Weird Science

(So what exactly does the Rhetorician-in-Chief means when he informs us that we will be “following the science”? Bad metaphysics will produce bad science. 1903 words)  

Memorial Day has passed us by earlier than usual this year, and in its wake we find that Summer is thrust upon us. Not that it hasn’t been summery for weeks already here in South Central Texas, but now that seasonal pattern that seems to get a little more so every year, of so many people being somewhere besides work on Friday, will begin to assert itself. Since hitting that high water mark on May 8, the Market seems unwilling to “correct” in meaningful way. Sure, it has given the Bears a few days to at least feel like they were in control again, but in the language of old school technical analysis we seem to be getting a correction “in time” more so than in “in price”. The manifold objects which aggregate into that great Wall of Worry that every recovering Market must scale continue to pile up, but the day to day tone continues to suggest that “fear of being left behind” has been greatly outweighing the kind of fear that brought us to March 9.

The subject of this week’s Musings is a troubling bit of rhetoric which has tipped the tenuous balance of my subconscious into full-boil umbrage. That would be stumbling across yet another reference to the statement made by our Rhetorician-in-Chief with respect to how from now on we are going to “follow the science”. (The very word “rhetoric” seems to have made something of a comeback since we entered the Era of the Traveling Tele-prompter. I had been led to believe that rhetoric had, apart from the context of academic training, been rendered irredeemably suspect since about the time of the original Sophists.  As for me, what pundits are calling “his inspiring rhetoric” is evocative of that guy you knew in college who could B.S. his way out of anything, or something along the lines of The Music Man: “...yes there’s trouble, with a capital T which rhymes with B and that stands for Bush”) Exactly what he might mean by that should be of interest to thinking investors for at least two reasons. One would be that the clear thinking which is prerequisite to effective decision making very much depends on a clear understanding of the meaning of words and the varying senses in which they might be used. The other is that “following science” in some senses of the word is going to all but certainly damage our long running experiment in ordered liberty, which one would think would have some effect on the present value of future cash flows from enterprise. There is a sense in which only a flaming Luddite would protest “following science”,  but I don’t think that is the sense of the word  that the resident caudillo has in mind. Indeed, the possible range of what “following the science” might  actually mean is so wide that irrespective of where one stands on the issues it entails, it should not exactly bolster the credibility of the speaker (“rhetoric”, again.)

Before considering what “science” has come to mean when uttered by politicians and their enablers, it would be wise to revisit the meaning of the word in its strictest, most time honored sense. The word is derived from the Latin word for knowledge. Methodologically, it evolved from what was previously called natural philosophy. To the extent that it has revealed mystery and undergirded the technology which has mitigated so much of the de facto wretchedness of human existence, it is best understood as a method. Real science, as opposed to some nebulous something else that has been tricked out to look like real science and so garner its inherent respectability, has certain hallmarks. It involves actual observations of phenomena, which are sufficiently reproducible to make useful predictions. Of utmost importance are rigorously designed experiments, the results of which are subject to also rigorous peer review. This method has delivered the goods in more ways than we can enumerate. It is a most impressive bag of tools. But that is all it is, a method, or a bag of tools. The right tools in the right hands for the whatever the job might be is about as god-like as humans get, but bad things happen when the tools are in the wrong hands, or other than the right tools for the job, or ascribed value, power or stature exceeding that which should be accorded to mere tools.  That bag of tools that is Science (science in the sense that is worthy of our respect and gratitude) is no exception.

It should be no surprise to any reasonably sentient reader that mischief has been done under the guise of “science” for about as long as the word has been around. One suspects that when an Academic who has found his way into government speaks of science what he or she really means can be understood in two senses. One is about power, the other about money. The former evokes the priest castes of ancient civilizations, cultic power ensconced with an elite few who had convinced the others that they had unlocked the governing mysteries of the universe. Gnosticism (“special knowledge” imparted to only a few) is older than any religion, but alive and well today, no doubt because it imparts power and authority to those “in the know”. Gnosticism is alive and well today, and truth be told, its “special knowledge” is as ill-defined as ever. However, its substance matters less than the ability of the wizards to convince the citizenry that by virtue of being attainable by only a select few, it is indeed special and so worthy of our deference (the Wizard of Oz comes to mind here.). 

