#79: Liberalism, Pseudo-Science, and the Master Plan

September 8, 2010

I.

I’ve argued that contemporary Liberals are the descendants of 18th C Rationalists (by way of the early 20th c Progressives); that like the Rationalists they define themselves by reference to reason and science; that this identification gives them a sense of superiority over the common man they could not otherwise hope to acquire; and that they embrace counter-intuitive doctrines eagerly, as evidence of their superiority.

All of this should be puzzling, since genuine science is not inherently biased towards the counter-intuitive. That scientific truth is counter-intuitive is a belief that was encouraged by some of the early popularisers of the physical sciences. I think, though, that the apparent plausibility­­ of the belief is most likely derived from the fact that genuine science often deals with facts that are not directly perceivable, such as  sub-molecular events and processes or field phenomena. This should not really count towards their being counter-intuitive, since most people really have no intuitions at all concerning them. It is true that when early researchers began to think about the microscopic world, they did imagine it to be very much like the macroscopic one, just smaller, but these were not the “intuitions” of the common man, just the first groping scientific hypotheses of a nascent science.­­­

Modern Liberalism is actually not “scientific” at all; it is, rather, “scientistic.” I may be responsible for coining this term, but, in any case, what I mean by it is “just mimicking science” as opposed to “satisfying the demands of scientific method.” Scientistic theories are characterised by having the trappings of science, but none of the substance. Some have argued that Freud’s theories are “scientistic” in just this sense. Most of what Universities have come to call the “social” sciences are “scientistic” rather than “scientific”; just calling something a science does not suffice to make it one. Calling the rituals of primitive tribes “the magic sciences” does not transform them from hopping, gibbering juju into genuine sciences anymore than adding statistical formulae to them does.

In fact, scientific method is governed precisely by the intuitive, for which another more common name is “the probable.” The medical diagnostic aphorism, “When you hear hoofbeats behind you, don’t think zebras (think horses),” is an expression of just this scientific commitment: begin with the most probable. In general, science has embraced all the many variants of the philosopher’s principle known as “Ockham’s Razor,” named after its originator, William of Ockham (ca.1288-1348). The original principle was that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” which meant that when one is trying to explain phenomena, one should only assume the smallest number of unseen entities necessary for the explanation. In more recent times, people have interpreted the principle to mean: use the simplest explanation. I don’t want to suggest that what is meant by “simple” is itself a simple matter, but only that science is, in general, methodologically biased in the direction of the simple, however we might wind up defining that. But, further, that one of the strongest candidates for simplest is most probable.

The new science of the 18th century was extremely optimistic. The philosophes, the French intellectual dilettantes of the time were convinced that human reason in the form of science could, and would, resolve all human problems. Science was the new authority, capturing the educated public’s confidence and loyalty in the way in which Christianity once had it, but was increasingly losing. What this meant, in practice, was that science became the new marketing ploy; casting your product in a “scientific” or scientistic light vastly improved its chances of success. This inclination is nowhere more visible than in the later 19th c when Karl Marx sought to cast his new communism” as a scientific theory. But it was not “scientific,” it was “scientistic.”

Thus, I have to refine the thesis that modern Liberals are the biological children of the Enlightenment; they are rather the adoptive children. Modern physical and life-scientists are the biological children, while the “social” scientists are the adoptive ones. I admit that the analogy suffers mildly from the fact that in this case, it is the children who adopted the parents, rather than the other way around.  Nonetheless, those children have chosen to mimic their parents and given themselves a superficial resemblance to their non-biological forebears.

In general, I’m not given to quoting people for whom I have contempt, but it seems impossible here not to paraphrase Obama. Speaking of the adoptive children of the Enlightenment, one could say that they thought that Christianity had failed them in many ways “and it’s not surprising, then, they got bitter, and now they still cling to big government or pseudo-science or antipathy to ‘common’ people who aren’t like them or anti-nationalist sentiment or anti-free-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” And make no mistake about it: Liberals are now an embattled population under siege, their God has now failed them and they are almost literally clinging to the failed axioms of their faith.

There are two defining characteristics of scientistic Liberalism. The first is  the form of its discourse, which is that of either professional or popular science. In particular, it loves to couch its theories and doctrines in the language of statistics. Liberals love to cite numbers just as Mediaeval Bishops loved to intone Latin.

