Because of COVID, there has been a lot of discussion over what role science should play in politics.
Lately, the Red Team says that the science is never settled, which is true in principle but can stop us from taking necessary actions based on strong evidence. The Blue Team says, “believe the science,” but this often means using shaky hypotheses to advance their political goals.
These arguments are often not over science itself, they’re over how science is used. That’s engineering, not science. And everyone knows that engineering has always has a moral dimension – was it good or bad when physics was used to design a nuclear weapon, and so forth. So none of this is really new.
But pure science has also had a damaging effect on politics in a way you do not hear much about. Two things happened early in the 1900s in the field of physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Both demonstrated that many common-sense notions of how the world works are wrong under extreme conditions. Relativity showed that time runs at different rates depending on how fast you are moving. Quantum mechanics showed that a moving object has no definite position.
These breakthroughs are unknown or irrelevant to most people in the conduct their lives, but they damaged the common sense of many highly educated people – the kind of people who run things. The highly educated all learned about relativity and quantum mechanics in college, and these were often served up with a dollop of “wooo, look how strange the world really is, anything’s possible, man.”
Once you learn about relativity and quantum mechanics, it becomes just a little harder to accept any common-sense truths. There’s always that voice saying, “Well, what about quantum mechanics? It showed that common sense is wrong sometimes.” Things that are 99% likely to be true now can't penetrate the 80% barrier. You may not consciously attach numbers like this, but subconsciously there is doubt, which, unmoderated by constant contact with the everyday world, can blow up into postmodernism where we only believe what we want to. Pretty soon walls don’t stop people from crossing a border, women can have penises, and being obese is healthy. You don't need science to evaluate these claims; you only need common sense.
Common sense isn’t always right, but, in its proper sphere, it almost always is. We can come to different conclusions about the political implications of these facts, but it’s not necessary to believe women can have penises in order to encourage tolerance and understanding towards the transgendered.
The science problem is related to a bigger problem with the highly educated which is that they have a greater ability to rationalize selfish or short-sighted behavior. Don’t ask me how I gained this particular insight. You see this in some people who aren’t that intellectual (we call them egotists or narcissists) but among the highly educated it’s nearly universal, and they're better able to hide it. And they use this ability!
I recently read a biography of Stewart Brand, who I like a lot because of his old Whole Earth Catalog (the internet in paperback form -- a fascinating snapshot of the rebirth of the self-determined American -- check it out.) Brand was associated with the 60s counterculture, and I couldn’t help but notice how much of that counterculture was just hedonists inventing political cover for their lifestyles. “We’re not selling dangerous drugs because it’s fun and profitable, we’re selling them to expand the consciousness of humanity,” this kind of crap. It takes a highly educated person to make and accept arguments like that. Most people can see right through it.
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