IN ONE OF THOSE multi-volume paperback would be historical treatments of Western philosophy published around the mid 1900s, the 20th century was called "The Age of Analysis" and the 19th century, "The Age of Ideology." At least that's as I recall it. I no longer seem to have the several books of that series I once had. As all such alleged surveys of such a vast topic as Western philosophy is (including those produced as such stars as Bertrand Russell) it was more superficial than really useful. I came to reject the characterizations of the 19th and 20th centuries because analytic philosophy, which was dominant in English language philosophy departments of the time (under the influence of such stars as Russell and Moore) was an ideology all on its own and it was hardly the only one around at the time. I read enough of it, along with such allied cults as logical positivism, to believe it was primarily an ideology.
The 20th century was as ideological as the 19th and that trend in disunity continues. I doubt there has ever been a decade, never mind a century that can be honestly captured in a single one of those labels. I don't think diversity in philosophy is a bad thing. It's preferable to a hegemonic unity of the kind that tends to dominate some academic departments where one ideology gets the upper hand at a particular university and can control hiring and other exercises in power. I have noticed that the product of some university philosophy departments seem to reflect the narrowness and uniformity of that soft-handed but ruthless intellectual thuggery. Often professional and para-professional jobs get handed to those who uphold the house ideology, networks of such "philosophers" seem to exist and interact with ideological interest projects. That is often to be seen among the professional atheists and what has become of would be public intellectualism.
I think that natural philosophy, or, as it's name has been unfortunately modernized, "science" is as liable to the same professional and personal exclusivity and gangster behavior as philosophy, especially in areas of science which are farthest from the practice of legitimate, rigorous verification in nature. Theoretical physics and cosmology, for now and perhaps from now on, speculating on things that cannot be verified, have become enmeshed in that same power political scenario. Biology is rife with it - especially the largely speculative field of evolutionary biology in which most of what would be needed to gain a firm ground is entirely lost in the largely destroyed physical record of life and the fact that much of what would have to be known was a product of actions and interactions that would leave, at most, the rarest and generally most unreadable fossil information. About the thoughts and detailed actions of creatures in the past, what was honestly had is found only in the explicit written documents produced by one species, human beings. All the rest is story telling of unknowable accuracy, indeed, the written record is believed to be literally true at one's own peril.
The "genetic record," while it, at present, can give some good clues that may well indicate something about the relatedness of individuals and species and maybe some of the more general levels of classification but it is hardly infallible in that and it really can't be read to tell us much else, even many of the most salient and important details. It is one of the ironies of late 20th century and current biology that that impossibility to discern the past for how organisms acted is filled in with the most perilous of claims about allegedly scientific descriptions of the behavior of living animals drawing some of the most absurdly tenuous conclusions about species as removed in evolutionary history from one another as ants and human beings and other currently living species.
I will remind you that when the idiot Toronto University psych prof. and angry-dork internet cult figure Jordan Peterson wanted to use alleged behavior of lobsters to tell us something about the "natural" roles of male and female human beings (as if we are all uniform and our personal choices mean nothing), really to support a pretty obvious male supremacist claim, I could point out that the same species hundreds of millions of years in the past that we are speculated to have in common with lobsters is the very same species we would have in common with preying mantis in which the females often kill, by decapitation, males that would try to mate with them (eating their heads as the dying headless male copulates with them) and, in fact, black widow spiders. Psychology has produced some of the biggest idiots to have ever been granted the academic and popular and, most dangerous of all, legal status of "scientists" while never actually doing anything like science. If you want to see nut cases in academia, the psych department is a good place to start the search. Better than many areas of the humanities. I would assert that modernism has done nothing to improve on that record in any university department I know of, including such as you would think were relatively immune to that such as applied science and technology.
