The man in the street surely believes such scientific facts to be as well-established, as well-proven, as his own existence. His certitude is an illusion. Nor is the scientist himself immune to the same illusion. In his praxis, he must, after all, suspend disbelief in order to do or think anything at all. He is rather like a theatergoer, who, in order to participate in and understand what is happening on the stage, must for a time pretend to himself that he is witnessing real events. The scientist must believe his working hypothesis, together with its vast underlying structure of theories and assumptions, even if only for the sake of the argument. Often the "argument" extends over his entire lifetime. Gradually he becomes what he at first merely pretended to be; a true believer. I choose the word "argument" thoughtfully, for scientific demonstrations, even mathematical proofs, are fundamentally acts of persuasion.
Scientific statements can never be certain; they can only be more or less credible. And credibility is a term in individual psychology, i. e. a term that has meaning only with respect to an individual observer. To say that some proposition is credible is, after all, to say that it is believed by an agent who is free not to believe it, that is by an observer who, after exercising judgment and (possibly) intuition, chooses to accept the proposition as worthy of his believing it. How then can science, which itself surely and ultimately rests on vast arrays of human value judgments, demonstrate that human value judgments are illusory? It cannot do so without forfeiting its own status as the single legitimate path to understanding man and his world.
But no merely logical argument, no matter how cogent or eloquent can undo this reality; that science has become the sole legitimate form of understanding in the common wisdom. When I say that science has been gradually converted into a slow-acting poison, I mean that the attribution of certainty to scientific knowledge by the common wisdom, an attribution now made so nearly universally that it has become a commonsense dogma, has virtually deligitimatized all other ways of understanding. People viewed the arts, especially literature, as sources of intellectual nourishment and understanding, but today the ares are perceived largely as entertainments. The ancient Greek and Oriental theaters, the Shakesperian stage, the stages peopled by the Ibsens and Chekhovs nearer to our day - these were schools. The curricula they taught were vehicles for understanding the societies they represented. Today, although an occasional Arthur Miller or Edward Albee survives and is permitted to teach on the New York or London stage, the people hunger only for what is represented to them to be scientifically validated knowledge. They seek to satiate themselves at such scientific cafeterias as Psychology Today, or on popularized versions of the works of Masters and Johnson, or on Scientology as revealed by L. Ron Hubbard. Belief in the rationality-logicality equation has corroded the prophetic power of language itself. We can count but we are rapidly forgetting how to say what is worth counting and why.
This passage was a good part of why I first decided to go through the then, for me at least, novel exercise of typing large passages of books out to comment on what they said. Then, in the period of the new-atheist fad of the now going on two decades past, even before I had concluded that the three mainstays of conventional atheist-materialist-scientism were deadly to my primary goal, the success of egalitarian democracy, hollowing out the foundations of it, I was already enormously annoyed by exactly this aspect of the common-received atheist faith and its popular expression in the semi-commercial "skepticism" movement. More generally I was beginning to really understand that, far from supporting equality and a democratic system based on justice, the common received culture of the college-credentialed was more likely to produce white-collar Republicans who were prone to fascism in protection of their accumulated wealth under a morality that was a legalistic expression of an even more vulgar materialism, modern Mammonism. And that that was as apt to be true of those on the secular left as it was the overt capitalist right and center - according to the conventional meaning of those terms. Snobbery among the college-credentialed on the left played no small part in that, as well, secular leftism being more a lifestyle choice than an expression of a well-founded morality that supports an effective and full struggle to establish equal justice which could not be found in its required and hegemonic ideological foundations, in any way.
While Joseph Weizenbaum may not have exactly expected my analysis of the crisis on the very different parts of the coalition that are what we call "the left" to come the way it does from his statement that "science has been converted into a slow-acting poison" due to that faith in its all enveloping potency and its sole legitimacy I think my analysis of it in regard to American politics, the politics in countries in which "the left" means everything from what remains of Marxism to a watered down secularist materialist modified 18th century style European laissez-faire liberalism under a degraded form of republicanism is correct.
