Taken in this light as a sort of nebulous divinity — spoken of with explicit capitalization and the occasional flourishing exclamation mark — “Science!” often strikes like a character in the tales we encounter throughout our life, gradually accumulating a jumble of associations and personality traits. Tales that are almost uniform across our society. Everyone knows the high school story of Science! in rough terms: The belief that the entirety of our reality can be divided up into little atoms and facts. Gleaned from numbers, brutally harvested, and then locked into little jars. Except — the story goes — it’s never quite capable of successfully reducing us to these accounting sheets; all it succeeds at is calling for xenocidal policies, unleashing catastrophes, and, in its insane pursuit of infinite knowledge (ie domination) over nature, consuming everything and everyone in its wake. Science! is surely just another way of expressing the logic of empire and capitalism. Science! is a religious institution that brokers no alternatives. Science! is nuclear weapons, GMO killer seeds, animal testing, bulldozers, nazi medical experiments, Jurassic Park, and Christopher Columbus. It may have some more anodyne faces, but the affair as a whole is inseparable from destructive hubris and cold inhumanity.
Once you’ve seen this pattern or narrative it’s all too easy to fit everything into it.
Chances are you don’t directly experience science in your everyday life. But you do encounter its glossy logo incessantly. In the news stories trolls cite against you to “prove” something about gender roles. In the stickers on giant technological devices. If it’s not sneering Dawkins fans telling you Science! says they’re right then it’s the horror tales repeated incessantly by a fearful popular culture. We’ve watched thousands of movies moralizing about “playing god” by seeking understanding, to the point where we just assume such cinematic mistakes are a realistic thing that totally happens. Someone says “the Large Hadron Collider could create a blackhole” and we partially believe them because like we’ve seen this movie before and further we immediately leap to our Hollywood notion of a “blackhole” where it eats the earth (rather than immediately evaporating into hawking radiation). There’s literally a terrorist organization trying to murder graduate students over a fear (“grey goo”) they admit they don’t understand at all. But again, we’ve seen this movie.
Okay, sure, scientists may occasionally manage to poke their heads through the media wall and point out that pollution is happening or that actual neuroscience doesn’t back patriarchal narratives, but that’s clearly just them cleaning up after their colleagues, their own mistakes, their own colonizer logic. So many terrible people cite science as a justification there must be something to it. And who could deny that ozone depletion and deforestation wouldn’t have happened in the first place if we weren’t making pencils and measuring devices for those scientists to scribble down their findings. (Don’t talk to us about scale or ridiculous differences in orders of magnitude! Numbers remind us of how much math class sucked and any reference to scale proves it’s “just a matter of degree.” And anyway all of industrial society surely depends entirely on all the rest of it! It’s a package deal!) Even if Science! has good parts, it surely also has a Dark Side and dare not be let free to its own desires. At best it’s a tool capable of some good (if tightly enslaved) and much evil (if embraced for its own sake). But if it is just a tool it’s totally the master’s tool. And at worst? At worst Science! is an insane power fantasy of our rulers that has motivated and facilitated the enslavement of the entire world.
Science! is — in short — accepted on face value. It is taken more or less as what we see called Science! almost everywhere. An unlucky few of us are granted closer experience, stumbling into soul-sucking engineering jobs for companies or academic sweatshops, specializing in what boils down to optimizing a single widget. Science! is on the nametag. Science! is on the diploma. Science! is on our report. Science! is how our paymasters excuse the damage our widget causes in military or economic application. Science! must surely be this.
You can tell I think this is all patent nonsense. A similar intentionally misattributed and surface-deep tale could be told about “Anarchy” from the newscaster desks to the Hot Topic stickers.
Yet the pull of such narratives are all consuming. And like any good tale, they typically have a wide enough array of moving parts to make any attempt at thorough critique prohibitively involved. Even if you were to examine every association, assumed causation, repeated lie, and misattribution it’s unlikely someone enraptured by this narrative would be able to hold it all in their attention at the same time. They’d always feel confident you hadn’t addressed enough. And in the face of such complexity, they might as well default on whatever bundle of associations they already have. In any case this narrative is dressed up as a ‘critique’ of something presently in power — what? do you oppose critiques? are you defending those in power?? surely the status quo needs no more defenders!
