EXCERPT:
"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, question.
"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 It is true that the selfish gene has lately been replaced by the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."
