Chapter 2 – The Moral Emptiness of Science

                         

                           

                              William Butler Yeats (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

—from “The Second Coming” by W.B. Yeats, 1919

In the West, when our idea of God began to erode, so did our ideas of right and wrong, and when those ideas began to erode, we became the society that Yeats described in his great poem “The Second Coming”. We live in a time in which some truly immoral citizens are filled with “passionate intensity”: fraudsters claim they are daring entrepreneurs; Mafia thugs claim that they are soldiers in one more kind of war; warmonger generals tout their own indispensability. In short, these people see themselves as moral, even heroic.

In the meantime, some of what should be society’s most moral citizens “lack all conviction.” For example, it would seem logical that people looking for moral direction in the Science-driven countries of the West would turn to their gurus, i.e. scientists. Especially those who study human societies and the moral beliefs they run by. In the West, these experts are our anthropologists and sociologists. Trained to make astute, Science-based judgments about human societies and their “ways of life”, social scientists should be our most morally gifted citizens.

But social scientists in the West have no moral directions to offer the rest of us. In their writings, they flatly deny that moral values refer to anything real at all. As I noted in our previous chapter, American anthropologist Ruth Benedict put it succinctly: “Morality differs in every society and is a convenient term for socially approved habits.”¹ Thus, as moral guides, Science and scientists (social scientists, in particular) appear to be pretty close to useless.

How can this be? Ordinary people in societies and tribes all over the world, when they are asked to explain their actions, answer by giving the moral codes they learned in their childhoods. It seems clear then that Social Science ought to be studying those moral codes if it wants to explain why people in tribes and societies do the things they do. But in response to questions about what moral codes are, and how they relate to humans’ actions, social scientists say that moral codes have no basis in the real world. Moral claims are just expressions of tastes, like a preference for one brand of ice cream over its competitors. Statements about “right” and “wrong” are just ways of venting emotion. Right and wrong are empty concepts, unrelated to the observable facts of Science. These experts then go so far as to challenge their opponents to prove otherwise. 

Many even go over to the offence and ask what it is that all Science is seeking. Are scientists seeking truth about reality? That, by pure Logic, is unattainable. But, if not truth, sociologists ask, then what is Science seeking? The answers to these questions are parts of a fight going on in universities worldwide right now.

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is arguably the most influential work on this topic. In it, he casts a dark shadow over Science’s view of itself. He argues that all branches of Science move forward via processes that are not rational. The scientific method is driven by intuition, not logic. Science does not progress by a steady march of improving knowledge; it moves from less useful pictures of reality to more useful ones by unpredictable leaps that he calls paradigm shifts. 

A paradigm shift occurs in a branch of Science when many individuals in that branch, separately, each have a moment of insight and then experience a leap of understanding so profound that it makes them literally see reality in a new way. But they cannot tell you after their cognitive leap has occurred how it happened and how they then came to grasp this new picture of the world.

Scientists who grasp a paradigm shift do indeed come to “see” the world in a  new way because their minds then have been reprogrammed to see different patterns in the details around them. That’s how profoundly the new model, once they learn it, affects them. Each scientist who “gets it” experiences a kind of “conversion” that steers her/him into a new way of seeing reality and a new community of fellow believers.

In all branches of Science, Kuhn claims, old ways of thinking are dropped, and new models become accepted ones via this process that appears to be driven at least as much by non-rational mental leaps as by rational steps like theorize, test, and repeat. The modes of thinking that enable Science to evolve run deeper than reasoning and evidence can explain. Kuhn gives many examples from the History of Science to support his case. His work has evoked many responses, pro and con, but there is no doubt that he has shone a troubling light on the reliability of all of Science.² In short, Science is not done “scientifically”.