As with conspiracy theories, if you hold a believer’s nose to the tricks or holes in their tale they’ll sincerely retort that surely every other possible story depends on equivalent slights of hand. Time and time again I hear from hip radicals the same derision with science dressed up as enlightenment: “All models are wrong, it’s just that some can be useful self-deceptions.” If everything’s equally just a myth, equally ungrounded, or politically suspect, you might as well settle on whatever seems like it would be the most useful story given your psychology and context.
A Context of Unending Appropriation
Among other peculiarities I have the dubious distinction of having been raised by a true believer in “Christian Science.” If you’re unfamiliar with the religion think less Scientology than a cranky first-wave feminist sort of Mormonism. Which is mostly just to say a distinctly 19th century American invention with a tenuous Christian genealogy, conservative aesthetics, and some weird twists into philosophical idealism.
Christian Scientists are most notable for their unique response to the problem of suffering in the presence of an omnipotent god: they respond by disbelieving in suffering. Indeed they disbelieve in the entire material world and sometimes even logic or math. It’s one of the cutest tricks in the history of religion and philosophy and I feel bears some horrified appreciation. There’s an organized religion in our world with hundreds of thousands of followers founded on an explicit version of immaterialism that would do even George Berkeley proud.
If you break your back or are imprisoned by a rapist you can cope by denying that any of that actually exists. The entire material universe in fact is a vicious lie, an error caused by the mistaken thoughts of “mortal mind.” There is only God and Her love, everything else is a shared delusion, a consensus reality. Thus, if you’re in suffering, disassociate. If you face obstacles, work harder at convincing yourself they’re not a problem. If you’re privileged, bask in the knowledge that you must be doing something right as a matter of character. It’s basically The Secret for 1880s housewives.
Rarely is the core of faith exposed so openly. Christian Science caters to the poor, the mentally ill, and rich conservatives with hippie inclinations. Washington DC is filled with them. My impoverished family was once bizarrely taken yachting by a former assistant director of the CIA.
So if you’re going to invent a stripped down version of Christianity that resolves its incoherencies by claiming the universe doesn’t exist and expressing distrust if not intense hostility to any sort of hands-on engaging with material reality or even consistent bayesian logic — if you’re going to become famous for letting children die rather than concede to basic science — why adopt the label “Science”? Well put simply, in the 1800s when the church’s founder Mary Baker Eddy was trying to win over the world, “science” was a popular buzzword with a lot of awe but little public comprehension. (So exactly like today.) The founding saga of Christian Science is that a middle class schizophrenic white girl addicted to morphine slipped and hurt herself, some doctors allegedly told her she would never heal and in a few days she did. Bam. New religion.
There’s a couple things to note here.
Even before Baker appropriated the term for herself, the dastardly representatives of “science” in this story, the “doctors” (they were actually homeopaths) had just as brazenly appropriated said mantle for themselves. Little about practiced medicine at the time involved anything remotely close to the kind of knowledge of root causes and relationships that had driven the public stature of “science.” Physics and mathematics, with chemistry and some limited realms of biology dogging at their heels, had seen a stunning burst of conceptual developments and dramatic evidence over three centuries. We were old hats at advanced calculus and were sending electric signals across the transatlantic cable… but we didn’t even really have the germ theory of disease. Would be doctors, like everyone else, were trying to position themselves as inheritors and compatriots of if not indistinguishable from physicists. Such baldfaced appropriation of anything garnering respect is venerable tradition and those in power were well-versed long before Baker. From the days of Newton there’ve been rich statesmen like Francis Bacon leaping to define what those folk garnering respect were really all about and how it could be applied to other things.
