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 scientists who study human societies and their moral beliefs. 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 perfect truth about reality? That, by pure logic, is unattainable. But, if not truth, sociologists ask, then what is Science seeking?

 

Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) 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 not by logic, which can be very clearly defined, but by intuition, which long has been a nebulous concept. Science does not progress by a controlled march of improving knowledge. Instead 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. The insight for most of them will have been triggered by things they have read by some fellow scientist. But they cannot tell you after their cognitive leap has occurred exactly 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; their minds are 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 into a new way of seeing reality and into a 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 hypothesize, 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, and 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, he says, 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 well countered in Harold Kincaid’s Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences.⁴)