The extent to which "the left" has given up the faith that equality, that justice, that fairness are true BECAUSE THAT IS HOW GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE, that the universe itself tends in that direction and that people have a moral obligation with consequences to bend their actions in that direction as well, is the extent to which "the left" will not only never succeed but will, as well, peter out into the kind of impotence that has characterized the left in the period after its high point in America, the weeks and months and all too brief years when the agitation led by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. and others, most of whom were people of faith, led to lawmaking to pursue equal justice, economic justice in the mid-1960s. The progress that was made after that was an after-glow and as that faded it became largely a matter of a few agenda items considered "leftist" or "liberal" largely out of a coincidental intersection where laissez-faire for the elites met up with a more general egalitarian program of justice. I think that is what accounts for the fact that even as equal rights for Black People and other People of Color has been successfully attacked, especially in voting rights by the Republican-fascist right, much of the agenda for gay men and lesbians has succeeded. The equal justice on the basis of things such as employment, marriage equality allowed for gay men and lesbians, even supported by one of the most potent enemies of the rights of Black People, of other People of Color, the enemy of the right to cast a vote and have it counted, Chief "Justice" John Roberts is certainly due to him wanting those things for "people like him" not because he has any devotion to the general equality of all people and universal justice. He is, in fact, an interesting study in the intersections of those two generally opposing things, 18th century "liberalism" and the more general, egalitarian traditional American meaning of that word as so well and prophetically addressed by The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. throwing in Republican-fascist intent to dominate absolutely and anti-democratically into that mix.
One of the themes I have developed was the enormous price that the American left has paid due to its championing the rights of and even some of the claims of those devotees to the ultimate expansion of the materialistic scientism and atheism of the past, the Marxists. Marxism is an ultimate expression of that received faith which I have come to see is one of the most deadly poisons of a real left, one motivated by the pursuit of equality, equal justice in its real meaning - in which economic justice is the center - and one which, using the language of equality, of fairness, a fairness which has never existed during any of the Marxist regimes supported by the Marxist left, has duped even traditional American style liberals into being their patsies to the ever enduring damage to the real left. It is no accident that anti-commie talk has reemerged now, even today when the most Marxist of countries, China, has an economy that Marx might recognize as his nightmare capitalism on steroids and the North Korean slave state contracts slave labor out to the Putin regime, which has given up the pretense of Marxism altogether, keeping the gangster-boss political and law structure which Lenin and Stalin cemented into place as "Communism" as soon as they took power. If Trotsky had won his power struggle with Stalin, he'd have done the same probably with at least as much violence as Stalin did. And all that time the American "left" supported that or at least discouraged the recognition of the Marxist left here for being the stooges and admirers of gangster strong-men that they were.
I think there is no more of a quintessential example of that than the lore of the Hollywood 10 who were, to a person, either present day or past supporters of Stalin, well-paid by the movie industry to write and, um, "create" even as their hero kept a jack-boot on the arts, literature, murdering writers and poets and people in the theater and movie industry in ways well known in the United States. Some of the figures in and around that, the people whose far more limited persecution we were to lament and rage over were open signatories in support of Stalin's show trials and summary executions, some of whom never allowed those to bother them at all as they lived in a continuing affluence afforded them as even under-cover scribblers for the American movie industry. What they never were was a real danger to American democracy in line with their intentions, there was no way they were going to sucker most Americans into voting for Marxism through the entertainment industry. Their real damage to democracy came from their associating themselves with the real left, the Democratic Party and so to its discrediting which the Republican-fascists are reviving even as they are the ones taking their instructions from and supporting the intentions of a former Communist gangster dictator in Russia. The party that put his puppet into power and which keeps him as the Hollywood-TV invented leader of their party.
