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September 15, 2016 Dear Colleagues, I'm Really Looking September 15, 2016 Dear colleagues, I’m really looking forward to our conversation next month! What I’ve given you here, under the collective title “The Specter of Social Engineering: Scientism and Its Critics in the Long 1950s,” is a series of chunks, separated by ellipses, from a book-in-progress that is tentatively titled Containing Science: The Challenge of Science in Postwar America. (“Postwar” is now too narrow and will need to be rethought.) I’ve included pieces of the Introduction and Chapters 2-4. The book will continue with three more chapters that bring the narrative up to the present. Chapter 5 will look at the impact of “anti-scientism” on the New Left and its offshoots from the 1960s to the 1990s. Chapter 6 will explore anti-scientism among conservatives over roughly the same period. Finally, Chapter 7 will look at the fate of such challenges to scientism in our current era, which features both technological enthusiasm and religious conservatism. With the book as a whole, I seek not only to explain important features of American political discourse but also to illustrate the importance of intellectual history to political history and vice versa. As part of this endeavor, I have laid out the similarities between “anti-scientism” and the familiar category of anti-communism. Is this a useful and convincing parallel to draw? Or do you think the phenomena differ sufficiently that equating them is misleading? Beyond that, can you think of a term less awkward than “anti-scientism”? Meanwhile, I plan to add more material from popular culture and national political debates to these chapters before submitting the manuscript. I need to grapple with science fiction somehow, and there are many other cultural phenomena that may deserve attention as well. I also want to look more systematically at Congressional debates, as well as newspapers and journals of opinion, including the letters columns. How should I work in these sources? How much material should I add, and which existing material should I cut or compress? I’d be very glad for suggestions on these matters or any other thoughts for improvement that you might have. Thanks in advance for your help! Best, Andy Jewett Introduction Science as a Moral Threat “Democracy,” remarked the Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas some years ago, “is a form of theocracy in which the new priests, that is, social scientists, rule in the name of ‘the people.’” To many readers, this sentiment will sound profoundly strange. What do sociologists and anthropologists, toiling away in university departments, have to do with the elected officials, bureaucrats, lobbyists, and donors who make up the face of American politics? But to other readers, versed in certain modes of cultural criticism, Hauerwas’ meaning is quite clear. From their standpoint, his assertion neatly captures the modern world’s characteristic malady: the fact that science’s cultural influence has eradicated all moral content from public life.1 In one form or another, this claim has reverberated through American public culture for nearly a century. Flip through the archives of American magazines from the twentieth century, or listen in on past scholarly conversations, and you will begin to notice it, again and again—seldom the dominant note, but often vigorously sounded. In these arguments, metaphors of pollution and contagion abound: Science seeps, creeps, infects. Some critics traced the cultural sickness to broad philosophical tendencies or “isms”: materialism, naturalism, positivism, secularism, atheism. Others found the source of the malady in the social sciences. Those fields had been “secreting … something akin to a poison” into modern societies, wrote the historian Jacques Barzun in 1966, turning the physical scientist’s mechanistic outlook into the “image of our inner life.” A decade earlier, another critic argued that postwar American life took its shape from “the seeping into the minds of non-academic men of the conviction that human and social life is subject to the same necessities as is the subject-matter of the physical sciences, and subject also to the same controls.”2 Such images of science as a potent threat to morality derive their power from a key assumption—namely, that science assumes a position of neutrality, or even active hostility, toward human purposes and values. In this definition, thinking scientifically about any subject matter means adopting an objective, value-neutral orientation that eliminates all moral considerations from the inquiry at hand. But Hauerwas is not simply saying that science is value-free. His assertion implies a series of further claims, which add up to a position I call “anti-scientism.”3 1 Stanley Hauerwas, Dispatches from the Front: Protestant Engagements With the Secular (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 214, note 8. 2 Jacques Barzun, “Science as a Social Institution,” Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 28, no. 2 (April 1966): 11, 13; Alexander Miller, review of Joseph Wood Krutch, The Measure of Man, Christian Scholar 38, no. 1 (March 1955), 69. 3 Anti-scientism is an unlovely term, and it has the serious disadvantage of not offering a parallel to “anticommunist”; “anti-scientist” simply does not work. But I have not found a more precise label for the cluster of arguments I describe. The superficially similar term “anti-science” imports far too much polemical content into the terminological framework and reifies a single definition of science: e.g., Gerald Holton, Science and Anti-Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Richard Hofstadter’s “anti-intellectualism” remains tied to a very specific intellectual formation: the beliefs and practices of elite university scholars circa 1963. Science figured heavily in this formation, but Hofstadter did not single out science or relate criticism of the postwar intelligentsia’s values—his own values—to other species of anti- scientism: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Knopf, 1963). Jewett (Draft: Please do not cite or circulate!) 1 The reasoning associated with anti-scientism goes like this: Value-neutral science is the proper means for examining the non-human, and thus non-moral, dynamics of the natural world. But the application of this value-neutral approach beyond its legitimate domain, to aspects of the human world, eliminates the moral meanings necessary for proper behavior. Indeed, anti-scientism holds that science’s morality-destroying outlook has spread through much or all of American public life, squeezing out other interpretive frameworks and creating a moral vacuum in the culture at large. Modern citizens, in this view, do not simply flout moral strictures. Rather, they disavow the moral dimensions of the human world altogether, because they adopt the value-neutral mindset of the scientist. It is society, not individuals, that lacks a moral compass. And this moral deficit, say critics, has produced major social problems that citizens will not solve until they address the underlying cultural root. They must throw off the moral nihilism of a scientific outlook and reorient their thinking around a more traditional source of insight—many critics point to religion, while most others favor the humanities—that once offered the requisite moral guidance and could do so again. Anti-scientism suggests that citizens need not, and should not, eliminate genuine science; they must have physics, chemistry, and biology for guidance. But they can save the human world only by containing science—by confining it once again to its proper domain, the study of the natural world. Only if modern citizens manage to contain science in this way will they learn once again how to behave morally, as their forebears did.4 The term anti-scientism builds on scientism, a pejorative label that critics have long applied to the view that scientific methods or interpretations are relevant in domains beyond the study of physical nature. The stance or sensibility that I call anti-scientism builds on scientism as a mode of criticism: it contends that some individual or group, or modern society in general, thinks that science applies where it does not. But anti- scientism also holds that the cultural influence of scientism has produced a wide-ranging set of social problems, or even a general crisis of society or civilization—dubbed simply the “modern crisis” by many critics since the 1930s. Like anticommunism, then, anti- scientism is a social and political argument, not just an intellectual one. Anticommunists did not simply disagree with communism or find it mistaken; they also saw it as an active threat to their societies. Similarly, anti-scientism identifies scientism as a clear and present danger that must be rolled back, not just a harmless mental error by a few, or even many, individuals. It comprises the full series of assertions outlined above: Science is rigorously value-neutral, even amoral. A scientific outlook dominates some or all of the public culture. When that culture does not provide firm moral guidance, our habits and institutions go awry. Ergo, our social and political problems stem from science—or rather, scientism and the faulty applications of scientific thinking it has fostered. Put most simply, anti-scientism is the tendency to see scientism as a cause of concrete ills in the world. Critics in this vein make claims about not only what science is but also what it does, or has done, to society.5 4 Hauerwas adds two additional claims to the basic framework of anti-scientism: the idea that science is a full-blown religion and the claim that society operates through a top-down system of political control. The first of these has been more common than the second among anti-scientism’s adherents. 5 Many critics, especially since the 1960s, have argued merely that rolling back scientism would be necessary to solve society’s problems, but many others have implied that such a move would be sufficient.
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