The Problem of Scientism

Not all social problems can or should be solved through science.

By guest author Gregory C. of Red Gorillas.

The Rot in Scientism

On a metascientific level, there is a problem with the idea that all social problems can or should be solved through science. For this to be true, humans would have to experience the world accurately. There is little reason to believe this to be true, and many reasons to be skeptical.

Some science is highly reliable and can predict lots of things. Some of it is very unreliable and provides little that can be used to make predictions.¹ In fact, I would say you could rank the sciences by how reliable they are, and if you did so you’d end up with something like this:

Mathematics
Physics
Chemistry
…

Biology

…
…
…

Psychology
Social Sciences

So why can we use physics and chemistry so successfully that we can land a spaceship on the Moon, yet we still haven’t come up with an accepted explanation for why humans and other animals spend a third of their lives asleep?²

The likely reason is that we don’t experience the world as it is. We experience it as if through an operating system.³ Imagine you lived on a Windows desktop. You could open Windows and run programs and open files. You could come up with all sorts of scientific theories on how Windows operates. You’d never be able to tell, though, that everything you experience was being run by a bunch of microchips and computer hardware tethered together in a box. It doesn’t matter how much testing you did or what science you engaged in. Important aspects and truths about your world would be hidden from you. While some science could reliably predict certain events occurring within Windows, other things would be mystifying to you. That’s because they’re being influenced by things occurring in the hardware in the box which you are incapable of perceiving.

There are two reasons to believe that this is likely true. One is evolutionary, and the other is religious.

If you believe in evolution, you believe that humans are the accumulation of various traits and abilities that aided our ancestors’ survival and reproduction. Therefore, our perception of the world around us would not likely be accurate, but instead one that is optimized for survival and reproduction.⁴ For example, we don’t find everyone to be sexually attractive, normally just members of the opposite sex that show signs of optimal fertility or physical strength.

Another example is food. If you are hungry and eat a piece of pizza, it will taste delicious. If you’ve already eaten a pizza, though, and are full, the same piece of pizza wouldn’t be as appetizing. It may even be revolting to you if you try to eat it. Your perception of the pizza’s taste is based on its ability to aid your survival. For similar reasons, we are unlikely to find grass to be appetizing, even though cows enjoy eating it.

So, to the extent we evolved, we would not have developed the ability to perceive things about the world that are irrelevant to or detrimental to our ability to survive and reproduce. For example, there are a minority of women living today who can see additional colors.⁵ Most women and no men have ever seen these colors. It is believed that these women may have had ancestors who gathered berries while men hunted. The increased color perception in these women’s ancestors may have helped them locate berries or differentiate them. Most women and all men, however, did not develop the ability to see these additional colors because they were unnecessary for the survival of their ancestors. There is no reason to believe, then, that our perception of the color of any object is correct. No amount of science could ever reveal that information to us.

If you’re religious, there is also the possibility that God doesn’t reveal everything to us about our world, or He may hide truths about it from us. There are numerous reasons for why this might be the case. You could speculate all day. One simple reason is that such aspects are hidden because they would reveal God’s presence, and God doesn’t want people to prove His existence scientifically.⁶

Either way, we don’t perceive the world accurately. The inaccuracy of our perceptions doesn’t have as big of an impact on how we perceive physics and chemistry as they do on how we perceive aspects of our biology or social behavior. If that’s true, some social problems may be impossible to solve scientifically, and we would be better served trying different methods or giving up on solving them entirely.

The Other Problem with Scientism

In addition to its profound metascientific problems, scientism is plagued by a related problematic metaphysics.

Scientism rejects the existence of anything metaphysical and instead emphasizes the material nature of our world.⁷ In this worldview, a Big Bang occurred for an unknown reason and spread material around the universe.⁸ This material eventually formed the planet Earth, which became habitable to biological lifeforms. If we scientifically study all the material components of things in the universe, we have the potential to learn everything there is to know about the universe.⁹ Anything that could exist outside of this material, whether it be God or basically anything else, doesn’t exist.

