Science Not Scientism

Having received a variety of thoughtful books as Christmas gifts this year I am surprised that the one I keep picking up is one I bought myself after the holiday: Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine. The book is putting words to things I have struggled with for some time, things like the often unacknowledged limits of science. What resonates most with me though is the attempt to name what it is about modern society that seems so inhumane. My reason for writing to day, however, is not to discuss the inhumanity of modern society. Depending on your point of view that would be either misguided or banal. I simply cannot do it justice in less than a thousand words. Instead I would like to suggest (not prove, or even attempt to fully describe) an aspect of Kingsnorth’s book that feels to me a bit under-cooked: the notion that science is a religion that should be more or less rejected.

I almost hope the previous sentence exaggerates Kingsnorth’s view. And yet as I thumb through Chapter VII of Against The Machine I can find no suggestion that science might actually offer something useful. While I can understand the temptation to go so far, I think without some additional nuance there is a pretty large baby getting thrown out with the dirty bathwater. I can’t really follow Kingsnorth here, and in fact do not even agree that it is science that should be rejected so much as scientism. Even Chapter VII of Kingsnorth’s book seem to me really to be taking aim at scientism, so perhaps I am being pedantic. But the language is important, and I am not sure I understand what he is really taking aim at here. If he means to reject scientism, then I have no problem; if science, then what of the medical advances on the last two centuries?

There are a lot of applications of science I could accept doing without. The Internet, computers, automobiles, central heating and air conditioning are all things I think I could learn to live happily without. Even highly processed foods seem worth giving up, as much as I occasionally enjoy them. But when I pull on the thread of modern medicine I find a lot of things I would be happier to keep. Anesthesia, antibiotics, triptans and all the other more mundane developments that modern medicine offers really do seem to have improved our lives. And they are largely, perhaps entirely built upon the foundation of science: biology, chemistry, and germ theory. I have heard Kingsnorth talk elsewhere of “raw” and “cooked” varieties of nonconformists. If the raw, radical version of his proposal requires an outright rejection of science, then I suppose that puts me in the cooked camp.

But I do not think a thorough nonconformism should require a rejection of science because that would misidentify the source of our ills, which is better stated as applied scientism. It is (as Kingsnorth states) the reduction of our world, our society, our very selves, to machines. Science asks how mechanical systems work in order to leverage them to serve humanity. Scientism seeks to turn humanity and everything else into machines so they can all be leveraged to whatever ends the powerful have in mind. This is, I think, the larger point Kingsnorth is making, and I fear he is essentially correct.