, they decided to take matters into their own hands.

[chaos_engineer]

I think we're talking past each other on the evolution/eugenics issue...

Part of the human condition is that people do bad things and then try to come up with lame excuses to justify themselves. Sometimes the excuses are secular, sometimes they're religious, or chauvanistic, or whatever.

Usually there's a mix. The rhetorical heart of Naziism was German Nationalism, with a generous helping of "Jews killed Jesus"-style religion and the thinnest veneer of scientism.

The point is that the cure for "bad secular thinking" isn't "less secularism". It's "less bad thinking."

I guess we come up against that dogma and limitations of Scientism when analyzing the paranormal. Many "scientists" and skeptics who rely on science dismiss the paranormal based on a strict adherence to scientific principals (even when the evidence contradicts their scientific dogma).

Not exactly. Science is a particular way of looking at the world, and it gives us accurate results in the right context.

Do you remember the Yes, Virgina, there is a Santa Claus letter?

If we wanted to look at the question scientifically, we could use the scientific method. We could take satellite photos of the North Pole, or run surveys to correlate children's virtuousness with the number of presents they receive, or set up cameras to film the presents being delievered. And at the end of all that, we'd reluctantly have to conclude that Santa doesn't exist as a physical being.

But that misses the point, doesn't it? As the author points out, Santa exists on an abstract plane, with "love and generosity and devotion". Science doesn't have anything to say on the subject, and if you start thinking about these abstracts then you're no longer doing science. But only the very crabbiest of secularists would use this as proof that Santa isn't "real".

(On the other hand, secularists do get annoyed when people claim to have scientific evidence that Santa exists, especially when it turns out to be something like, "I saw him downtown at the mall" or "I woke up and heard reindeer on the roof." Secularists get downright upset when they're called "dogmatic" for rejecting that sort of evidence.)

[Barbara W. Klaser]

I agree that we place too much trust in scientism, or rather in techonology, and we tend to think that knowing how is sufficient justification to do just about anything, without much regard for the consequences. But I think arrogance, selfishness, greed, and lack of compassion -- all very old problems -- are the overriding factors in most of the problems we face today. From the moment iron was forged or seeds were deliberately sown, technology has simply been the lastest tool used to gain control and promote selfish aims, without a thought for the poor, for future generations, or for the planet.

[drew hempel]

Ah yes -- accurate results! That's the problem! All logarithmic-based mathematics inherently destroys Nature because logarithms go against complimentary opposites of Pythagorean transduction.

Sound wacky? Well chaos science is just putting the Machines in control -- what could be more spookier?

There is no "pure" science -- the hypotenuse for the Pythagorean Theorem was turned into "magnitude" for the physics of Eudoxus and Archytas and Hippocrates.

That was the start of structural "deep disharmony" (math professor Luigi Borzacchini) for the planet.

In fact the only true "harmony" is FORMLESS AWARENESS -- beyond spacetime and defined by gender dynamics.

[chaos_engineer]

Ah yes -- accurate results! That's the problem! All logarithmic-based mathematics inherently destroys Nature because logarithms go against complimentary opposites of Pythagorean transduction.

The logarithm is the inverse operation of exponentiation. It's used a lot in calculus, and in statistics.

But it's a free country, so you don't have to learn logarithms if you don't want to.

I didn't understand anything else you said. I guess I'm kind of a simpleton. Can you dumb it down for me?

[Ebonmuse]

I'm not going to comment on everything in this post, but I want to respond to one point, namely this:

"The appeal of communism was based, in considerable part, on its claims to represent a scientific, rational approach to society as opposed to the free-for-all of the marketplace."

The idea that communism was a political system based on science is just plain wrong. In reality, communism, like some forms of fundamentalist religion, was an anti-rational ideology built on a set of core dogmas, the questioning of which was not permitted.

The best example of this is the Soviet approach to agriculture. An ideologue named Trofim Lysenko, who knew nothing about science but did know the right Marxist code words, convinced the Soviet government that the newly discovered science of genetics was "bourgeois" and had to be rejected because it contradicted Marxist ideology. As a result, real geneticists like Nikolai Vavilov were forbidden to do research, and were persecuted and imprisoned for opposing Lysenkoism. Lysenko's own views on plant breeding were distinctly Lamarckian, believing in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and were an utter failure in practice - but because they were in accord with communist principles of dialectical materialism, they were made the official dogma of the USSR. The result was decreased agricultural production, mass famine, possibly thousands of deaths from starvation, and a Russian state that to this day severely lags the West in genetic research.

[Michael Prescott]

>The idea that communism was a political system based on science is just plain wrong.

True. Communism wasn't based on science. But it claimed to be based on science, and this claim (uncritically accepted by many people even in the West for far too long) helped give communism a crucial public-relations advantage.

This is why I wrote: "The appeal of communism was based, in considerable part, on its claims to represent a scientific, rational approach to society as opposed to the free-for-all of the marketplace." (Emphases added)