The materialistic worldview supports the managerial ideology that by deploying science, managers can solve problems and work towards utopianism. Because the existence of things outside the material components can’t be subjected to the scientific method, managers simply choose to reject their existence.¹⁰ This aligns perfectly with a famous quote often brought up in management training: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”¹¹

This is a serious problem because by rejecting metaphysical concepts, managers abandon a key tool previous classes of elites used to manage and control the mass population of every world civilization¹² down to even small tribes of hunter-gatherers.¹³

The most obvious example of this is religion; however, it encompasses much more than that. Archetypes, forms, traditions, and systems of morality not rooted in material components are all presumed not to exist and are therefore brushed aside by managers.

The bourgeoisie class regulated their own behavior and the behavior of the mass population through religion, archetypes, forms, and virtue ethics rather than relying so much on aggressive fox tactics such as propaganda, hedonism, and manipulation.¹⁴

In the bourgeoisie period, there was an understanding of what a family was and one’s duty to it, what a good father should be, what made a man an ideal man, what a good citizen was, the importance of bravery, what good and evil were. These are all things that are metaphysical. To dismiss them as not being real is to abandon so much of accumulated human wisdom. These things obviously are real because they have profoundly affected the behavior and lives of so many people throughout history. People have sacrificed their lives for purely metaphysical concepts.

The system of morality preferred by managers is utilitarianism.¹⁵ This is because utilitarianism is a system of morality that is based on materialism. It’s the belief that the most moral and ethical thing is that which leads to the greatest good for the greatest number. The good which consists of physical pleasure and well-being of humans is materially based and can, at least in theory, be scientifically measured. It is also hedonistic, which is another reason why managers prefer it as a morality. Something like consuming pornography, which most people intuitively find immoral, can be justified on utilitarian grounds.

While the bourgeoisie were perfectly happy to ignore religious precepts that the prior prescriptive elites may have enforced if they interfered in entrepreneurship or business ownership, the bourgeoisie nonetheless fully embraced the prescriptive elite’s virtue ethics. George Washington,¹⁶ Benjamin Franklin,¹⁷ James Madison,¹⁸ and Thomas Jefferson¹⁹ all emphasized that virtue ethics were a necessity for the success of the republican state they helped to create.

Virtue ethics emphasizes the cultivation of positive character traits such as bravery, honesty, diligence, and sobriety while avoiding vices consisting of negative character traits such as laziness, cowardice, greed, and carelessness.

Bourgeoisie vs. Managerial Education

The classical liberal ideology was inculcated in bourgeoisie elite through the liberal arts education.²⁰ The liberal arts education celebrates the Enlightenment, a period of time where Greek and Latin texts were supposedly rediscovered after the Dark and Middle Ages.²¹ The education begins in Ancient Athens, where philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle discussed the Greek concept of virtue ethics.²² Plato also critiqued Greek democracy and believed that a virtuous philosopher king would make for a better government.²³

The next stage of the liberal arts education moves to Ancient Rome after the conversion to Christianity. Students learn about Saint Augustine, who developed the concepts of natural law and natural rights, as well as Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose scholarship led to virtue ethics becoming part of Catholic orthodoxy.²⁴

In its final stage, the liberal arts education focuses on Enlightenment authors and philosophers, the Protestant Reformation, and the American Revolution. The take-home message was something along the lines of this: Through virtue ethics, Western men learned to free themselves from the hedonistic tendencies towards vice based in our biology.²⁵ Over time, Western men realized they had certain God-given or natural rights and that the government also needed to be constrained to ensure freedom and protect those rights.²⁶ By obtaining this liberal education, a student would have the required freedom and appreciation of it to be a responsible, liberal citizen capable of governing as a philosopher king through America’s democratic government.²⁷