In fact the barrage of quacks, cultists, con-men, and politicians so dwarfed the numbers of those they were emulating that very quickly they managed to seize the mantle of “science” in the public’s eye for all manner of pet projects. It didn’t matter that the people five-seconds prior considered scientists emphatically dismissed nonsense like phrenology and other such ‘sciences of peoples’ as ridiculous, the establishment showered any half-baked fool willing to defend patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism with money and displays of respect. Neither her neighborhood “doctors” nor Mary Baker Eddy herself (the original name she chose for her religion was “Science of Man”) were doing anything different than most people throughout modern history; they found something respected or liked for whatever underlying reason and mischaracterized that reason or offered a different explanation so they could hitch their own stuff to it.
But Baker didn’t just ride this popular wave of appropriation, she took advantage of the way it muddied the waters to discredit and disregard the original scientists. The rhetorical tactics common in bible study when I was a kid will be familiar to anyone today: Stripping merely brilliant and unparalleled models or insights of their explicit context and assigning them straw man pretensions as Absolute Knowledge; using the shoddy results of appropriators to slander by association the original endeavor; belittling anything too far outside the everyday concepts, experiences, and concerns of those in a certain cultural/economic space… it was a by-the-numbers affair; the same sort of rhetoric you hear from theocrats or nihilist burnouts today. (If the ideologies that use such defenses vary so wildly it’s because once you chuck pursuit of coherence and the roots of dynamics you can “argue” any arbitrary position.) The thing is, it worked. It’s one thing to latch onto a bigger phenomena in hopes of becoming indistinguishable from it, quite another to use it as a ladder to reach respect and then turn around and try to set that ladder on fire.
Mary Baker Eddy’s wild success is a testament to human weakness and oppression. People who have no power, who are trapped or locked out, will go through all kinds of mental gymnastics to avoid coming to terms with their reality. Minds are always looking for avenues of exploration and the only thing more painful than being fundamentally barred is not knowing where to start. Conscious minds can’t figure out how to live in stasis and the result of trying is always insanity. To minimize this as best we can we turn to escapism, we shrink our horizons, we frantically model alternatives in hopes of finding a useful perspective. And when that grows weak we simply deny. There’s no way they could know something we don’t. No way our abuser or a person with more privilege could have legitimately discovered realities by virtue of their situation. To admit this is to come face to face with the full nature of power and either strip us of hope or open yet another exhausting frontier of conflict.
I single out Christian Science as an illustrative example of the disingenuousness surrounding use of the word “science” in particular because it arose simultaneous with an array of more influential appropriations, from “Social Darwinism” to Comte’s “Sociology” to Marx’s “Scientific Socialism”, at a historical moment when most of the academic categories we know today were being hashed out.
To understand the tangles of philosophical attempts over the last century to define “science” it’s important to grasp the context surrounding exactly who got in and who didn’t when the modern lines were drawn. In the mid 1800s the explosive cultural force of the Enlightenment had been mostly spent and the social prescriptions of its political ideologues were undeniably losing cachet amid the complexities of industrialization. Mathematics and physics were still accelerating at a breakneck pace but the days when political theorists could pretend to be of the same cloth were fading. Studies were moving out of social halls and into an increasingly segmented academia. In the thereto standard academic distinction social concerns that we’d today classify as economics and sociology were common-sensically denoted as “moral philosophies” — ie. inherently political — while the real drivers of undeniable advances in knowledge like physics and mathematics were “natural philosophies.” This distinction within academia brought a clarity that threatened to undermine those forces looking to appropriate intellectual authority.
Thankfully for them there were distinct aesthetic qualities to the arguments of Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes that resembled the mathematical proofs and rigorous surveys of early physicists or sought to tenuously extend models within natural philosophy into normative social theories. That was after all the whole game of Hobbes and company. And so eventually the term “science” was settled on as a means by which economists, sociologists and the like could be grouped together with the natural philosophies.
Over the previous centuries, with the decline of tradesmen and the rise of industry, “science” had quietly shifted from an adjective describing the individual cleverness and experiential know-how of craftsmen and artisans to a noun mainly signifying the systematic collection of data. “Science” thus provided an effective way to redefine what exactly was the source of success in the early cluster of physicsy fields, and to blend them with certain moral philosophies (usually wed to the kinds of state power or capital that could perform extensive data collection) into a intentionally hazy and exploitable bundle of popular associations, primarily characterized by an air of inevitability and absolute knowledge.
