In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic comment.
First of all, some of my commenters think that this doesn't rule out religion being the threat. It may still be the major source of illiberalism, and I cannot deny that, but I think the problem lies not in the instantiation of the antimodernism, but in the psychology that underlies it. For religious ideas would have no issue if they did not serve the underlying human shared psychology, and in order to understand that, we must appeal to the nature and roles of our evolved psychological dispositions.
Consider a child trying to deal with the world. We simply cannot deal with the complexity of the world unless we can impose order onto our experiences. There are too many facts, and there is too little time to sort them. How does a complex cognitive organism like a human deal with it? One answer, which I find overly simple, is the answer of evolutionary psychology: we have special purpose modules that are task-specific, that solve one and only one problem. These evolved in order to solve the sorts of problems that are crucial to the survival and reproduction of the organisms, goes the story. I think the evidence is against modules, but there's another, I think better, story.
The work of Gerd Gigerenzer and the ABC Group (Adaptive Behavior and Cognition) at the Max Planck in Berlin has shown that with respect to environmental knowledge, humans are born with some basic heuristics that enable them to make sense of the "blooming buzzing confusion" that William James described an infant's experience of the world. One of these heuristics is "choose the best" - look around you at what your community does, find what works best in some manner, and copy that. Why? Because, and this is very important: they aren't dead.
Think of this for a minute - it is not a foregone conclusion that we will survive. Life is tough. So anything or anyone that maximises the chances of survival and reproduction is a good bet to copy. So if someone is doing very well in your social group - remember that humans are social apes - they ought to be copied. It effectively means that you get the benefit of hundreds of generations' worth of learning, which is a lot more than you could ever do on your own. This is one reason why tradition plays such a crucial role in human learning. If someone is not only alive, but doing well materially and in terms of the status accorded them by those around them, you have a kind of filter.
But the filter isn't perfect, and it presumes, insofar as a heuristic embedded in our developmental process can, that things don't change very rapidly. So it allows all kinds of "cultural hitchhikers" to parasitise it. And once humans are able to find food and resources without much cognitive effort, that disposition to learn from those around you can be reused for other social reproducers.
It is an implication of this view that humans are naturally disposed to be conservative. I don't mean by this the political sense of conservative - well before the writings of Edmund Burke, we were inclined to treat the new as suspect. And here is the rub: science generates the new all the time. In fact, it's basically one of the things science does best.
How is this, by the way? How, if we are evolutionary conservatives can we have produced a process that generates novelty all the time? I think it is because science is not confined to the brains of a few individuals, but to the work of all practitioners, that it is able to escape the confines of evolution - science is very much greater than the organisms that make it up. But that's for another time.
So when a society is facing constant change, no matter how well it works, it will tend to recoil. How can we get around that? The answer is an old one: education. In addition to the "take the best" heuristic, I think we all have another heuristic that is just as strong: believe what you first learned. The reason for this is obvious - if you learned it, and you learned it from those around you, they still weren't dead. So it's likely in ordinary human society that what you learned as a child would satisfy the necessities of life as well. Also, I suspect that we lay down our most permanent skills and knowledge base early in life.
This means that humans are likely to spend a considerable amount of time later in life, if they live in an ever changing society, complaining how things were so much better in the old days, because they are best individually adapted to that culture. If things change, all cultural states of each generation's childhood will be the most familiar.
So why is science such a positive thing? Well, for most people it isn't. But if they are educated into a science early enough, then they will on average be relatively happy with that. What drives scientific research is not the desire for the new, at least not at the social level (the social structure of science is a different matter here), but rather the desire for more of the same as the past. Parenthetically the recent trend to granting money only to "safe" research indicates the social structure of science may be changing too.
All this leads to what I call antimodernism. The fear of the modern. Of course, society has to adapt to the changes institutionally too. New technologies mean choices must be made that cannot be read off the traditions. So there is a constant state of anxiety about science that is likely to always be with us. Antimodernism is not so much a recent movement as a shift in the balance of power from those who were proscience during the heyday of empire and technological advancement (usually for military needs), to those who are antiscience from fear.
So in order to ensure that scientific progress continues, we need to convince people early that science can be good for them, for their society, and for knowledge for its own sake. And this will never be done by playing media games, or by making films. These things are worthwhile, but they aren't the core solution. The antimodernists know what is, and so they are trying hardest to take control of the educational curriculum.