The second defining feature is the compulsion towards the counter-intuitive. Liberals shun the obvious with the same horror as the French shun soap. While genuine science may embrace the counter-intuitive where data and method demands it (in quantum physics, for example), it only does so where the situation forces the embrace. The Liberal embraces any counter-intuitive creed, as long as it is scientistically couched. But why does he do this?

I suspect that it is because embracing the counter-intuitive is his demonstration of his superiority. Each time the Liberal espouses an unpopular view, he demonstrates that he, unlike the majority, is not fooled by the obvious; he, the Liberal, has superior intelligence and insight that enables him to penetrate beneath the misleading surface veneer to the remarkable counter-intuitive truth beneath.

The Liberal fancies himself a seer, a Gnostic, one of the intellectually and morally advanced people of the earth who have a special gift and a special responsibility of tending to the welfare of the ignorant unwashed masses (and I don’t mean only the French!).

II

The old fashioned heartland American, with his Christian faith, his patriotism, his self-reliance, his literal reading of the Constitution, and his guns may not have the verbal skills with which to defend his world-view, but that doesn’t matter to him because he doesn’t feel the need to defend it. His views are not vulnerable simply because they are an expression of his culture, of who he is. This makes the modern Liberal crazy and contemptuous because he himself has no similar foundation. He experiences the heartland American with a mixture of fear and secret envy. The rage, contempt, and insult that comes from him is nothing other than fear and envy.

The Liberal needs “reason” and pseudo-science for the defense of his positions precisely because his positions are not foundational, because his positions do not emerge from who he is. And the fear and envy result from his secret recognition of the inability of his “reasoning” and pseudo-science to accomplish what the heartland American has simply by his birthright. The modern Liberal suffers from what some sociologists have called anomie, the state of “normlessness” or being without values or a culture.

Now, the word “ethnic” has been appropriated for application only to so-called “minority” or immigrant populations, but all it originally meant was “pertaining to culture.” Since the heartland American most definitely has a specific, definable culture, I think it fair that we introduce a new technical term, something that Liberals love to do, the term “ethnophobe.” Liberals really are ethnophobes. Of course, they are not generally ethnophobes, since they compulsively collect ethnic populations they can patronize and use politically. Liberals are only ethnophobic with respect to autonomous and independent ethnic populations. But what is important to see here is that their ethonophobia is a direct consequence of their anomie.

One can have one’s culture taken from one or one can come to lose it. Perhaps the best example of the former is that of the Canadian aboriginals who were taken from their parents and placed into the residential schools. Finding an example of the second is both more difficult and more interesting. I suggest that the Western loss of a cultural foundation was a result of the European Enlightenment, when the Judeo-Christian values were replaced by science, which was not a set of values, but only a method.

A literate population expresses its discomfort with anomie differently than a pre-literate one. We know the awful consequences for the residential school children, they have been well documented. The literate Europeans expressed their malaise with anomie in the writings of the atheistic Existentialists. Nothing more is meant by Nietzsche, when he writes that “God is dead,” than that the automatic authority of Judeo-Christian morality has ceased to exist. Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov says at roughly the same time, “If there is no God, then anything is permitted.” But all that is meant by “there is a God,” here, is that people uncritically and automatically operate on the basis of Judeo-Christian values.

One way of looking at what is happening today is as a “clash of civilizations.” Many have objected to this way of putting it on purely political grounds: “This implies that we are at war with the whole of Islam.” Of course, it doesn’t, but I would avoid this phrase simply because I suspect that it doesn’t penetrate to the root of the matter.

What is going in, I think, is rather a war between those groups with strongly internalized cultural identities and those with none. On the one hand, you find Evangelical Christians, devout Muslims, and Orthodox Jews. The fact that these often hate and attack each other on doctrinal grounds does not neutralize the fact that they are on the same side.

On the other hand, you find socialists of various stripes desperately attempting to defend their policies by appeal to specious “reasonings” and pseudo-science.

The “big” war, then, is between those who have an internalized value system that lies beyond “reasoning,” on the one hand, and those who suffer from an anomie that expresses itself as an ethnophobia directed at the first population, on the other.

Liberalism is a war directed against all populations that have a cultural identity and seek to preserve it. Do not be fooled by Liberalism’s embrace of “multi-culturalism,” this is no more than a transitional step, no more to be trusted than Lenin’s coziness with the Kaiser’s Germany, no more than Stalin’s wooing of Western “intellectuals.” The embrace of immigrant ethnic groups in the U.S.A. and Europe is no more than one more tactic in bringing the native ethnics to their knees.