Scientism Marches On

I have subscribed to the New Scientist, which is a “pro science” magazine, by which I mean, in addition to purely science articles, it publishes polemical broadsides arguing on behalf of naked science unfettered by societal restraints. In the October 22 issue, Timothy Ferris, identified as a “popular science writer and professor emeritus at UC Berkeley,” argues in “Keep Up the Search,” on behalf of “free empirical inquiry.” (No link available. You have to be a subscriber.) Those who wish to regulate science, he claims, are “opponents of science,” whether conservative (based allegedly on religion), or those he calls “our fellow liberals,” who worry about potential consequences of experiments gone wrong.

Ferris claims that “government restrictions on scientific research seldom if ever make sense.” He states that the best way to reduce ignorance in the world is “through persistent experimentation on just about every front that anyone” cares “to explore.” That’s a very broad statement that would permit no reasonable parameters. He even goes so far as to claim that science moves forward “pretty much how liberal democracies proceed” and that the future of free countries “are bright, if only because it is there that science has taken root and grown.”

But this is wrong: Liberal democracy isn’t laissez faire anarchy of the kind Ferris seems to advocate for science. Rather, liberal democracies depend on widespread adherence to certain commonly accepted ethical principles and assumptions, that is upon a system of ordered liberty. Or to put it another way, we remain free precisely because we establish reasonable checks and balances over powerful institutions—and what institution is more powerful than science?

Ferris is another example of a believer in scientism transforming science from a means into an ends, a belief system rather than a method. Science as the be all and end all. Rather than supporting liberal democracy, such beliefs are a challenge to it.