The other sense in which “science” plays today is with respect to what we commonly call  “pork”. When politicians with the power to redistribute wealth talk about “science”, they are probably talking about how they are going to reward their friends in the Academic class. Read the earmarks, read the grants, read who is a professor of what, times however many departments in however many universities we have out there (its an astoundingly big-ass number), and you get the sense that “cost/benefit” is a somewhat foreign concept in this realm. The incentives around that blobby institution we call Science (science de facto, as opposed to the previously described science de jure?) are all wrong (e.g., favoring the perpetuation of perceived crises as long as the money can be kept coming.) They are also more susceptible to corruption than almost anything that goes on in the world of commerce, because the accountability is so much harder to come by. We are invited to imagine that diligent men and women are working to find ways which will improve our lives with the same ardor and discipline that unlocked the mysteries now codified in the Periodic Table. In reality, we are getting a whole lot of Dr. Peter Venkmans (the Ghostbuster played by Bill Murray) trying to grind out a career on some gobbet of intrigue which, viewed in the light of science de jure might make Venkman’s parapsychology look respectable. As a one-off, this would be an admixture of annoyance and amusement, but at the scale to which it has transmogrified, it is one heck of a   big rock in the pack that our grandchildren will be carrying.  

Like so much else that finds its way into Musings, Science’s susceptibility to subversion and otherwise going astray has been an issue for a very long time. I was reminded of this upon reading about the recent death of Fr. Stanley Jaki, a physicist by training who spent his life writing about the history of science. His very substantial body of work might be summarized in the tenet that “bad metaphysics will yield bad science”. He noted how so many past civilizations (the much maligned “West” being the only exception, really) made promising starts at understanding the physical world but inevitably wandered into what he called “blind alleys”. Particularly telling were the ancient Greeks, who excelled in so many fields but within what we call science in exactly one (geometry). Jaki went so far as to state that Greek physics (Aristotelian, Epicurean & Stoic) had the effect of “putting physics into a straitjacket for 2000 years,” (because their common and overriding aim was not so much to save the phenomena as to save purpose for man as well as for the cosmos). He was probably also my introduction to the tendency for ideas to have their day as and derive the specious power of fads (see The Road to Science and the Way to God, 1978). The ideas which were the currency of the salons wherein what we call the Enlightenment was popularized had Bull Markets not unlike the ideas we attempt to ride like waves today. They also tended to end about as ugly. 

We can find the root of Science’s susceptibility to rot in the very beginning, if indeed that which we call the Enlightenment was the beginning of science as we know it today (an increasingly debatable premise).  It is commonly understood that the ideas of Frances Bacon changed the object of the quest that was “natural philosophy” from wisdom to power over nature. Not surprisingly, this new emphasis would in time be understood as the manipulation of nature in as many of its facets as practicable, including humanity.  Descartes is a splendid example of a brilliant theorist who made many worthwhile discoveries but whose seemingly overweening ego made him something of a role model for purveyors of ill-advised “unified theories of absolutely everything worth thinking about”.  Though he seemed to harbor at least deistic beliefs, his framework seems have been exceedingly attractive to those harboring radically materialistic presuppositions. At the same time, we find in his contemporary Blaise Pascal an articulate humility that those who claim to be seekers of the truth would do well to emulate. Pascal understood the limitations imposed by what he termed the “wretchedness” of the human condition. In his Pensees, he wrote eloquently of the paradoxically (yet abundantly evident) magnificence and yet infirmity of human reason. He strongly recommended that we use our reason but also recognize its limitations. He went on to describe how much of what we long to know is perceived by another means, by what he called the heart. (“The heart has it reasons of which reason knows nothing.” This heart of which he writes is about much more than “feelings” as popularly conceived, but rather is the seat of the will, the intellect and the emotions. Alternatively, it is said to be where virtues such as faith, hope and love reside.) Pascal did not succumb to the reductionism which seems to pervade even moderately successful theorists. Seekers of the truth would do well to study him and emulate him.

A final bit of understanding I would offer up would be the distinction between Science and what has been called Scientism. An excellent summary of the latter can be found at  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism, particularly the segment which addresses a range of meanings for the term. The range of meanings seen here ought to make us very nervous when a gifted but politically obligated rhetorician informs us (as opposed to imploring us) that we are going to be “following the science”.