In the meantime, counterattacks aimed back at the social sciences are made by critics like philosopher John Searle. He admires the physical sciences because, he claims, they can be logically rigorous. Physical sciences describe their theories and the studies designed to test them using unambiguous terms. (One calorie heats one gram of water one Celsius degree.) But the social sciences use terms that are too vague to support rigorous reasoning. (In Anthropology, what makes a “band” or a “big man”?) Thus, conclusions reached in social science are not reliable.³ (Critics of social science are countered in Harold Kincaid’s Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences.⁴)

   

     A clash of cultures: skulls of buffalo shot by U.S. government hunters, 1880’s   

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In response to the criticisms of the “unscientificness” of their discipline, some social scientists have tried hard to be more rigorous in their work. However, many have admitted Searle is at least partly right. For example, studies done in Anthropology are usually difficult to replicate for a whole array of reasons. Thus, precise replicating of research in social science is almost never possible. 

Here let’s recall that, in order to qualify as “scientific”, a model or theory must be testable in the real world, and the tests must be replicable. If the tests can’t be replicated, the theory is not Science. Tell me how you test your theory. Then, I can check it by doing those tests myself. Easy to do in Physics and Chemistry where materials and pieces of apparatus are standardized. All but impossible in Sociology and Anthropology.

Many factors make social science’s studies hard to replicate.

First, background conditions of studies in social science often can’t be reset. Socially relevant facts keep changing. For example, how could a tribe return to living as fishers if the species they once caught off their coasts are gone?

In social science, we also accept implicitly that, even when conditions in the world can be “reset”, that no custom should ever be forced on a tribe. For example, trying to get a tribe to go back to living naked once they have chosen to wear clothes would be unethical. Tribes in the Amazon, once they join a society where clothes are worn, don’t want to live naked anymore. Cultural anthropologists would not try to make these people go back to living naked, as they had been living just a few years before. The anthropologists’ own moral code tells them that trying to “guide” changes in a tribe’s way of life to aid research – or for any other purpose – is wrong. Social scientists are ethically bound to observe societies as they live, but never to interfere in their changes.    

In addition, a researcher’s own biases influence what she looks for and how she sees it. These biases are impossible to avoid, no matter how carefully the studies are designed. People of the Amazon see trails of peccary or cayman in crushed grasses. But Western anthropologists see details they have been programmed to notice (e.g. flowers, insects). An anthropologist living with an Amazon tribe needs years of training before she can learn to skilfully track peccaries.  

  

Finally, a social scientist’s watching a tribe of people also changes what is being watched, namely the morés of those people. For example, an anthropologist in the field usually can’t work without shoes. Often in only weeks, the folk she’s living with and studying, if they have been living barefoot, start to want shoes.  

For all of these reasons then, social scientists admit they often must settle for what is really a single occurrence of the social phenomenon they wish to study. One that can’t be replicated. But no generalizations can be drawn from a single, unrepeatable instance of anything. That’s a direct contradiction of what the word “generalize” means.

These difficulties with social science research put us in a logical quandary.

Societies vary widely in their beliefs and morés, and those morés keep changing even while scientists are studying them. There are many human tribes to study, and each contains many customs that are changing all the time. Social scientists will never adequately document all the societies of the world as they are now.

Thus, we’ll never arrive at any useful conclusions in social science unless we can first propose larger, more generic theories of how human societies work.

In fact, most social scientists see that kind of plan as being immoral from its outset because it amounts to Europeans imposing their ways on other cultures. In the meantime, critics of social science say such a grand theory can’t be formulated. They insist that social science is too vague, from its terms on up, to ever enable its practitioners to create a general theory of how societies work.

If such a theory ever were articulated, it would give direction and focus to all social science work. Under it, social scientists could propose and test specific hypotheses. But until social science has a comprehensive theory to guide its research, it will remain what Ernest Rutherford dismissively called “stamp collecting”: people recording data, but making no attempt to explain them.

At this point, some social scientists respond to their critics with further, more aggressive counterattacks of their own. They argue that no science, not Physics itself, is “objective”. Cultural biases shape all human thinking – including that of physicists. For example, over a century ago Western physicists postulated, and went looking for, what they called “atoms”, because early in Western history, a philosopher named “Democritus” had postulated the idea that the world is made of atoms. Once instruments capable of reaching into very tiny levels of matter became available, Westerners had already available the concept that enabled them to imagine and set up experiments at that level. It had been planted there during the educations they acquired in their cultures. But Democritus did not derive the idea of the atom from observations of any “atoms”. The idea was a product of his culturally-shaped imagination.   

