"Stunning" science, and our post-Christian statism
FUTURE CONTENT NOTICE for y’all homeschooling people, anyway - I wanted to mention that I am working, as a side-project, on what I am envisioning as a supplemental science textbook chapter that might be helpful to you. At the moment it is titled “Supplemental: Interacting with Science Today”. Science and, most especially, the way the world at large interacts with science, is broken today. And it’s important to give older children / young adults language to help them recognize, especially, and understand that brokenness so they are not manipulated by it. Even many good science textbooks, in my experience, don’t do a particularly good job at that preparation… for reasons that are sometimes perfectly understandable, like the speed with which the world is changing and the delay in publishing. But in any case, I am working on a supplemental textbook chapter, and will link it here when finished, and perhaps it will be useful to some of y’all.
And now, onto today’s business, the first is which is somewhat related.
Stunning science
I am still poking my way through David Cayley’s autobiography of Ivan Illich… there is much Illich has to say by way of warning to our time. Just a reminder that, to write an insanely short summary of his thinking… when things get too big, when institutions get too big, when life becomes too formalized and regimented, it changes the whole way we think about life. Our humanity itself is disabled. Life and its components (health, education, etc.) become things provided by institutions or the credentialed, instead of skills innate to ourselves, or learned through life experience, or passed down from our ancestors since time immemorial.
The following is Cayley summarizing a piece of Illich’s thinking in Tools for Conviviality… consider that this was published in 1973.
Failure to change, [Illich] writes, will set the stage for a ‘belated technocratic response to disaster’, a response that will amount to a ‘managerial fascism’ and be marked by a degree of professional dominance that will smother every remaining vestige of human spontaneity.
Could have been written yesterday1. For another example of the same (and because we all enjoy hearing other people sound like us), you know it has long been a complaint of mine that one of the ways “science” is misused today is that, instead of being treated as a tool, it is treated more as a collection of infallible facts (a holy book, really), with scientists themselves treated as priests. Among other things this obliterates both the fact that scientists often disagree with each other, and the tentativeness and uncertainty that is always present in science. This error has been present in the popular press for years, especially in the “scientists say” construction, which has lately gone into hyper-overdrive when expanded into “experts say”.
On that point… again, this is Illich’s thinking not from yesterday, but in the early 1970s. I added the paragraph break for readability:
‘Political discussion’, Illich says, ‘is stunned by a delusion about science.’ Science has become ‘a spectral production agency’ whose output is certified knowledge. One accepts it because of the overwhelming authority this certification confers and because not to accept it is to risk the status of heretic. In courts of law, to take one of Illich’s examples, evidence that our legal tradition would formerly have excluded or bracketed as ‘hearsay’ becomes decisive when delivered by a scientific expert. Decisions that belong in the realm of common sense and practical judgment are instead settled by expert opinion: Is the nuclear power plant ‘safe’? Do studies on parent-child ‘attachment’ authorize early day care? Which diet will produce the biggest payoff in life expectancy? and so on.
This ‘stuns’ political discussion in two ways, according to Illich. The first is that science as a process of inquiry is mystified. Gone are the adventures and vicissitudes of trying to stabilize a ‘fact’ along with the very provisional character of the stabilization once achieved. In their place is a monolith: the oracular ‘Science says…’ or ‘Studies show…’ There’s nothing to discuss. ‘Scientific’ findings that amount to little more than gossip when de-contextualized and stepped down into everyday talk pass from hand to hand, still trailing the aura of the laboratory. The second result, Illich says, is that ‘people… cease to trust their own judgment.’
We could dwell on that comment for quite a while of course. One good movement in science education today is actually to bring back the story, to teach not just the final result but also how specific humans got there. Secondarily… our politics, our lives now are filled with what are really prudential judgements (that require things like “practical judgement”) which our instead pretended to be… I’m sorry, the selected person with the credential has spoken. You disagree? What are you a science denier (aka a heretic) or something?
And then… post-Christian statism
Let me start here with a comment from Robert George, which is going to strike most of y’all as so obvious we needn’t even say it… but it isn’t obvious to most people yet, so we should probably keep saying it.
And then one reply:
This brought to mind the fact that, here in Michigan, Gov. Whitmer’s second inauguration was yesterday. In 2015, just living down the road after all, we attended the second inauguration of then Republican governor Rick Snyder, and I was surprised by what a small affair it was - just a few rows of chairs, some short speeches. I don’t think journalists actually outnumbered attendees, but it was one of those events where you feel like that might be getting close. I mentioned this on Twitter, and in fact even at the time I had the thought that maybe it’s a mistake to make this so small.
In other words, maybe this is actually symptomatic of the GOP tendency to fade into the background, failing to articulate any actually positive vision, thereby failing to give people any real reason to vote for them. Maybe. There are still many good reasons for Christians to prefer a much-restrained government.
But as befits statists, both of Whitmer’s inaugurations have been, basically, big parties. They are intentionally a big propaganda bash with an implied theme, it has seemed to me, of the victory of light over darkness. By “darkness”, unfortunately they mean the forces of tradition and conservatism. But I mention it here, because it does all feel very post-Christian to me. As in, if Christianity had never been the dominant force in America, the secular Left also would think about politics very differently. They are still seeing life as a spiritual battle between good and evil. They’re just quite mixed up about who is on what team.
Incidentally, per smothering spontaneity, I again had the thought over the weekend that… Edward Snowden was right to say that many of your freedoms bear some connection to the fact that it just isn’t practically possible for the state to monitor most of your activities. If you really could be monitored 24/7, no doubt you do all manner of things that the ruling technocrats would find highly alarming, and they would be extremely happy to write another set of rules to govern your behavior. Right now, blessedly, they can’t, because such constant observation is still outside their powers. But they do want it. Micro-detailed rules for absolutely everything would make life better for everyone, don’t ya know? Well, Illich understood that such a system would be crippling to our very humanity.
If I may write a footnote on a footnote… I’ve seen increasingly often the suggestion that the big push for electric vehicles has less to do with CO2 production, and more to do with the fact that the state sees here a technological means to monitor and control your travel. And, regardless of what you think of that, surely it is the easiest thing in the world to imagine restrictions being placed on how far you can drive and/or how much you are allowed to charge, at first because of some kind of “electrical emergency” (like the unusually cold weather the south just had, say) which might even be genuine… but soon thereafter it is “discovered” that really, for the sake of everyone, we need that monitoring and need those rules all the time, thanks. I know that sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it doesn’t have to be - this is just how the technocratic mind works, this is the sort of thing it naturally desires.
Scientism is our new religion. And BIPOC LGBTQ+ people are the new Chosen People.
"Climate change" is being used to implement the system of complete control, or as close to complete control that our minders can achieve. Limiting freedom of movement is key to that, and EVs are perfect for trapping people. Most people cannot afford them, and those that can will be severely limited in their ability to move around, with paucity of charging stations cutting back on freedom even more.
It was very telling that when California and NY declared that they were banning gas-powered vehicles within 15 years, this seemingly business-destroying proclamation was met with silence by oil/gas companies and auto manufacturers who would be knee-capped by these state actions. Awfully strange...unless something more than profit-making is going on.
Something very big and very bad is underway, I fear.
Would a footnote of a footnote be a toenote?
Thank you for linking your book references to something other than A-moola-zon.