In The New Republic, culture critic Leon Wieseltier addresses his “fellow humanists” (the graduating students at Brandeis University, where he gave the commencement speech) on the nonsense and folly of scientism:
Our glittering age of technologism is also a glittering age of scientism. Scientism is not the same thing as science. Science is a blessing, but scientism is a curse. Science, I mean what practicing scientists actually do, is acutely and admirably aware of its limits, and humbly admits to the provisional character of its conclusions; but scientism is dogmatic, and peddles certainties. It is always at the ready with the solution to every problem, because it believes that the solution to every problem is a scientific one, and so it gives scientific answers to non-scientific questions. But even the question of the place of science in human existence is not a scientific question. It is a philosophical, which is to say, a humanistic, [sic]
Owing to its preference for totalistic explanation, scientism transforms science into an ideology, which is of course a betrayal of the experimental and empirical spirit. There is no perplexity of human emotion or human behavior that these days is not accounted for genetically or in the cocksure terms of evolutionary biology. It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the altruistic gene, which is lovelier, but it is still the gene that tyrannically rules. Liberal scientism should be no more philosophically attractive to us than conservative scientism, insofar as it, too, arrogantly reduces all the realms that we inhabit to a single realm, and tempts us into the belief that the epistemological eschaton has finally arrived, and at last we know what we need to know to manipulate human affairs wisely. This belief is invariably false and occasionally disastrous. We are becoming ignorant of ignorance. More.
The point blocked out in red is worth noting because any system can account for phenomena. The same phenomena that the evolutionary psychologist accounts for via genes and prehistoric man, the shaman can just as easily account for by lucky numbers (genes) and the spirits of ancestors (evolutionary psychology).
Wieseltier is right, and there’s more: Every science that scientism touches, it turns into magic. More on that later, from C.S. Lewis.
What’s really interesting about this is that Wieseltier was invited to say this at a commencement, when there must have been at least two dozen dull Darwinist dons in the audience/on the platform.
Funny, he follows hard on Raymond Tallis pointing out that science without philosophy becomes ridiculous and New Scientist pretty much demonstrating that fact, with a recent article claiming that multiverses can save us from Darwin’s plague of disembodied space brains. These two guys don’t by any chance know each other?