Chapter 2.             (continued) 

In response to these criticisms, some social scientists have striven to be more objective and empirically rigorous in their work. But they do admit that the studies done in their fields are often difficult to replicate because relevant background conditions to the phenomena being studied can’t be reset. For example, how could a tribe go back to living as fishers when the fish species they once lived off are gone? Could we get a modern nation, or even a small subgroup in it, to live without their cell phones?

Even a social scientist’s examination of a group of people changes those people. In the process, some of the morés of the people being studied become altered or cease to exist. Social scientists also admit that the models guiding their research can’t be expressed in neatly logical terms so the phenomena the researchers describe are often not reducible to formulas. In addition, many of the ways in which a researcher’s own biases may influence what she looks for and how she sees the data seem impossible to forestall, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. Finally, many human customs make sense only when they are viewed in the context in which the humans being studied normally live. Outside of their contexts, human actions often look pointless. In the Aztec markets, which kiosks sold batteries? Before they went overseas, where did the Crusaders get their typhus shots?

Thus, social scientists admit they often must settle for a single print of any phenomenon they wish to study. Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés and keep changing even as we examine them. There are a great number of prints to study and more coming all the time; we’ll never catch up. And for that matter, how can any social scientist who grew up largely inside of one culture ever claim to look objectively at another culture?

Others in the social sciences have taken a more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally acquired biases shape all human thinking—even, they say, the thinking of the physicists and chemists.

Thus, they argue that the overarching position called moral relativism is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the whole body of social science research, or all research in all fields, for that matter. We can try to observe and study human societies and the belief systems they instill in their members, but we can’t pretend to do such work objectively. We come to it with eyes already programed to see the details considered “significant” under the models and values we absorbed as children. Each researcher’s model of what human society is—or should be—lies deeper than her ability to articulate thoughts in words or even simply to observe. Our biases can’t be suspended; they prefigure our ability to think at all.

This is the stance called social constructivism. In its view, thought filters are absorbed from our culture (parents, teachers, etc.) as we develop, and with these tools, we string together sense data—the ones that we have been told matter—until, moment by moment, we form a picture of “reality.” But the whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights and sounds we are paying attention to. And other people, especially those from other cultures, construct their own pictures of reality, some of them radically different from ours, but still quite workable. People from other cultures have morés and ways of seeing reality that differ from our ways, but their ways do work for them.

In support of this claim, social scientists point out that while careful descriptions of events in a given society are possible, and even generalizations about apparent connections between events in that society are possible, lawlike statements about how moral codes and morés for all humans in all societies work continue to elude us.

Some social scientists go so far as to claim there aren’t any “facts” in any of our descriptions of the events of the past, or even of the events happening around us now. There are only sets of details selected by us, but guided by the values we learned as children, and we string these details that we do notice together to form various narratives, any one of them as valid as any other one. At the highest level of generality on what morality is, then, many social scientists not only have had nothing to say, they insist that nothing “factual”—that is, nothing objectively true—can be said. Each of us is trapped inside of her or his version of reality, and there is nothing we can do about that. Even science is just a set of opinions that seem to be working …for now. 

This argument called the Science Wars continues to rage. There’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of it. But the point for us is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack conviction. They can read about honour killings and remark calmly, “Well, that’s their culture.” In fact, to many thinkers in the humanities and social sciences today, all convictions are temporary and local. (One more recent, sensible, and useful compromise position is taken by Marvin Harris in Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times.)⁵

This has been the scariest consequence of the rise of science: moral confusion and indecision among our elites. It began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century, but here we are in the twenty-first and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be worsening.

Now, all of this still may sound academic and far removed from the experience of ordinary folk. But the truth is otherwise. When a society’s sages can’t guide its people, they look elsewhere for moral leaders. When the “wise” respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, others—some of them very unwise—jump in to fill people’s needs.