If you don't think that is relevant to what Joseph Weizenbaum discusses in this introduction to his book Computer Power and Human reason, I will remind you he began with this:
In
1935 Michael Polanyi, then holder of the Chair of Physical Chemistry
at Victoria University of Manchester, England, was suddenly shocked
into a confrontation with philosophical questions that have ever since
dominated his life. The shock was administered by Nicolai Bukharin,
one of the leading theoreticians of the Russian Communist party, who
told Polanyi that "under socialism the conception of science pursued for
its own sake would disappear, for the interests of scientists would
spontaneously turn to the problems of the current Five Year Plan."
Polanyi sensed then that "the scientific outlook appeared to have
produced a mechanical conception of man and history in which there was
no place for science itself." And further that "this conception denied
altogether any intrinsic power of thought and thus denied any grounds
for claiming freedom of thought."
Marxism was not the only strain of that thinking, it was and is widely held under any interpretation of the world under a materialistic, scientistic and almost all atheistic framings of reality. It was as true for Nazism as it was Stalinism, it is as true for eliminative positivisim and evolutionary psychology even those parts of it which claim to use science to support its degrading of minds to being those of "lumbering robots" that exist for the benefit of DNA, their status as insignificant expressions of the movements and combinations of molecules controlled by nothing but the "laws of science" either unaware of or uninterested in the fact that those laws exist in no place except the minds they are degrading in the interest of their ideology. That actually does comprise a good part of the metaphysics as taught by modern universities, it is the faith taught by them and supported by the culture of the college-credentialed who probably couldn't do second year algebra, never mind understand any of the alleged scientific basis of its claims.
Meanwhile, the real American left must keep on even as the secular left whines about its ennui and annoyance because the real left knows that they have an enduring moral obligation to try and struggle to produce equality in results, in real lives, in real life and not in impotent theory. The real American left is a lot harder than the secular left or the even more degraded form of that, the play-left. It is no wonder that the Democrats in nominal control of the American government have a hard time ruling even with the support of a majority of Americans for their intentions. So much is stacked against them. I have looked and I have seen the secular left is already doing what they do, slamming their inability to deliver promptly what they want to do. They do that even as the person honored by the "Center For Inquiry" for her contribution to bringing atheism into politics, Krysten Sinema is one of the roadblocks to doing that. At least people are calling her a "conservative Democrat" as she does it. Before she became a Senator a lot of people were calling her a liberal because of her sexual orientation. Which may tie up another of the threads in this post.
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I am tempted to go over more of Joseph Weizenbaum's book, skipping the chapter in which he creates a game to try to explain how a computer works. If you want to read his book, which I would encourage because there is a lot more than just this to it, I would encourage you to read the chapter which opposes the practice of instrumental reasoning. Though all of it is very important to understanding why this is a danger to the struggle for equality, equal justice, economic justice, and democracy. It is probably as important to understanding how "scientific materialism" as politically expressed in Marxism is as fundamentally opposed to even the weak, half-measure towards achieving that equality, electoral democracy as other, more overtly anti-egalitarian ideologies claiming to, as well be expressions of "applied science" as laissez-faire capitalism and Nazism are. As are, in a strictly American context, the various Republican-fascist ideologies that enshrine the Constitution, giving it a similar status as "science" takes in other ideologies. The Constitution, written largely by those who were proponents of 18th century scientistic hegemony, the "enlightenment" carries in it not a slight amount of that poison, though its motives were purely those of slave-holders and bankers and mercantile economic interests. They found nothing in their materialism or scientism to counter their self-interests.
The brief expression of something higher at the beginning of the Declaration of Independence, suppressed by their "enlightened self-interest" away from the declaration of God endowing all people with inalienable rights. Jefferson as willing as Madison or any of the others to turn his back on that as it profited him. I think it was, for him, a logical problem of explaining the rights of white men and their source which can only come from The Creator - he could not account for them with science or materialistic philosophy - while never intending to extend those to all. There is no way the documents and governmental structures set up by such people would not include opportunities for those to legally prevent equal justice as has, in fact, comprised so much of the history of the Constitution, the Supreme Court and, as is most often seen, the anti-democratically constituted Senate. I am convinced more and more, the more I look into these things that either you believe that God created all people as equal and in God's image or you are looking out for #1.
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