In an e-mail exchange with a friend, I claimed that science is an ideology, and I listed all of its ideological components that I could think of, which I will include below.
But before I include that, I’ll clarify what I mean by “science,” since my friend argued that I wasn’t being consistent because I claimed that at least one of science’s ideological components, namely scientism, piggybacks the scientific method, which implies it’s something distinct from the scientific method, yet I also said that it and all the other -isms I named are components of science.
What I responded with was this:
If we define science as the scientific method per se, then most (perhaps not all) of the -isms I mentioned are not science per se. But I’m not really using “science” in that strict a sense. I’m using it more colloquially. And I’m using it sort of in reference to a place it holds in people’s minds. It’s sort of nebulous. It has an aura. Or, if you really want to define science as being the scientific method, or you think I’m being too poetic in my description of how I’m using it, we could just be more technical and say, “Science itself is not an ideology, or at least most of the ideologies I mentioned are not part of science, but the important thing is that science is virtually inseparably linked with these isms in our current culture.
So, here’s my response to my friend with the list of ideological components of science, modified:
I very much see science as an ideology. I think people see science as *not* an ideology because science is seen as merely the rational and neutral search for truth, whatever it might be. Of course, there is some truth to that notion, but there’s also a lot more to it than that. Here are some aspects of the scientific ideology:
- A tendency to have faith in the Establishment, in whatever the scientific community currently happens to believe, and in the claims of individual scientists and other sources purporting to be scientific, such as journalists and corporations selling a product. All of these sources are more fallible than they’re taken to be.
My friend replied with the following:
trust in the scientific community is not blind faith but is based on the rigorous process of peer review and validation. again, while some individual scientists and studies can indeed be fallible, the collective process of scientific inquiry tends toward self-correction over time.
To which I replied with this:
I know that there is good reason to listen to science, and that good reason is what has catapulted the faith in science, but I maintain that the faith is somewhat blind, in that it gives all scientific and purportedly scientific sources too much credit. It believes what they say without enough critical thought or research. And yes, we can’t all spend our time researching scientific topics, nor do we have the necessary education to do so, but we can say that people “overestimate the likelihood” of a given scientific claim of being correct. It’s more or less seen as infallible. Yes, the process tends toward self-correction over time, but there’s still incorrectness in the current time, and secondly, some things never get corrected. For example, there are several nutritional claims that scientists have vacillated back and forth between one claim and its opposite many times.
And there are systemic problems with the scientific community that self-correction just isn’t enough to fix. Basically, there are various incentives to fudge results, and it happens quite often. (a) If the results are fudged once, they can be fudged the next time, and (b) self-correction doesn’t apply if there are no subsequent investigations into a topic because it’s not a prominent enough topic. - The ideology of strict empiricism. This doesn’t just refer to science’s reliance on physical observation/measurement/evidence to arrive at conclusions, but on the ideology that physical evidence is the only legitimate basis in inferring truth.
- Positivism (maybe not as popular as the other things in this list, at least in its most strict sense). This doesn’t mean being positive; it’s the doctrine that a claim has no meaning if it doesn’t ultimately resolve to a claim about the physical state of things/empirical observation. I say it’s not as popular as the other things, though, because it seems to have fallen out of popularity.
- Atheism/anti-spiritualism/anti-mysticism/anti-“woo”/anti-paranormal/anti-parapsychology
My friend replied with this:
science does not inherently promote atheism or anti-spiritualism. instead, it focuses on what can be empirically observed and tested, nothing more/nothing less. btw many scientists hold personal spiritual or religious beliefs, demonstrating that science and spirituality can coexist. (see my point about how science and religion are actually not at odds when you consider science as methodology)
I replied to that with the following:
Most people who are into science seem to be anti-spirituality. Maybe actual scientists are more open-minded than armchair scientists, I don’t know. I’d like to know what percentage of scientists hold spiritual beliefs, actually. Science doesn’t “inherently” promote atheism in that that’s not a part of the scientific method, but this comes back to my comments above regarding my use of the word science. Another thing, there seems to be a strong taboo against spirituality in the scientific community. Some scientists may hold spiritual beliefs, but they have to keep them to themselves, or at least they can’t venture into research into those spiritual or parapsychological beliefs, because they’d lose all credibility in the community. They’d lose their livelihoods. There’s a video explaining this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9Qiwqew&ab_channel=GoogleTechTalks (Science and the Taboo of Psi) - Physicalism and mechanicalism, and, by extension, the tendency to see living things as non-living, such as your own flesh, trees, the sun, etc. (Trees are technically living according to science, but we don’t see them as alive in the sense of being beings or having any meaning beyond that of an object.) And, to a lesser degree, determinism, implying we have no free will and further cementing the idea that we’re merely complex machines.
I realize it’s contentious at the very least to say the sun is a living thing, so, in that case, let’s just say, “potentially living things..”
We see our own and others’ flesh as essentially non-living, a thing, at least on some level of consciousness, because we know it’s made of matter, and we see matter as non-living. These preconceptions are so deeply ingrained into us by our culture that we don’t consciously notice them. So, this perception serves to deaden us by deadening our own self-perception. It also facilitates mad dreams of replacing parts of our living body with non-living machines because of their supposed superiority, i.e., transhumanism. - Rationalism. The meaning of rationalism is hard to put a finger on, but maybe you have a feeling for what it means already. Rationalism is to rationality as scientism is to science, simplistic is to simple, and complicated is to complex. I wrote more about it here: https://exalumen.blog/2018/04/13/notes-on-science-scientism-mysticism-religion-logic-physicalism-skepticism-etc/#Rationalism
- A fixation with understanding everything via theoretical models of those things
- A replacement of actual philosophical thought and insight with strictly evidence- and statistics-based methodologies. A good example is how psychology moved away from being creatively insightful to being merely a practice of data collection and pattern finding. Another example is the popular belief among scientists and scientifically minded people that philosophy in general is bunk and has been obsoleted by science. (It hasn’t; philosophy addresses many questions that are inherently outside the purview of science and never will be within it. The very definition/methodology/nature of science determines its inherent limitations.)