There are many remnants of the bourgeoisie education that exist today. For example, some colleges still refer to themselves as liberal arts schools. Fraternities and sororities still identify themselves with Greek lettering. In fact, sororities and fraternities are often the subject of anti-bourgeoisie propaganda in television shows or films. In some cases, the fraternity will consist of stereotypical caricatures of bourgeoisie individuals who serve as the antagonists.²⁸ In other cases, a protagonist fraternity or sorority that embraces aspects of managerial ideology such as hedonism (e.g., excessive drinking, partying, and smoking weed) and cosmopolitanism (loose membership standards allowing a diverse cast of characters in) will be pitted against an antagonist fraternity consisting of stereotypical caricatures of the bourgeoisie.²⁹

Managerial education begins instead with the colonization of America. Students learn about the injustices of slavery and the mistreatment of American Indians to emphasize cosmopolitanism.  The Founding Fathers are nonetheless praised for overthrowing the British and creating a democratic government (utopianism) but are faulted for not being cosmopolitan enough by not ending slavery or being otherwise insensitive to ethnic minorities.

Managerial education skips next to the Civil War. Students are taught about the war and how it was a great victory for cosmopolitanism. However, there were still lots of problems because of segregation, Jim Crow, and the KKK.

After discussing the Civil War, students learn about the Industrial Revolution. Students learn that this led to scientific advancement and inventions which were good but also created poor working conditions. The heroes of this era are proto-managers such as Teddy Roosevelt who try to manage problems caused by the Industrial Revolution through promotion of labor unions, environmentalism, and antitrust.

After largely ignoring WWI,³⁰ the managerial education moves to the Great Depression. FDR is portrayed as heroically ushering in the Managerial Revolution through his New Deal programs. He then leads America to a heroic victory in WWII, wherein atrocities were committed against Jews during the Holocaust. This, again, is heavily emphasized to promote cosmopolitanism.

After WWII, the education shifts to the civil rights movement. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks are described heroically as they help bring an end to segregation and Jim Crow. This culminates in the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the overturning of the 1924 Immigration Act. Managerial history pretty much ends here. Well, in my education we also learned about the Vietnam War. That event had a profound effect on American culture that was still being felt when I was growing up.³¹ It’s also why an antiwar streak persisted in left-wing politics until the Obama administration, when managers finally managed to excise it.

I suspect that today the Vietnam War — as well as the Cold War entirely — is glossed over.³² There is little propaganda value to it for managers. The same could be said about the history between America’s Revolutionary War and the Civil War. World War I is also neglected. None of these, though, compare to the greatest black hole of all, which has seemed to suck up the entire history of America as a colonial empire.³³

During the Spanish-American War, America took over the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and various small Pacific Islands. For about a half-century, the American Empire had more Asians living within its borders than blacks.³⁴ As a source of cosmopolitan propaganda, there is abundant red meat here. The people living in these colonies were afforded no rights such as those enjoyed by American citizens.³⁵ Regional governors ruled over colonies as dictators and frequently did and said racist things.³⁶ Filipino and Puerto Rican nationalists were frequently targeted and harassed.³⁷ In the case of Puerto Rico, people were medically experimented on and involuntarily sterilized.³⁸ Even to this very day, the FBI designates Puerto Rican Nationalists as a threat group in its Strategic Intelligence Assessment on Domestic Terrorism.³⁹

Despite supporting the cosmopolitan wing of managerial ideology, this aspect of American history is suppressed.⁴⁰ The reason, of course, is that these actions were the result of managers. While Teddy Roosevelt and other progressives of his time may have held beliefs that are considered racist today, they were considered progressive proto-managers of their day. These proto-managers believed that they could help develop these colonies into modern economies through management practices. This concept was expressed through propaganda as “the white man’s burden.”⁴¹

Of course, history isn’t the only thing taught in school. Students also learn English. Where bourgeoisie students would read Aristotle, Aquinas, and John Locke, managerial students read To Kill a Mockingbird, Huckleberry Finn, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Diary of Anne Frank.⁴² The bourgeoisie books promote classical liberalism and the Western Man narrative, while the managerial books emphasize the cosmopolitan aspects of the managerial ideology.

