Prometheus Bound, but good

This blog-entry responds to a heated interchange this last week over whether Republicans or Democrats were more "anti-science." I complained bitterly about the foolish framing of the question, but since few non-scientists may understand my own indignation, I thought I had better explain.

There is no such thing as a "science" that encompasses all the worldly, materialist efforts to grasp the facts of life and death, thence to intervene to enhance life and forestall death. What the electorate is debating is the power of ultraconservative evangelical Protestants and Catholics to roll back the achievements (or, in their views, atrocities) of the modern world, a modernity that is held responsible for decadence and mass death, owing to the mistaken notions of progress and "enlightenment;" a secular wasteland that is gleefully responsible for "the death of God," or, failing that, banishing Christian symbols from public space. Such a dive into the muck betrays "life" itself. In other words, the question regarding "anti-science" serves culture warriors in both political parties and is intrinsic to the current polarization.
  

In my book Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival, I made a distinction between the Radical and Conservative Enlightenments. The Radical Enlightenment (a 16th century development that educated and raised the morale of "the lower orders") was co-opted by anxious elites fearing the leveling tendencies of science and its alleged worship of the Goddess of Reason. These "moderate conservative" elites formed the progressive movement, and used "scientific management" to forestall servile revolts, arguing that free markets, left unregulated, would generate mobs who would abolish private property tout court. Similarly, social psychology was harnessed to the New Deal, using statistics and other scientistic (i.e., pretending to scientific method) strategies to get a consensus behind the ever more powerful federal government and the authority of the presidency. I call this co-opting of "science" the Conservative Enlightenment. The social bonds it advocates are based on mystical bonds between leaders and the led, not upon the convergence of real interests within groups. Such are the methods espoused by the troops of the allegedly "pro-science" Democratic Party.
  

Scientific method, i.e., relying on material evidence and following facts wherever they lead, does not come naturally to a growing child. As an infant and toddler, and even into adolescence, magical thinking will dominate the psyche. Seeing "things as they are" may be fraught with fear, pain, and conflict. In my own examination of Herman Melville's writing, I have seen the anguish with which the idealizations of childhood are relinquished. His kaleidoscopic imagination, that constantly reconfigures the world we think we see, so apparent to readers who have gone that route themselves, is generally suppressed in the scholarship, or dismissed as "incoherence," or as a pre-Freudianism that is easily dismissed as bogus, carnal, and hence "Jewish." Melville himself never resolved his inner war between science and religion, at times demonizing his "dark" Promethean characters, including "Margoth" an apostate secular Jew, who bears comparison with Twain's Yankee.
  

Realism and naturalism in the arts have gotten a bad rap because of their association with the marxiste notion of dialectical materialism. The latter is a form of Hegelianism that banishes the real world in favor of an unalterable march toward communism/the reign of Spirit, a march supposedly led by the politically-conscious working class, but in practice, guided by intellectuals. These same intellectuals decry (undialectical) "materialism" as atomization and hyper-individualism of the most hateful "bourgeois" variety. I have been called that atomic bomb by more than one Leninist. As culture critics, they purportedly espouse "realism," which for them consists of unveiling the mystifications of the bourgeoisie, pulling back the curtain to expose exploited masses and wily magicians in the urbanized land of Oz. Where these mystical anti-mystics go wrong is in their condemnation of the Promethean bourgeoisie, a class that relies on science and technology to improve the world and the life chances of its inhabitants.

Science is not dogma, and is constantly self-correcting in the collective criticism of the community of scientists (unless they are bought off by patronage). But that is not the view of those relativists who now study the history of science in order to discredit is as "essentially, a swindle." (See A brooding meditation on intimacy and distance or This witch is not for burning: science as magic.)
  

In the world of true science, quacks are driven out, and commonly held beliefs subject to alteration in the face of new evidence. Would that our political culture were as discriminating in extruding frauds.

© 2012 Clare L. Spark