Incidentally, I have managed until now to avoid using the "p" word: postmodernism. It is my view that this generally acts as an antimodernism. However, it need not. That knowledge is a social construct (for it is at least that) doesn't mean that is all it is. Of course knowledge is social - I just argued that. But it is social knowledge that serves a purpose, and in the case of scientific knowledge, that means it has to work, at fine resolution, in empirical cases. In philosophese, science must be empirically adequate. Much social knowledge is not, either because it fails to deal with empirical matters (which is best: jazz or blues?), or because empirical adequacy for that domain is relatively low resolution (e.g., cooking).
Postmodern views have been used as an antimodernism not only by those who are opposed to scientific claims like vaccination or evolution, but by those who think science is a hegemonic institution that threatens the social order, both on the left and the right. And in that case too I think fear of the new threatens the antimodernists.
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The antimodernists know what is, and so they are trying hardest to take control of the educational curriculum.
Where do you stand on faith schools/private schools?
I think they are something we have to live with. If you don't want to actively ban religions, then you have to allow them to teach their children in that tradition. But, and here's the kicker, if education is to be accepted in a secular society, faith schools must teach the secular content, and employ teachers trained in the secular curriculum, so in the end faith schools do little active harm (and may in fact harm their own religious traditions if they teach what is known to be false - kids do grow up, you know).
Which rather implies our taking into account what people think is good for them, even if we don't want to consider the "F" word.
Why is technology so pervasive in our culture? Because of the "stuff" it produces which appeals (naturally or artificially) to consumers, making them partners in progress. Is this education? Or marketing?
Either way, making it relevant to people is the best way to ally them with progress/knowledge.
Dawkins has a riff in one of his books (Devil's Chaplain?) about children believing everything you tell them, probably because adults seem to know more (and of course, do know more), and the penalties for being sceptical when young about what you're told (don't play with tigers, don't jump off cliffs) can be so extreme. So, he continues (if I recall accurately) a child has good (evolutionary) reasons to trust what they are told. But it will then go on to believe other, more debatable, things about the world asserted by authority figures - eg all foreigners are dangerous, there are spirits in the natural world, God is watching everything you do.
if education is to be accepted in a secular society, faith schools must teach the secular content, and employ teachers trained in the secular curriculum, so in the end faith schools do little active harm
Seems fair to me. Recently there was a story in the news about a fundy christian school in Gippsland that stated it taught evolution as just a theory and in the same science class successfully taught creationism as better than evolution....
Such schools and cases will always be around. I bet none of their graduates will end up as working biologists, though.
Not in mainstream schools. But they'll probably breed like rabbits and indoctrinate their kiddies and we'll have a larger block of ignorance. Then they'll set up fundi universities with names like Liberty college I expect. :)
I think the rising antimodernism is understandable. The realization that our bodies are just machines and nothing else is upon us! The social implications of this fact alone are huge. Also, nuclear proliferation and the thought of a world ending war are not terrible improbable. I think we realize we are capable of screwing things up in epic proportions, but we are not looking at all the possible good that can be done.
I bristle when you say, "It is an implication of this view that humans are naturally disposed to be conservative." I think it would be more accurate to say that some humans are predisposed to be conservative, some humans are predisposed to seek out novelty, and most humans are adaptable.
There's an analogy here to sleep patterns. Some humans are Larks, some humans are Owls, and most humans are relatively adaptable to different sleep patterns. This ensures, for pre-agricultural nomads, that there's always someone awake, which is a pretty healthy state of affairs for bipedal apes nesting under a baobab on the edge of a veldt full of predators.
In the same way, some humans are naturally conservative with respect to change, and some humans naturally seek out the new, and most humans are adaptable, embracing the new only once its value has been demonstrated. For a sentient, conscious animal, this would be the optimal arrangement. Because sometimes, the new way is better, and sometimes, the new way fails. (And sometimes it fails spectacularly.)
[NB: My real-life surname is Peirce, but I am, as far as I know, not related. But I do think that "sometimes" is a critical concept for understanding the world.]
The greatest threat to science is any extreme ideology. Once one's fixed belief causes one to deny the evidence of science you have a problem. You can have people of any political stripe be denialists, it's their fundamentalist belief in some form of ideology that is the prerequisite for unscientific thinking.
Fixed belief - any fixed belief - is the threat.
