I wrote recently about Stephen Pinker’s efforts to defend scientism, where he argued that although the use of the word is not consistent and is often used as an epithet, it deserves to be defended because there is a positive meaning that can be salvaged.
There are some problems with his essay. One is that he starts out with a partial straw man.
Scientism, in this good sense, is not the belief that members of the occupational guild called “science” are particularly wise or noble. On the contrary, the defining practices of science, including open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, are explicitly designed to circumvent the errors and sins to which scientists, being human, are vulnerable.
I doubt that even the most enthusiastic defender of science is suffering under the delusion that scientists are particularly wise or noble. Those of us in science are only too painfully aware that we are as much captive to human failings as those outside science. However he is right that the methods of open debate, peer review, and double-blind methods, while by no means guaranteeing avoidance of error, are fundamental characteristics of scientific practice that are worth emulating in any field.
But apart from the scientism issue, Pinker does give a good description of how science has been, or should be, influential in shaping our general worldview. Thanks to science there are brute facts that we know now about the world that earlier people did not know and that have radically transformed our thinking, though some still cling to the old views.
The moral worldview of any scientifically literate person—one who is not blinkered by fundamentalism—requires a radical break from religious conceptions of meaning and value.
To begin with, the findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. We know that our species is a tiny twig of a genealogical tree that embraces all living things and that emerged from prebiotic chemicals almost four billion years ago. We know that we live on a planet that revolves around one of a hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of a hundred billion galaxies in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe, possibly one of a vast number of universes. We know that our intuitions about space, time, matter, and causation are incommensurable with the nature of reality on scales that are very large and very small. We know that the laws governing the physical world (including accidents, disease, and other misfortunes) have no goals that pertain to human well-being. There is no such thing as fate, providence, karma, spells, curses, augury, divine retribution, or answered prayers—though the discrepancy between the laws of probability and the workings of cognition may explain why people believe there are. And we know that we did not always know these things, that the beloved convictions of every time and culture may be decisively falsified, doubtless including some we hold today.
In other words, the worldview that guides the moral and spiritual values of an educated person today is the worldview given to us by science. Though the scientific facts do not by themselves dictate values, they certainly hem in the possibilities. By stripping ecclesiastical authority of its credibility on factual matters, they cast doubt on its claims to certitude in matters of morality. The scientific refutation of the theory of vengeful gods and occult forces undermines practices such as human sacrifice, witch hunts, faith healing, trial by ordeal, and the persecution of heretics. The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species, and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces, quests, destinies, dialectics, struggles, or messianic ages. And in combination with a few unexceptionable convictions— that all of us value our own welfare and that we are social beings who impinge on each other and can negotiate codes of conduct—the scientific facts militate toward a defensible morality, namely adhering to principles that maximize the flourishing of humans and other sentient beings. This humanism, which is inextricable from a scientific understanding of the world, is becoming the de facto morality of modern democracies, international organizations, and liberalizing religions, and its unfulfilled promises define the moral imperatives we face today.
But the success of science has its price and we have to be willing to pay it.
A major goad for the recent denunciations of scientism has been the application of neuroscience, evolution, and genetics to human affairs. Certainly many of these applications are glib or wrong, and they are fair game for criticism: scanning the brains of voters as they look at politicians’ faces, attributing war to a gene for aggression, explaining religion as an evolutionary adaptation to bond the group. Yet it’s not unheard of for intellectuals who are innocent of science to advance ideas that are glib or wrong, and no one is calling for humanities scholars to go back to their carrels and stay out of discussions of things that matter.
So far, so good. But I found his diagnosis of the state of humanities to be somewhat simplistic, consisting mostly of a rant against the influence of postmodernism similar to, though not as bad as, the broadside leveled against the humanities in the 1997 book Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science by Paul Gross and Norman Levitt where the authors suggested that there was practically an organized effort by faculty in the humanities to discredit science, and somehow managed to conflate that supposed attack with left-wing politics.
Pinker does not go so far:
The humanities are the domain in which the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil. Yet it is just that domain that would seem to be most in need of an infusion of new ideas. By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale is sinking, students are staying away in droves. No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment from the humanities, which are indispensable to a civilized democracy.
Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda.
Many scientists hate what they think of as postmodernism, mainly because of its denial of the possibility of an objective truth and its questioning of the concomitant idea that knowledge is somehow progressing. The idea that scientific knowledge is not necessarily advancing towards something that we can call ‘truth’ disturbs them. This radical break with past ideas that scientific progress was necessarily leading towards truth one of Thomas Kuhn’s key ideas in his highly influential monograph The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But rather than engage with this important idea (and it is difficult to refute and has not been done, as far as I am aware), the term ‘postmodernism’ is often used as an epithet used by scientists against their critics, the way that ‘scientism’ is used as a weapon against science.
The most heated but fruitless debates tend to be over the merits of labels, when there is little understanding or consensus of what the labels represent.