Thus, these social scientists argue that the overarching view called relativism is the only logical one to adopt when we study the body of social science research (or all research in all fields, for that matter). We can try to observe human societies and the belief systems they instill in their members (Western science being just one example of a belief system), but we can’t pretend to do the work objectively. We come to it with eyes already programmed to notice in the details around us the patterns we consider “significant”. We see as we do because of beliefs we absorbed as children. Every scientist’s model of what the world is lies deeper than her/his ability to articulate thoughts or even just observe. Cultural biases can’t be suspended; they preconfigure our ability to observe or think at all.

The whole of reality is much more detailed and complex than the set of sights, sounds, etc. any one of us is paying attention to. Other folk from other cultures notice different details and construct different pictures of reality. Some of the pictures are radically different from ours, but they are still quite workable.

In short, any human view of the world, and especially any culture-wide model believed and used by any human society, is inherently biased. This is the stance taken by most social scientists: even Physics, they say, is made of opinions.  

Some social scientists go so far as to claim there aren’t really any “facts” in any of our descriptions of past events or even of events happening around us. There are only various sets of details noticed by some of us; these are filtered through values and concepts we learned as children. Within each culture, people group these details to form a “narrative”. Thus, social scientists argue, as we go from culture to culture, we see that any one of these various narratives is as valid as any other.

So, at the level of large generalizations about what “right” and “wrong” are, social scientists not only have nothing to say, they insist that nothing objectively true can be said. “Science” is just a Euro-based set of theories that seem to work most of the time. For now. But it is not true in any ultimate sense of the word. 

Scientists in the sciences other than the social ones continue to assert there is an empirical, material reality out there that is common for us all and Science is the most reliable way we have to understand that reality. But scientists in all branches of Science admit that they can’t give a very good explanation or model of what “right” and “wrong” are – if such things can even be said to exist.

In a further rebuttal of relativism, however, scientists in the physical sciences and life sciences assert that the idea that Science can’t give us any useful insights into how any parts of the world work is nonsense. Science works. Its successes have been so large and so many that no sane person can doubt that claim.

In this complex picture lies the dilemma of the West in modern times. Back and forth, these arguments called the Science Wars continue to rage. I’ve touched on a few of them, but there’s not enough space here to go into even five percent of the whole controversy.

So what’s the bottom line? The point of all the discussion so far in this chapter?

The point is that Yeats was right: the best really can lack all conviction. They can even reject the whole idea of anyone having any “convictions” ever. Thus, many social scientists can read about customs like honor killings and remark, “Well, that’s their culture.” In fact, for many thinkers today in the universities, all convictions are temporary and local. (A more sensible 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 in, first, our intellectual elites and, then, the whole of Western society. This confusion began to become serious in the West in the nineteenth century after Darwin and the granddaddy of all relativists, Nietzsche. But here we are in the twenty-first century, and the crisis of moral confidence is getting worse. No educated person in the West wants to say what “right” is anymore.

Now, all of this still may sound far removed from the lives of ordinary folk, but the truth is that relativism’s effect on ordinary people’s lives is crucial. When a society’s sages can’t guide its people, the people look elsewhere for moral leaders. When the philosophers and social scientists respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with jargon and equivocation, or just flatly refuse to answer the queries, others – some very unwise – move in to fill the demand in the ideas marketplace.

So, now we must ask: how has this moral paralysis since Darwin, Nietzsche, and Freud affected ordinary folk? How has the eroding of our old moral codes affected real people’s lives? What consequences did people who lived in the growing moral emptiness of the last hundred years have to endure?

Notes

1. Ruth Benedict, “Anthropology and the Abnormal,” Journal of General Psychology,          10 (1934). 

http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/heathwood/pdf/benedict_relativism.pdf.

2. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3rd ed., 1996).

3. John Searle, Minds, Brains and Science 

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

4. Harold Kincaid, Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences: Analyzing Controversies in Social Research, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

5. Marvin Harris, Theories of Culture in Postmodern Times (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1999).