I’ve been reading this article by Steve Pinker in The New Republic. It has been ages since I have had a reason to pick up a copy of TNR. Maybe that says more about me than it does about them, but I actually check into Mother Jones and The Nation once a week, so maybe TNR just got dull. There was a time, probably in the late 1980’s, that The New Republic was a must read journal, if you wanted to know what the ruling class was thinking about policy. Anyway, the Pinker piece is interesting to me for two reasons.

The first is that he starts with the claim the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were all scientists.That’s more than inaccurate. He gives the impression that they were pure empiricists and not influenced by philosophy or religion. Blaise Pascal was a Christian fanatic in addition to being a great scientist. Locke and Hobbes were certainly men concerned with philosophy, economics and politics. I suspect the great men he lists in his opening would have viewed their science as a hobby, a sideline to their real work.

It is one of the things I find irritating about materialism. Pinker carries on at great length about the war on science, but it reads like a jeremiad against the humanities. I think what he sees as a rejection of science is really just a rejection of the absolutism we get from guys like Pinker. It’s similar to how atheists turn the religious into straw men. The critique is not about explaining the object of the critique, as it is celebrating the critic. Maybe the humanities are nothing but magical thinking, but there’s a reason for that too.

Anyway, that’s not why I started this post. Pinker brings to mind the real trouble for science and that is the corruption of science. Putting economics, for example, in the same bucket as chemistry is the sort of corruption I have in mind. Economics is not astrology, but it is probably closer to wine tasting than it is to physics. A lot of economics is wishful thinking dressed up with mathematics. It gets even worse when it comes to other so-called soft sciences like psychology or sociology.

For the same reason counterfeiting used to be a hanging offense, fake science should be given rough treatment from the empiricists. The only way the folks over in the philosophy department are going to respect the folks in the chemistry department are when both sides know the boundary. That’s where Pinker goes wrong. He thinks there is some great fusion to be had between the two. There’s not. Science is an explanation of the knowable. The scope of what is knowable expands as science expands.

The point being is that the defenders of science never stop to think that maybe they have some hand in the reaction against their work. They seem to lack any respect for the common man and his skepticism of science. The public used to hold science in the highest regard, but decades of corruption and unaddressed hucksterism has made the average guy into a skeptic. The old gag is, “where is my flying car.” The first place to start in the defense of science is to clean out the corruption in the sciences.

That said, Pinker is right to attack the ridiculous straw man of “scientism.” This just made up nonsense from neo-Christians. They also rail against “Darwinism” which they conveniently define as a religion. The people pitching this stuff almost always call themselves Bible-believing Christians, which means they practice a bespoke religion based on whatever they like form the New Testament. There is a good argument to be made that they are not Christian, but actually post-Christian pagans.

Regardless, they are noisy, not serious. The defenders of science would be wise to ignore them in the same way evolutionary biology ignores intelligent design. They are not making arguments that can be refuted. They are simply hooting like primitives about things that confuse and frighten them. Let them hoot. It’s harmless. The world is no more going to spin off its axis if some small minority believes in voodoo than if some small minority are young earth creationists. Pinker is thinking like a totalitarian here.