Chapter 2.       (continued)

                   Artist Dosso Dossi's imagining of Greek Philosopher, Democritus 

                                             (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

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 already had 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 that 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 ability to articulate thoughts or even just observe. Cultural bias can’t be suspended; it preconfigures 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, as we go from culture to culture, social scientists say, we see that any one of these narratives is as valid as any other.

 

So, at the level of large generalizations about what is “right” and what is “wrong”, social scientists not only have nothing to say; social scientists 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 that 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, who basically argued that the human world is indeed a mess, and the only thing that brings any kind of order to it is the will of a hard-driven, visionary individual. This he argued back in the late 1800s. And 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, people look elsewhere for moral leaders. When the philosophers and social scientists respond to their fellow citizens’ queries about morality with equivocation, or flatly refuse to answer the queries, others – some very unwise – move in to fill the demand in the ideas marketplace.

 

(In case the larger point here is not clear, this is a good place to stress again that the main aim of this book is to articulate a moral code that all humans can live by. One we can choose to follow because we can see by reasoning and evidence that it explains the cultural diversity that we see and that, therefore, it will likely work. It will get us to a world society that is both peaceful and vigorous.)

 

So, now we must ask: how has this growing 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).