Technopoly (19 page)

And so it is necessary to understand where our techniques come from and what they are good for; we must make them visible so that they may be restored to our sovereignty. In the next chapter, I hope to do this with the intricate and vast ensemble of techniques I call Scientism.

On December 5, 1989, Daniel Goleman, covering the social-science beat for
The New York Times
, gave considerable space to some “recent research findings” that doubtless unsettled readers who hadn’t been keeping informed about the work of our scientists of the mind: Goleman reported that psychological researchers have discovered that people fear death. This insight led them to formulate “a sweeping theory,” to quote Goleman, “that gives the fear of death a central and often unsuspected role in psychological life.” To whom death’s role is unsuspected we were not told, but the theory is sufficiently rich to allow the hypothesis that all cultures (to quote Goleman again) “prescribe what people should do to lead a ‘good’ and ‘meaningful’ life and offer some hope of immortality, as in the the [sic] Christian afterlife or the Hindu notion of reincarnation into a better life.” (The repetition of the word “the” in the sentence quoted above may have been a typographical error—or else perhaps an excited stammer in the face of such an astounding hypothesis.) As if this were not enough, Goleman also reported the same psychologists as having
discovered that how one reacts to death depends on one’s moral code, and that those who value open-mindedness are more tolerant of people whose values differ from theirs—which means that those who are open-minded tend to be open-minded, a fact that is not sufficiently appreciated, if known at all.

On September 11, 1990, Goleman revealed the results of new research which suggests that Asian-American students do well in school because they come from intact families that value advanced academic degrees. And on October 2, 1990, he reported that psychologists have discovered that children who are inept at social relations tend to be unpopular with other children.

I cite these reports from
The New York Times
because it is considered by many to be the “newspaper of public record” and may be assumed to be reporting the
best
of social science. It is possible, of course, that Goleman is a “mole,” or an undercover agent, who is trying to reveal where our culture stands by ridiculing the trivialities of social science. But I doubt it. He seems to believe in social science, as so many in Technopoly do. That is, he believes that the study of human behavior, when conducted according to the rigorous principles established by the physical and biological sciences, will produce objective facts, testable theories, and profound understandings of the human condition. Perhaps even universal laws.

I have previously attributed the origins of this belief to the work of Auguste Comte, which is a defensible position but something of an oversimplification. In fact, the beginning formulations of a “science of man” are more precisely attributed to a school than to a man. The school, founded in 1794 in Paris, was called the Ecole Polytechnique (the same school that, as I mentioned earlier, quickly adopted the practice begun at Cambridge of assigning number grades to student work). The Ecole Polytechnique gathered for its teaching staff the best scientists, mathematicians, and engineers France had produced, and became
famous for its enthusiasm for the methods of the natural sciences. Lavoisier and Ampère taught there, as did, later, Volta and Alexander von Humboldt. Their work in chemistry and physics helped to lay the foundation of modern science, and in that respect the Ecole Polytechnique is justly honored. But there were others associated with the school whose exuberance for the methods of the natural sciences led them to believe that there were no limits to the powers of the human mind, and in particular no limits to the power of scientific research. The most famous expression of what may be called “scientific hubris” appeared in Pierre-Simon de Laplace’s
Essai philosophique sur les probabilités
, published in 1814. He wrote: “A mind that in a given instance knew all the forces by which nature is animated and the position of all the bodies of which it is composed, if it were vast enough to include all these data within his analysis, could embrace in one single formula the movements of the largest bodies of the universe and of the smallest atoms; nothing would be uncertain for him; the future and the past would be equally before his eyes.”
¹

There is, of course, no scientist today who takes this view seriously, and there were few enough who did in the nineteenth century. But the spirit behind this scientific ideal inspired several men to believe that the reliable and predictable knowledge that could be obtained about stars and atoms could also be obtained about human behavior. Among the best known of these early “social scientists” were Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, Prosper Enfantin, and, of course, Auguste Comte. They held in common two beliefs to which Technopoly is deeply indebted: that the natural sciences provide a method to unlock the secrets of both the human heart and the direction of social life; that society can be rationally and humanely reorganized according to principles that social science will uncover. It is with these men that the idea of “social engineering” begins and the seeds of Scientism are planted.

By Scientism, I mean three interrelated ideas that, taken together, stand as one of the pillars of Technopoly. Two of the three have just been cited. The first and indispensable idea is, as noted, that the methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the study of human behavior. This idea is the backbone of much of psychology and sociology as practiced at least in America, and largely accounts for the fact that social science, to quote F. A. Hayek, “has contributed scarcely anything to our understanding of social phenomena.”
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The second idea is, as also noted, that social science generates specific principles which can be used to organize society on a rational and humane basis. This implies that technical means—mostly “invisible technologies” supervised by experts—can be designed to control human behavior and set it on the proper course.

The third idea is that faith in science can serve as a comprehensive belief system that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being, morality, and even immortality.

I wish here to show how these ideas spiral into each other, and how they give energy and form to Technopoly.

The term “science,” as it is generally used today—referring to the work of those in the physical, chemical, and biological disciplines—was popularized in the early nineteenth century, with significant help from the formation of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1831 (although Murray’s
New English Dictionary
gives 1867 as the earliest use of the term in its modern sense). By the early twentieth century, the term had been appropriated by others, and it has since become increasingly familiar as a description of what psychologists, sociologists, and even anthropologists do. It will come as no surprise that I claim this is a deceptive and confusing use of the term, in part because it blurs the distinction between processes and practices.