The late 20th century completion of the Darwinist program of reducing the would be science of evolution to the pseudo-scientific story-telling of psychology is a tragedy the political ramifications of which may be playing out in the resurgence of scientific racism, white supremacy and even the neo-Nazism that has again become actively dangerous. I think the 1970s predictions of the old Sociobiology Study Group in that regard have come true. Of course the old scientific racism on the basis of natural selection never did go away, it was always just beneath the surface in academic science as the record, especially in their semi-private professional correspondence and babbling shows, now that those are surfacing. I have also repeatedly pointed out that overt-neo-Nazi style antisemitism was perfectly acceptable within academic "Evolutionary Psychology" until its exposure forced the "scientists" to newly find out how horrified they were to have elevated it with full academic honors for the scientific antisemite.*
The logical consequence that natural selection supports aristocratic rule, fascism (by whatever name you want to give it) was articulated by Ernst Haeckel with the unreserved approval of Charles Darwin and the implied support of such Darwinists as Thomas Huxley who wrote an introduction to the English language translation of the book he said it in, "Freedom in Science and Teaching."
Besides, Darwinism, the theory of natural selection—which Virchow
aimed at in his denunciation, much more especially than at
transformation, the theory of descent—which is often confounded with
it—Darwinism, I say, is anything rather than socialist! If this
English hypothesis is to be compared to any definite political
tendency—as is, no doubt, possible—that tendency can only be
aristocratic, certainly not democratic, and least of all socialist.
The theory of selection teaches that in human life, as in animal and
plant[93] life everywhere, and at all times, only a small and chosen
minority can exist and flourish, while the enormous majority starve
and perish miserably and more or less prematurely. The germs of every
species of animal and plant and the young individuals which spring
from them are innumerable, while the number of those fortunate
individuals which develop to maturity and actually reach their
hardly-won life's goal is out of all proportion trifling. The cruel
and merciless struggle for existence which rages throughout all living
nature, and in the course of nature must rage, this unceasing and
inexorable competition of all living creatures, is an incontestable
fact; only the picked minority of the qualified "fittest" is in a
position to resist it successfully, while the great majority of the
competitors must necessarily perish miserably. We may profoundly
lament this tragical state of things, but we can neither controvert it
nor alter it.
Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science And Teaching, p 93.
Now, who does that remind you of?
In the case of both Haeckel and Huxley, and more primly expressed, Charles Darwin, himself, that included claims of the salubrious effects of genocidal murder. In going on two centuries of the rise and hegemonic domination of natural selection as the required ideology of evolutionary science, that feature of it will inevitably return and return again as long as that hegemony is in place.
Note: The number of posts I've done citing and quoting Darwin at length about the inferiority of many Peoples, from the extreme West of Europe (The Irish) to Eastern Europe and Eurasia, perhaps no where as cluelessly as in his statement on the Turkish Peoples, "darker races" in general (putting a lie about that in the mouth of an eminent scientist, many Peoples of the Pacific Islands, Natives of South America, etc. the number of posts documenting that are too numerous to list. Maybe I'll try to do the task of collecting all of the Darwinism pieces and put them on a dedicated blog with an index. I wonder just who else with such an eminent place in the popular culture of science and in science itself, has ever made so many outrageous racist and bigoted claims, claiming that the extinction of so many millions of people would be salubrious for the human species as Charles Darwin. I doubt there is one who was worse on that account except, perhaps, the far less elevated figure of Ernst Haeckel.
There is lots of important and valid science that is done, more of it than ever. But the permission given to consider rank speculation based on either scanty or totally tacit physical evidence to be called science, starting in a serious way in the 19th century especially around the theory of natural selection things have gotten seriously out of hand. Darwinism's extension into the rank pseudo-science of psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethology etc. is extremely dangerous and entirely dishonest.
I'm holding the those who claim the mantle of scientific method as a means of obtaining, within logical and honest limits, more reliable knowledge about what can be demonstrated or observed and measured about physical phenomena to their claims. It is one of the great ironies that some of the most ideological of atheists within and around science and the idiot groupies and poseurs who proclaim their championing of science and their claim to speak for it are some of the worst offenders. Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, pretty much anyone who has had anything to do with CSI(COP) and the Paul Kurtz's alphabet soup organizations of atheism-"Skepticism" falls in that category. Some of them produced actual science at one point in their careers, some continued with that even as they made common cause with pseudo-scientists, many of them working in "behavioral science," to further their real interest, their ideological materialist-atheist-scientism. I think they've done a lot more bad to science, helping to bring it into ideological discredit with many people and confusing many more, than they have done good. [I sincerely hope that some younger people who might read this have, by now, asked "Carl who?"]
