soldiers of the 8 nations alliance (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In the face of all the criticism of social science, some social scientists have taken an even more aggressive stance. They have argued that no science, not even Physics, is truly objective. Complex, culturally-based 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 programmed 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 acquired 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 their claim that all human perspectives on the human aspects of the world are hopelessly biased, social scientists point out that while careful descriptions of events in a given society are possible, and generalizations about apparent connections between events in that society are possible, law-like statements about how moral codes and morés for all human 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 any of the any events of the past, even of the events happening around us now. There are only details selected by us, but guided by the values we learned as children. We string these details 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, 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. Science is just a Euro-based set of opinions that seem to be working some of the time …for now. 

Scientists in the sciences other than the social ones continue to argue that there is an empirical, material reality out there that is common for all of us and Science is the only reliable way we have to study and understand that reality. Thus, most scientists will admit that they can’t give a very good explanation or model for what moral values are – if such things can even be said to exist – but the idea that Science can’t give us any reliable insights into how any parts of reality work is nonsense. Science works. Its successes have been so many that no sane person can doubt that claim any longer.  

These arguments called the Science Wars continue to rage. There’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of the whole controversy. But the point is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack all 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, after Darwin and Nietzsche, but here we are in the twenty-first and, if anything, the crisis of moral confidence appears to be worsening.