Managerial education also emphasizes science and mathematics. These subjects are mostly resistant to propaganda.⁴³ Managers assure students that these subjects, despite often being uninteresting to the mass student population, are very useful and important, thus appealing to scientism and utopianism.⁴⁴ I recall constantly being assured that I would need to use science and math often as an adult, but it turned out that I have only rarely needed them, even though I ended up working in a management position.  Managerial education also emphasizes the importance of doing well in school, scoring high on tests, and studying subjects that can lead to high-paying jobs (hedonism).⁴⁵ After all, you don’t want to work at McDonald’s after you graduate, right?⁴⁶

Returning to the Other Problem with Scientism

Managerial education therefore ignores the metaphysical and instead promotes cosmopolitanism, hedonism, and scientism. To the extent that any moral lessons are conveyed, it is in a purely materialistic, utilitarian frame. Slavery was bad because people weren’t paid for their work and were whipped and separated from their families. The Holocaust was bad because lots of people were killed.

While the bourgeoisie elite emphasized a complex morality based on virtue ethics, the managerial perspective can be boiled down to “Harming people is bad.”⁴⁷ Most types of harm one can inflict on other people are encoded into our criminal law.⁴⁸ The problem with this is that law and morality then become equated.⁴⁹

The equation of law and morality allows anything permitted by the law to be deemed acceptable even when it does in fact harm people. The social media companies are notorious for this. They will arbitrarily censor or ban people without due process, sometimes destroying their businesses and livelihoods.⁵⁰ When criticized, social media managers deflect criticism by arguing that their actions were perfectly legal.⁵¹ Law enforcement can also be guilty of this. While sometimes it is appropriate for police to deploy a SWAT team to execute a search warrant aggressively because the subject is considered armed and dangerous, there are also frequent occasions where this isn’t appropriate but used anyway.⁵² While I have no doubts that the police act legally in these circumstances by obtaining proper search warrant paperwork and respecting people’s rights as defined by managers working as judges, law enforcement still risks causing unnecessary and unjustified harm to people’s family members, pets, and property. The same argument is likely true in the use of drone strikes.⁵³

The bigger problem, though, is that the equation of law and morality leads people to the mistaken belief that anything that does not harm someone else is socially acceptable, and thus can and should be legal.⁵⁴ You don’t harm someone by doing drugs,⁵⁵ camping on the sidewalk,⁵⁶ illegally immigrating to another country,⁵⁷ or driving drunk yet carefully.⁵⁸ Therefore, all these things must be socially acceptable. People commit these crimes and then are dumbfounded when they get arrested, or they blame the police. “But… I wasn’t hurting anyone.”⁵⁹ Even worse, managers sympathize with this attitude. They run for District Attorney promising not to enforce laws in situations where people aren’t harmed. This only further reinforces the belief that it is socially acceptable to use drugs and to engage in other atrocious behavior.

Even crimes that obviously cause harm are often justified as being not harmful in order to fit the materialistic, utilitarian morality of scientism. For example, shoplifting is acceptable because businesses are insured against it.⁶⁰ This argument was also made by BLM protesters as justification for burning down businesses.⁶¹

When a crime does clearly harm someone — for example, an armed robbery — the criminal will typically deflect criticism by arguing that he is a drug addict and had no control over his actions. Managers have increasingly accepted this explanation and have attempted to manage crime by promoting rehabilitation and therapeutic treatment as alternatives to punishment.⁶² These methods are often ineffective, especially since manager policies promoting tolerance of crimes where no one is hurt allow drugs and other illegal activity to proliferate in neighborhoods. This in turn leads to an increased public perception that even crimes that harm people are socially acceptable and will not be prosecuted.

With such obfuscation of morality and the law, it isn’t surprising that the U.S. is the world leader in incarceration.⁶³ Managers presume that this fact means that there must be something wrong with the criminal justice system or the economic system because their materialist assumptions about the world preclude morality from existing in anything but a rank utilitarian frame. Therefore, managers conclude that there must be something about the U.S. system that is more authoritarian than, for example, the Chinese system.⁶⁴ This leads managers to conclude that the only possible solutions are either to scale back the criminal justice system (cosmopolitanism) or to enact more socialist legislation (hedonism).