It’s this last impression that still galvanizes people today, often quite violently.
Collecting Facts & Marking The Territory
As you might expect with stakes this high philosophers promptly spent much of the twentieth century squabbling in direct and tangential ways over what qualifies a statement or claim as “scientific”, or what counts as a “scientific fact.” I’d argue that this approach, while understandable, is ill-conceived.
The project of drawing a boundary between the inside and outside of Science! — a project called the Demarcation Problem — has mostly played out as contests over the mantle of science as an adjective denoting a kind of truth value. Thus for the philosophers and demagogues who have invested so heavily in this battle “science” is primarily viewed in terms of its service or danger as a rhetorical weapon. As something that might be slapped on a statement to make it a certain type of unassailable.
It should thus come as no surprise that virtually none of the most prominent voices in this debate and resulting commentary have been scientists themselves (not that we haven’t had strong opinions). And even when the intention of those involved has been good — like finding clear definitions that get evolution and global warming accepted as truthful but not homeopathy — the attempts invariably trend greedy in their praise or dismissal. Either way they often end up claiming fields like psychology and economics as being of the same primary category or essential nature as physics. At the same time almost all of these philosophers and demagogues have felt the need to hobble science lest it get too uppity and say more than they want it to say. There’s a widespread and frequently vocalized fear of science ceasing to function as a highly limited tool and instead getting unleashed as an orientation, motivation, or desire.
And so we get the simplistic Baconian picture taught in high schools since the Cold War: Where a limited methodology or proceduralism is almost entirely divorced from context or analysis and held up as the single defining characteristic of Science!. The almost entire process of theory or model development and comparison is handwaved away, and all that’s left is data collection and calculation of error bars.
Under this regime science is — at least officially — limited to the smallest of inductive steps forward. There is no space for analysis or models that require a complicated hashing out before data collection. The vast array of analysis of probabilities, bayesian dependencies, contextual considerations, limits, etc. that good scientists crank through — or any serious comparison of differing models, paradigms or lines of investigation prior to data-collection — is waved away as not really core to science. In the methodology picture a miracle occurs whereby some arbitrary hypotheses emerge fully formed — each more or less as a priori good as the next. There is no room for nuanced contextual considerations or the extended development of analysis that does not immediately offer experimentally falsifiable or verifiable predictions, nor any explicitly preferred direction in the winnowing down or comparison of such analysis. All that matters is the data collection and everything else is ultimately treated as a kind of handwavey excuse for it. “Signals” are then found, but how fundamental they are is anyone’s guess. Indeed, as an exercise, it can be illustrative to survey the notoriously horrid headlines of pop science and see how many times phrases like “science says” could just as well be replaced with “data says.”
This preposterously limited model of science obviously parallels the various currents of panopticon-aspiration we know all too well today, but it has its roots in classical imperialism — not just in the obvious necessity of taking censuses and mapping shorelines, but in the competitive collection of superficial “curiosities” by the upper classes to strengthen hierarchies at home.
It’s a sadly underemphasized fact that the aristocracy pioneered aspects of consumerism long before industrialism. In particular many fields that came to be considered “sciences” in the 1800s like lepidoptery were originally launched as fields of curio collecting whereby members of the aristocracy hunted down rare items from around the world and displayed them as one might today display a record collection. The key to understanding this dynamic is that anything with barriers to entry and scarcities can be used as currency to prop up a hierarchy. When the things we might otherwise value become less scarce those invested in social hierarchy itself respond by culturally promoting the valuing of other scarce things.
When — as is common in the modern era — information is made the scarce good, the resulting data collection or generation of lingo & taxonomies need not bare any real relation or insight into what true underlying dynamics are involved, and can happily countenance the most superficial or limited models.
