The Real As Opposed To The Mythical Mindset of Science

In Steven Pinker's article I mentioned yesterday, he talks about a far more coherent and far more informed article about scientism in the form of a review of Sam Harris's writings by Jackson Lears which appeared in The Nation.  He quotes a section of that

Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the "fit" and the sterilization or elimination of the "unfit." ... Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginable destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of sceintific research to advanced technology. 

Immediately after that, he quotes a part of a speech given by Leon Kass, noting that he was a bioethics advisor to George W. Bush, 

Scientific ideas and discoveries about living nature and man, perfectly welcome and harmless in themselves, are being enlisted to do battle against our traditional religious and moral teachings, and even our self-understanding as creatures with freedom and dignity. A quasi-religious faith has sprung up among us—let me call it "soul-less scientism"—which believes that our new biology, eliminating all mystery, can give a complete account of human life, giving purely scientific explanations of human thought, love, creativity, moral judgment, and even why we believe in God. ... Make no mistake. The stakes in this contest are high: at issue are the moral and spiritual health of our nation, the continued vitality of science, and our own self-understanding as human beings and as children of the West. 

Of course, one of his motives is to denegrate the opinions of one or both by associating them with the enemy of his readers choice.  Based on what I know of Pinker and the magazine he was published in, The New Republic, I think Lears was the target of denigration by association.   Considering his subject, it's rather odd that Pinker didn't note that Kass, unlike Jackson Lears, is a member of Pinkers club, a molecular biologist and physicist.   I haven't read the speech so I don't know what else he said in it or if the elision is his or Pinker's.  

Immediately after setting up that frame, Pinker takes the standard claim of moral impunity for science. 

These are zealous prosecutors indeed. But their cases are weak. The mindset of science cannot be blamed for genocide and war and does not threaten the moral and spiritual health of our nation. It is, rather, indispensable in all areas of human concern, including politics, the arts, and the search for meaning, purpose, and morality.

As someone who has studied the history of eugenics in quite a bit of depth, from the original primary documents, written by the scientists who invented and supported eugenics, there couldn't be a stronger case possible that they not only came up with the theories of that proposed application of natural selection in the human species, but also, from the beginning included all of its most horrible features, including the killing of people as its logical requirements.  Really, killing people in the name of biological hygiene of the human species. 
  

Either in encouraging conditions that would more passively lead to the deaths of those denominated as "unfit" "weaker members" of the human species,  the disabled, the ill and, most often of  all, the poor and members of ethnic and racial groups explicitly declared inferior to Europeans, death figures in it from the start.  And that was the case for the beneficial benefits of merely letting such people die without any help to prevent that.   There were, from as early as the 1860s, calls by scientists to actively kill those deemed unfit, made by scientists as eminent at the time as Ernst Haeckel with widespread approval of some of the most renowned scientists of that time whose reputation couldn't be higher today.  Darwin, himself endorsed the books in which Haeckel said that, with no reservations stated on those points.  If Pinker has not read the primary literature, he really should because those scientists presented their eugenics as constituting reliable science in the most unmistakable and explicit of terms.  There is absolutely no rational case to be made that they didn't say what they did. 

Whether or not Pinker likes the fact, what they were doing was fully accepted by the most influential faction of scientists at that time,  it is science that has been asserted by recent scientists as respected and renowned as Francis Crick and W. D. Hamiliton.  Those lauded and influential scientists of the supposed post-eugenics period left documents of their rather outrageous support of  Eugenics, both as theory  and as prescriptions for political policy. Eugenics was not merely a scientific anomaly, it is a resurgent trend in science, an outgrowth of the belief in the universal efficacy of natural selection.   It has been a feature of that ideological view within biology, it has been since the beginning, it is one of the most persistent over-reaches of scientists which has been responsible for the murders of millions of people and an unknowable number of those who died as a result of the passive neglect through the discouragement of money being appropriated for aid.  