Using definitions proposed by the British philosopher Michael
Oakeshott, we may say that “processes” refers to those events that occur in nature, such as the orbiting of planets or the melting of ice or the production of chlorophyll in a leaf. Such processes have nothing to do with human intelligence, are governed by immutable laws, and are, so to say, determined by the structure of nature. If one were so inclined, one might even say that processes are the creation of God. By “practices,” on the other hand, Oakeshott means the creations of people—those events that result from human decisions and actions, such as writing or reading this book or forming a new government or conversing at dinner or falling in love. These events are a function of human intelligence interacting with environment, and although there is surely a measure of regularity in human affairs, such affairs are not determined by natural laws, immutable or otherwise. In other words, there is an irrevocable difference between a blink and a wink. A blink can be classified as a process; it has physiological causes which can be understood and explained within the context of established postulates and theories. But a wink must be classified as a practice, filled with personal and to some extent unknowable meanings and, in any case, quite impossible to explain or predict in terms of causal relations.

What we may call science, then, is the quest to find the immutable and universal laws that govern processes, presuming that there are cause-and-effect relations among these processes. It follows that the quest to understand human behavior and feeling can in no sense except the most trivial be called science. One can, of course, point to the fact that students of both natural law and human behavior often quantify their observations, and on this common ground classify them together. A fair analogy would be to argue that, since a housepainter and an artist both use paint, they are engaged in the same enterprise and to the same end.

The scientist uses mathematics to assist in uncovering and
describing the structure of nature. At best, sociologists (to take one example) use quantification merely to give some precision to their ideas. But there is nothing especially scientific in that. All sorts of people count things in order to achieve precision without claiming they are scientists. Bail bondsmen count the number of murders committed in their cities; judges count the number of divorce actions in their jurisdictions; business executives count the amount of money spent in their stores; and young children like to count their toes and fingers in order not to be vague about how many they have. Information produced by counting may sometimes be valuable in helping a person get an idea, or, even more so, in providing support for an idea. But the mere activity of counting does not make science.

Nor does observing things, though it is sometimes said that if one is empirical, one is scientific. To be empirical means to look at things before drawing conclusions. Everyone, therefore, is an empiricist, with the possible exception of paranoid schizophrenics. To be empirical also means to offer evidence that others can see as clearly as you. You may, for example, conclude that I like to write books, offering as evidence that I have written this one and several others besides. You may also offer as evidence a tape recording, which I can supply on request, on which I tell you that I like to write books. Such evidence may be said to be empirical, and your conclusion empirically based. But you are not therefore acting as a scientist. You are acting as a rational person, to which condition many people who are not scientists may make a just claim.

Scientists do strive to be empirical and where possible precise, but it is also basic to their enterprise that they maintain a high degree of objectivity, which means that they study things independently of what people think or do about them. The opinions people hold about the external world are, to scientists, always an obstacle to be overcome, and it is well known that the scientist’s picture of the external world is quite different
from what most people believe the world to be like. Moreover, in their quest for objectivity, scientists proceed on the assumption that the objects they study are indifferent to the fact that they are being studied. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle indicates that at subatomic levels particles do “know” they are being studied, at least in a special meaning of “knowing.” An electron, for example, changes either its momentum or its position when it is being tracked—i.e., when it interacts with a photon—but the electron does not, in the usual sense of the word, “know” or “care” that the interaction is taking place. Nor do objects like leaves, apples, planets, kidneys, or bridges. This fact relieves the scientist of inquiring into their values and motivations and for this reason alone separates science from what is called social science, consigning the methodology of the latter (to quote Gunnar Myrdal) to the status of the “metaphysical and pseudo-objective.”
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The status of social-science methods is further reduced by the fact that there are almost no experiments that will reveal a social-science theory to be false. Theories in social science disappear, apparently, because they are boring, not because they are refuted. But, as Karl Popper has demonstrated, science depends on the requirement that theories must be stated in a way that permits experiments to reveal that they are false. If a theory cannot be tested for its falsity, it is not a scientific theory—as, for example, Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex. Psychiatrists can provide many examples supporting the validity of the theory, but they have no answer to the question “What evidence would prove the theory false?” Believers in the God theory (sometimes called Creation Science) are silent on the question “What evidence would show that there is no God?”

I do not say, incidentally, that the Oedipus complex and God do not exist. Nor do I say that to believe in them is harmful—far from it. I say only that, there being no tests that could, in principle, show them to be false, they fall outside the purview
of science, as do almost all theories that make up the content of “social science.”

I shall say in a few moments what I believe social science to be, as well as why Technopoly wishes to link it to the scientific enterprise. Here, I should like to give an example of social science to amplify the reasons why it is misleading to call it science.

A piece of work that is greatly admired as social science, at least from a technical if not an ethical point of view, is the set of experiments (so called) supervised by Stanley Milgram, the account of which was published under the title
Obedience to Authority
. In this notorious study, Milgram sought to entice people to give electric shocks to “innocent victims” who were in fact conspirators in the experiment and did not actually receive the shocks. Nonetheless, most of Milgram’s subjects
believed
that the victims were receiving the shocks, and many of them, under psychological pressure, gave shocks that, had they been real, might have killed the victims. Milgram took great care in designing the environment in which all this took place, and his book is filled with statistics that indicate how many did or did not do what the experimenters told them to do. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 percent of his subjects were rather more compliant than would have been good for the health of their victims. Milgram drew the following conclusion from his research: In the face of what they construe to be legitimate authority, most people will do what they are told. Or, to put it another way, the social context in which people find themselves will be a controlling factor in how they behave.