The reality is that China doesn’t have a superior economy or welfare benefits compared to the U.S., and doesn’t have a less authoritarian law enforcement apparatus.⁶⁵ Yet it remains much more law-abiding and orderly than the U.S.⁶⁶ The difference is that China retained its Confucian religious beliefs, which include a metaphysical belief in morality that resembles Western virtue ethics.⁶⁷ During a brief period in Chinese history, these Confucian values were challenged amongst other things. That period was the Cultural Revolution, and it was a time of chaos, extreme disorder, crime, and mass killings.⁶⁸ After Mao thankfully died, his successor Deng Xiaoping had those most responsible for the Revolution arrested, and he restored Confucian values, restoring order to the country.⁶⁹

1. Jonah Davids, “The Overwhelming Underwhelmingness of Academia: Three Reasons to Leave,” Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, November 29, 2021.

2. Ginny Smith, “The mysteries of sleep: everything we don’t know about why we snooze,” BBC: Science Focus, November 4, 2019.

3. Donald Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (W.W. Norton & Co., 2019).

4. Ibid.

5. Robbie Gonzalez, “Some women may perceive millions more colors than the rest of us. Are you one of them?” Gizmodo, June 18, 2012.

6. Deuteronomy 6:16

7. Bernardo Kastrup, “Why Materialism is a Dead-End,” IAI News, November 15, 2019.

8. Elizabeth Howell and Andrew May, “What is the Big Bang Theory?” Space.com, March 19, 2014.

9. Robert Nola and David Braddon-Mitchell, “Introducing the Canberra Plan,” in Nola and Braddon-Mitchell (Eds.), Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (MIT Press, 2008).

10. Abraham Verghese, “If We Can’t Measure It, It Doesn’t Exist,” The Atlantic, September 22, 2009.

11. Liz Ryan, “‘If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It’: Not True,” Forbes, February 10, 2014.

12. Dave Roos, “Human Sacrifice: Why the Aztecs Practiced This Gory Ritual,” History.com, October 11, 2018.

13. Jared Barlament, “Shamans, Priests, and the Origins of Hierarchy,” Medium, March 9, 2022.

14. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame Press, 2007 [1981]).

15. Alex Blasdel, “Pinker’s progress: the celebrity scientist at the center of the culture wars,” The Guardian, September 28, 2021.

16. Mason L. Weems, A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington (J.B. Lippincott Company, 1918 [1800]).

17. Benjamin Franklin, “Benjamin Franklin’s Book of Virtues.”

18. Adam J. White, “A Republic, If We Can Keep It,” The Atlantic, February 4, 2020.

19. Jean M. Yarbrough, American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People (University Press of Kansas, 1998).

20. Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (Yale University Press, 2018).

21. Ibid.

22. Ibid.

23. Plato, Republic, c. 375 B.C.

24. Eric C. Miller, “Hijacking History: Why What We Teach Matters,” Religion & Politics, February 15, 2022. (The subject of this article objects to a religious university that teaches a version of the traditional bourgeois education. While Miller is correct that bourgeoisie education pushes a narrative, he is oblivious to the fact that the standard managerial education is just as propagandistic.)

25. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid.

28. Jeff Kanew (Dir.), Revenge of the Nerds, 20th Century Fox, 1984; Walt Becker (Dir.), National Lampoon’s Van Wilder, Artisan Entertainment, 2002.

29. John Landis (Dir.), National Lampoon’s Animal House, Universal Pictures, 1978; Todd Phillips (Dir.), Old School, DreamWorks Pictures, 2003; Fred Wolf (Dir.), The House Bunny, Sony Pictures, 2008.

30. Mackenzie Carpenter, “Why World War I gets short shrift in U.S. schools,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 28, 2014.

31. Ted Kotcheff (Dir.), First Blood, Orion Pictures, 1982; Oliver Stone (Dir.), Platoon, Orion Pictures, 1986.

32. Bill Bigelow, “Camouflaging the Vietnam War: How Textbooks Continue to Keep the Pentagon Papers a Secret,” Zinn Education Project, June 18, 2013.

33. Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (Picador, 2019).

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. Ibid.