- Scientism. I know, I know, scientism isn’t science, or the scientific method itself. And you could say the same about the other things in this list. But, as I said before, these things are inextricably intertwined with science given the current zeitgeist. And the fact that they go along with science, or with being particularly science-minded, is invisible to us because they’re so widely/deeply accepted/entrenched in culture/ideology.
- Separationism/compartmentalism as opposed to holism. The anti-holism inherent to science is due to the fact that separating things into parts and compartmentalizing/objectifying their relationships to each other is necessary for effective scientific analysis and modeling. The anti-holism probably also stems from the proliferation of technological devices (which are themselves a product of science), which are modular in nature because that’s the easiest way for our puny brains to design them. This anti-holism becomes unconsciously assimilated into popular culture; we operate under the ideology that, by default, the various components of reality, things or beings are separate from each other, don’t affect each other, and are uncorrelated, unless proven/known to be otherwise.
An example of this anti-holism in popular culture is the belief that a person’s facial features have nothing to do with their personality. This is bunk. We may not know how to predict personality from facial features, but, if you think about it, there are tons of cases where, if you were to take two people and swapped their faces, it would be obvious that their personalities actually starkly clash with their respective (swapped) faces.
Another example is the ideology that personality is totally independent of what sex someone is, and additionally that what sex someone is just boils down/reduces to what genitals they have. There are obvious, profound inherent psychological/energetic differences between males and females, and it’s sad that people aren’t perceptive enough to see that. - Reductionism. I mentioned the term “reduces to” in the above entry because that entry reminded me of this ideological component of science, reductionism. By “reductionism,” I mean where all larger-scale objects are thought to be nothing more or less than the sum of their smaller-scale parts and their interactions, and ditto for every possible successively smaller and smaller (or larger and larger) scale of consideration.
- Technologism. By this I mean the tendency to ascribe or compare various things that have nothing to do with technology (basically, natural things) to various technologies. For example, likening people to mere complex machines, likening the brain to a computer, likening minds to software and brains to hardware, or thinking the universe might actually be a giant computer simulation.
As ski on IRC once said, “well, it’s tradition to try to understand ourselves through technical revolutions (mechanical, steam, electrical, information, communication).” So, today’s “people are only complex chemical machines” is just yesterday’s “people run on steam engines and hydraulics.”
While I’m elucidating my grievances with science (or the modes of thinking attendant to it), I should include the ones that don’t take the form of ideologies per se. I should first note that, as with many of the ideologies listed above, these thought-tendencies may be just as much the facilitators of the excessive proliferation of science, scientism, technology, etc. as its consequences.
One such grievance is the tendency of scientific thinking to actively quash any and all magic in the world. This behavior is so tragic it’s downright evil, although not in a deliberate way. You may say that such thinking could surely only quash the perception, interpretation, or belief in the magic of the world, rather than the actuality of it (in the case that it exists), but the nature of magic is such that the perception or the belief in it and the reality of it go hand-in-hand.
It may be difficult to explain why that is, but a key point is that one of the composing attributes of magic is that it’s miraculously connective, and, in this case, the relevant connection is between the observer and the observed, between internal experience and external reality, between mind and matter, or whatever.
It would be fair if you’re wondering what in the heck I actually mean by the word “magic.” I wrote an essay on it here: https://exalumen.blog/2017/07/12/the-meaning-of-magic/. I would add here that magic, as I see it, is very close in meaning to that of life itself. The nature of life is magical. So, if you quash or deny magic, you quash or deny life. If this seems nonsensical to you because “life” refers to specific classes of complex chemical processes, see my essay at https://exalumen.blog/2020/10/29/life-is-not-a-scientific-concept/.
Another grievance is the overly analytical, representational, left-brained thinking that obsessively models everything, totally misses any holistic perception of events and reality, and is constantly lost in the map while ignoring the territory. Maybe that’s actually a lot of grievances put into one sentence, but they’re all closely related. For further elaboration on some of these ideas, see Dr. Iain McGilchrist, such as in the video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IeuIg9nGY, and also my friend Darin’s writings at https://www.facebook.com/darinstevenson and https://organelle.org/.
Regarding the “overly analytical” aspect, I once saw a very bold and insightful Twitter post that basically said that constantly analyzing and evaluating things is actually a trauma response, and that’s exactly what scientists do for a living. So, this group of people among those that are admired most and listened to most and that make the world go around is actually even more neurotic/pathological than your average person.
My final grievance is with the proliferation of technology itself, which is the direct result of, and can only happen due to, scientific advancement. I wrote about why technology doesn’t ultimately help us, but rather does quite the opposite, at https://exalumen.blog/2023/12/17/on-simulation-theory/ and https://exalumen.blog/2019/09/13/no-were-not-living-in-a-simulation/. Theodore Kaczynski wrote a good essay on this at https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unabomber/manifesto.text.htm.