The Roots Of Science
The problem with identifying science in terms of all this is that data collection unto itself doesn’t really signify any concept or dynamic of substance. It’s hard to realistically speak of there being a passionate movement or culture or ideology or idealism of data collection. And data collection is not in any real sense descriptive of what motivated those original scientists everyone else appropriated from. Any old pile of data might show how particulars happen to be arranged, but alone it offers little insight into how or why. Some statistical analysis on that data might make for good predictions, but only within a certain given context, whose bounds we remain entirely ignorant of. At least without a serious sort of thoughtfulness, the contours of which are blithely ignored by the methodology tale. Incorrect surface-level impressions and models might well be falsifiable, verifiable, etc, yet remain unchallenged outside a given context; how and where we search matters. As do our motivations.
It’s easy to apply the trapping of the scientific method — even the broader definitions of science promoted by many philosophers — and end up with little in the way of deep insight. Indeed that’s often the point of much that the sticker of “Science!” is slapped upon: to map the world as it is and hide how else it might be or how it might change. Those who are invested in existing systems have little interest in mapping alternate possibilities. And those preoccupied with their own situatedness have little desire to look beyond it or press beyond the effective realm of their understanding.
Thankfully outside a few caricatures in some hilariously detached postmodernist polemics few people widely accepted as scientists today pursue data for data’s sake — as the sort of currency or fetishized commodity that so attracts aristocrats, bureaucrats, middle-managers, and hipsters. What motivates us is typically the search for deeper insights and models that might be made clear — to hack our way through the muddled chaos of first impressions, intuitions, and naive beliefs and find the real underlying dynamics of a phenomenon.
This strong, persistent, and near-uniform tendency among scientists is, I would argue, a good starting point for sorting out a clearer perspective on the whole affair.
Sure “science” as a term was championed to facilitate a disingenuous blurring and appropriation — a campaign that created a hazy umbrella of uses in practice, filled with more contradictions and tensions than any clear commonality — but a great deal of shaking-out has occurred since the 1800s. And further many important traits of those originally appropriated from have begun to be internalized by the appropriators. Not enough, obviously — the journals of medicine and the social sciences are still infamously rampant with irreproducible crap — but enough to warrant notice. In no small part because there really was a unifying tendency in the fields everyone else sought to steal legitimacy from. Something deeper than a mere tactic or procedure.
Few would deny physicists are located at the dead center of whatever ‘science’ supposedly is. (Well okay, the most absurd appropriators like Mary Baker Eddy and Auguste Comte eventually did, but their claims have fared poorly at undermining the historical centrality of physics.) And yet physics is also at the center of of a wide and deep tradition within science that is not motivated by shallow data collection and labeling but by getting to the roots. Hence physicists’ uniform frustration towards people attempting to derive general rules from surface data on complex systems. And our fury historically at psuedosciences like phrenology that the rest of the world happily accepted as science. Ernest Rutherford’s famous cry that “All science is either physics or stamp collecting!” arose deeply embedded in this context.
Our famed “arrogance” in this matter is better understood as an annoyance at the lack of humility or diligence on the part of those making such sweeping statements about macroscopic aggregate systems like human beings. In practice “political science” and the like have often functioned like cargo cult physics, and much of the literature of social science and biology has remained in a continuing crisis as a direct result of their failure to doggedly look for deeper root dynamics and instead just catalog surface impressions. Not to mention their corruption by economic interests seeking to derive useful tools or actionable prescriptions, pressuring them to behave as technologists or engineers rather than inquirers. And so we see within these broken fields an attachment to the scientific method, rather than to what I would term the heart of science. When you don’t actually really know why and how something works, just that it in a certain context does — or kinda does — from a bunch of data, you don’t have scientific knowledge so much as mere empirical knowledge.
Of course there’s certainly space for speaking substantively about messy abstractions like humans and human social relations, and data collection can of course facilitate this. But the frequent lack of humility in the social sciences & chunks of biology— the lack of any honest appreciation and accountability for just how insanely hazy and attenuated most of it is, often dealing entirely in immediate surface impressions — remains stark. While things have certainly gotten better as the rigor of physics and the like has leeched out (in particular see Scott Alexander’s impassioned defenses of modern psychiatry and nutrition), significant currents within these fields remain happy to speculate in shallow terms and collect data without any diligent root-seeking or explicit recognition of how tenuous and overly-simple their hypotheses are likely to be.
Part 2 is HERE