38. Ibid.

39. “Strategic Intelligence Assessment and Data on Domestic Terrorism,” Federal Bureau of Investigation, May 2021.

40. Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire.

41. “The White Man’s Burden,” Wikipedia, Accessed February 3, 2022; See also: Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Burden” (1899), for the text of the poem without commentary.

42. Mo Elinzano, “21 Classic Books That You Read in High School,” Deseret News, February 12, 2015.

43. Joshua Q. Nelson, “Professor torches school district’s ‘anti-racist’ math push: ‘Racism is an industry in America,’” Fox News, July 27, 2021.

44. Erin Schumaker, “Bill Nye the Science Guy’s advice for getting kids into science this summer,” Good Morning America, June 20, 2020.

45. Michael J. Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020).

46. “McJob,” Wikipedia, Accessed February 3, 2022; “McJob,” Wiktionary.

47. John Stuart Mill advocated many things that would later be associated with the managerial ideology including utilitarianism, hedonism, and cosmopolitanism. His thought has much more in common with mainstream contemporary libertarianism than the classical liberalism of his era. His famous book illustrates argues for a utilitarian approach to the state that focuses solely on harm to others. See: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

48. Burrage v. United States, 571 U.S. 204 (2014).

49. Kevin Jon Heller, “Legality Is Not Morality,” Opinio Juris, December 31, 2012.

50. Peter Pischke, “Facebook, Reddit Ban Pro-Cop Comic That Broke No Platform Rules,” The Federalist, January 28, 2022.

51. Michael McGrady, “Opinion: Twitter banning Alex Jones is justified,” The Detroit News, September 12, 2018. This article relies solely on legal arguments despite making a moral judgment.

52. John Davidson, “Amir Locke’s Killing Is a Grim Reminder That No-Knock Police Raids Are Un-American,” The Federalist, February 9, 2022.

53. Kevin Jon Heller, “Legality Is Not Morality,” Opinio Juris, December 31, 2012.

54. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, 1859.

55. Libby Emmons, “Biden to send crack pipes to drug addicts for ‘racial equity’: report,” Post Millennial, February 7, 2022.

56. Chris Sommerfeldt, “NYC Council majority calls on Mayor Adams to end ‘cruel’ homeless encampment sweeps,” New York Daily News, April 5, 2022.

57. David Frum, “Does Immigration Harm Working Americans?” The Atlantic, January 5, 2015.

58. “The Worst Excuses for a DUI You Can Give,” Shoemaker Law.

59. Benedict Carey, “Denial Makes the World Go Round,” New York Times, November 20, 2007.

60. “Seattle elections pit leftist candidates against moderates,” The Independent, November 2, 2021.

61. Erik Sherman, “Rioters Are Wrong to Say: Don’t Worry, Insurance Will Bail Out Small Businesses,” Zenger News, September 21, 2020.

62. Harriet Alexander, “Woke San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin DEFENDS shoplifter in infamous Walgreens video and says he was ‘desperate,’ then blames the drugstore’s security guard amid city robbery explosion,” Daily Mail, July 29, 2021.

63. “Growth in Mass Incarceration,” The Sentencing Project, Accessed April 7, 2022.

64. Tom Kertscher, “U.S. incarcerates more people than China or Russia, state Supreme Court candidate Joe Donald says,” PolitiFact, December 9, 2015.

65. Jim Abrams, “Executions in China Exceed 10,000 in Firm Crackdown Against Crime,” Los Angeles Times, November 8, 1987.

66. Huo Siyu, “Numbers speak for themselves: How China has one of the lowest crime rates in the world,” Global Times, January 11, 2022. While the Chinese government probably provides inaccurate crime statistics, the consensus of travel websites and blogs seems to be that crime is indeed low in China and that it is a safe place to visit.

67. Yukong Zhao, “Confucius guides Chinese-American parents to keep crime rate low,” Orlando Sentinel, November 19, 2018.

68. Tom Phillips, “The Cultural Revolution: all you need to know about China’s political convulsion,” The Guardian, May 11, 2016.

69. Ibid.