And that is only the most extreme result of the tendency to try to apply natural selection to the human species.  The reinforcement of class and racial caste has blighted the lives of those who survive.   Crick, in particular, was a great supporter of both Jensen and Shockley, of the point of view that any attempt to improve the lives of the poor and racially suppressed by education and other proven means of them rising was useless and a folly.  And all of them were scientists, in many cases Nobel laureates, whose identity as scientists is unquestionable and whose one and only minds presented their scientific racism and eugenics in terms of science, based in scientific methods and arguments. 

Similar cases can be made, in the strongest of terms, for those scientists who created the most potent weapons in human history and the less potent ones that kill many millions, the extraction industries, the chemicals that pollute the environment and are put in our foods.  If you want to include the behavioral and related sciences as science, as Pinker does, the role of psychology in creating more effective lying on behalf of corporations, the military, political parties, etc. would have to also figure in this.  Its role in figuring out how to sell lies and deception through advertising is both one of the most malignant and most successful branches of applied psychology.  It's certainly more successful than its clinical alleviation of miseries, not a few of which due to the temptations that psychology has helped to sell. 

Scientists are not deistic gods who create and then leave their creations to work themselves out without any further involvement, they are generally paid to do what they do, kept on retainer and frequently the owner of patents on the applications of their work, sometimes becoming filthy rich from them.  What they do, in many cases, wouldn't exist without being paid work.  They also gain professional standing, repute and influence by what they do.  They are honored by their fellow scientists.  

All of that, all of what scientists consciously think and do must be what constitutes "the mindset of science." When Fritz Haber pioneered the modern use of poisonous gas in warfare, he was doing so as a scientist, he was a professor at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which had one of the most illustrious collection of scientists which has ever been assembled, including, of course Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.  The association between the German military industrial establishment and science couldn't have been more obvious if uniforms, gun drill and military rankings had been required of all of them.  In 1918, when he should have been on trial for war crimes, his fellow scientists honored him with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Three other scientists working with him on gas warfare were to also be awarded Nobel Prizes later. 

He went on with his work as a scientist, creating the pesticide Zyklon, which, after his death, was altered to create Zyklon B, the gas used in the scientifically engineered death chambers of the Nazis. If he had still been alive and living in Germany, I would imagine the only way that Haber could have avoided being killed in one would be to trade on his expertise as a scientist. Many of his fellow scientists escaped to places like the United States that well could have rejected their immigration were they merely everyday Jewish people with no status gained as scientists or, to be fair, eminent scholars in other fields.

Anyone today who asserts the moral impunity of science and the scientists, whose minds in which science is constructed,  when they have the history they have racked up in the past two centuries is telling one of the most pervasively believed of massive lies.  Scientists are, first and foremost, people, human beings as heir to depravity and greed, selfishness and hypocritical claims to the better half of a double standard as the sleaziest conman or TV hallelujah peddler.   And they are even more potentially dangerous when they enter into the realm of political and military influence and power.   Science is efficacious  it can produce nuclear weapons,  oil drilling under the ocean, a massive carbon overloading in the atmosphere, racial profiling, gender inequality, and a myriad of other real manifestations of science as proposed by scientists as blight our history and put our future at risk.  No scientist can honestly make the claims Pinker has for science and then be allowed to lie about its history.

The declaration of scientism is that only science can produce knowledge, whatever is not known through science is not known.  But that's a lie.  History can produce knowledge more absolutely known than most of science, it can produce absolute knowledge of many aspects of the phenomenon of humanities collective experience, our world and our past.  It can cast a light on the complexity of the present that science is entirely unable to illuminate in such detail.  The history of science and the scientists whose mindset produces and are responsible for it is knowable in considerable detail GAINED FROM READING WHAT THOSE SCIENTISTS HAVE SAID IN THEIR OWN WORDS IN THEIR OWN PAPERS, ARTICLES AND BOOKS.  They said it so that their thoughts, their minds could be known and understood, that their words would have potency and the identity of science and the privilege of being relied on as true. Calling it science magnifies its power many times.  That they said what they did, that they produced the things they produced that kill people and blight lives and endanger the entire biosphere are as real and as absolutely known as the most favorable case that can be constructed by applying the double standard that is the standard operating procedure from that activity of scientists and their fans. 

I highly recommend reading Jackson Lears' article.  It is far better than Pinkers and far more honest.