I would point out that a lot of them, like Sagan, have produced a "popular understanding of science" that is far more heavily wedded to "science fiction"** than to science. That trend continues a quarter of a century after Sagan's death, it's probably worse now than it was then. I think a lot of theoretical physics and cosmology today is more like sci-fi written in equations than it is science, it has to be, the various warring ideological camps within those can't all be right, at best most of them have to be wrong, creating universes and creation myths that have no counterpart in physical reality, fictitious universes, fictitious multi-verses. And it's all called "science" and treated as such. I think it would be far better if the term "natural philosophy" was reimposed on those fields which have left the actual methodology of science behind, though in the case of the "behavioral sciences" it would be far more honest to call their junk what it is "lore" of a particularly low-level sort, keeping in mind much of that lore, such as Dawkins' stuff is not based in observation of the kind that generated the sometimes useful and observable casual lore of yore. What any of it means to the animals that are observed is unknowable because even those who are the most intimate of those can't tell us a thing about their real motives. That's as true of the "science" as it was the lore. But, then, we can't even be sure of people reporting on that are accurate or even being honest about it and we know it is impossible to get a valid sample of even a relatively limited but large population, perhaps we will see evidence of that this week.
* As I was typing that, it occurred to me that I can't recall anyone ever using the phrase "scientific antisemitism" as you will often hear "scientific racism". That isn't because such scientific literature in support of hatred of Jews isn't there for anyone to find. As I've pointed out one of the more obvious documents in English is the study asserting the intellectual inferiority of Russian and Polish Jews to Britain produced by one of the brightest of bright lights in late 19th and early 20th century science, Karl Pearson and Margaret Moul, a warning on the danger of the presence of such Jews for the British nation which was cited in the very scientific textbook used by Hitler and his fellow thugs as they were producing Mein Kampf while in prison. In the study Pearson and Moul note their scientific collaboration with and dependence on one of the authors of that book. The Nazis produced enormous quantities of scientific antisemitism, as I've pointed out Hitler's second in command for a long period of his ascendancy and rule called Nazism "applied biology" for a reason. As the career of Kevin MacDonald proves, science in the United States, in the form of evolutionary psychology, with the full force of the witness to the Nazi genocide of the Jews on full display, nevertheless elevated the author of blatant antisemitism to a full university professorship, editorship of professional journals and the full measure of privileges and honors they bestow. He was hardly alone in receiving that treatment. Richard Dawkins cited some particularly antisemetic tripe of one of MacDonald's allies in The God Delusion, to little objection among the sci guys of the 00's.
** That such a phrase, "science fiction" ever was articulated is an indication of how screwy "science" as a popular concept is. And that conception of it is not limited to non-scientists. If there is one thing that science should should be discernibly not be associated with, it is fiction. Yet most of the "science" that is popularly and even professionally believed and thought of is, in fact, fiction. The enormous boneyard of discontinued science is vast, especially in such fields as evolutionary biology. The sections of the "behavioral sciences" includes most of what has been and continues to be the professional holdings of those "sciences". Yet no one ever considers that as being a problem with what "science" is allowed all the rights and privileges and prestige of science. The unthinking, uncritical acceptance granted to what is claimed to be science.
And it's not even entirely untrue of what might, with more professional discipline and modesty, be actual science. As Rupert Sheldrake once noted, nutrition science isn't the most successful branch of biology. Individual organisms considered merely on the physical level are extremely complex entities of related organs and molecules on an individual level, trying to generalize statements about organisms in a universal way is fraught with problems that are likely insoluble. Though some general things might be discovered you're going to have to be really careful about the scope of what you claim if you want to maintain credibility. I'd bet most people in the United States are pretty skeptical about claims about nutrition after being deluged with that often contradictory and often overturned "science" for decades. The continual bait-and-switch of scientific announcements about diet and nutrition from nutritional science - often science paid for by industries seeing to use science to their own financial profit - doesn't go entirely unnoticed. It's about eating, something people do every day. It's not like evolution for which most people have little to no use for or stake in and in which bullshit flourishes to little notice.
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