I firmly believe that stork theory is wrong. My dogmatic adherence to the theory that sex is necessary to procreation means that for me anyway, the science of stork theory is going nowhere. I deny stork theory.
Aren't some propositions true? Or am I confused?
It does seem that traditional cultures have their "eternal verities" - things that seem to be immutably true about fundamental aspects of the human condition. I put the words "eternal verities" in scare quotes because some of these things may not be verities at all, and certainly not eternal ones. And they won't be identical across all cultures. In modern, pluralistic societies, you'll get different verities believed in by different people - some may still be operating with an "eternal verity" that women are intellectually inferior to men, for example, even though this is neither true nor even a universally-shared illusion. Nonetheless, there are various fundamental "verities" that are likely to be widely accepted even within a pluralistic society. Sometimes, philosophers challenge them directly by arguing that they are not true or well-founded. Sometimes science and technology challenge them less directly. Either way, many people are going to be made very uncomfortable. They execute Socrates, try to deny women the vote, ban human cloning, beat homosexuals, get queasy about interracial marriage, etc.
There may be some deeper explanation as to why the world is like this, but in any event I think it probably is like this.
The theory isn't mine by the way; I borrowed it from Richard Norman. It's Norman's theory of background conditions, or my restatement thereof. I wonder whether it's compatible with Gigerenzer's work, with which I'm unfamiliar. Maybe there's a way of putting Norman's theory on a more rigorous basis.
What role does religion play? I'm not sure that I have the full answer, but I think that a culture's religious beliefs and its pet "eternal verities" will co-evolve. As a result, the religion will be heavily invested in the local set of eternal verities. It will have influenced them and been influenced by them. It tends to preserve them and to resist challenges to them, whether from science or from experimental lifestyles, or wherever else. Religious images of the world will be chock full of these eternal verities, whether it's the eternal verity of human exceptionalism, the eternal verity of free will (in a very strong sense), the eternal verity that women should act in such and such a way in relation to men, the eternal verity that sex is nasty and only redeemed by its procreative potential, the eternal verity that we have only three score years and ten, or whatever it is that the locals believe to be an immutable truth about the world and our condition within it.
Any attack on the local eternal verities, even if not actually intended as an attack on religion, is likely to receive strong counter-attacks from religious sources. Moreover, because religion has picked up a whole lot of these traditional fundamental beliefs that made some sort of sense once but are largely not true, it is always likely to imagine the world in a different way from the way it is imagined by the majority of people who are highly scientifically literate and are keeping up with the developing scientific image of the world. (This para is my addition to the theory.)
If we really want to challenge the eternal verities (as they are imagined to be in our place and time), we can expect opposition from at least some - probably many - religionists. If we are serious, we may feel that we have to counterattack our religious opponents head-on, by pointing out that the religion that gives them their mantle of seeming authority is just not true in the first place.
E.g. to defend the morality of homosexuality, it may not be enough to argue that, by some secular principle, it does no harm. It may not be enough to put pressure on religion to reinterpret its doctrines to accept homosexuality. The best way of getting homosexuality socially accepted, and to stop people defending the local eternal verity that "homosexuality is evil", may be for at least some people to stop talking so much homosexuality itself, and about secular moral theories, or new theology ... and to spend more time promulgating scepticism about religion.
If you really want a transvaluation of values, according to which many things once considered virtues in your society (such as chastity and certain kinds of pietistic humility) are now considered vices, and certain things that were once considered sins are now considered good or at least neutral (e.g. homosexual acts; so-called scientific "hubris"), one of the best things you can do is spread scepticism about religion.
Of course, the fundies and the Vatican are already well aware of this last point, but whereas they call spreading scepticism about religion bad, I call it good.
"How is this, by the way? How, if we are evolutionary conservatives can we have produced a process that generates novelty all the time? I think it is because science is not confined to the brains of a few individuals, but to the work of all practitioners, that it is able to escape the confines of evolution - science is very much greater than the organisms that make it up. But that's for another time."
John, could you clarify how this mechanism for escaping evolutionary confines applies to science but not to larger communities? Cultural development and convergence of norms are not confined to the brains of a few individuals either, but are the products of large scale interactions between many individuals. Why does it provide a window for one, but not the other?
In philosophese, science must be empirically adequate. Much social knowledge is not, either because it fails to deal with empirical matters (which is best: jazz or blues?), or because empirical adequacy for that domain is relatively low resolution (e.g., cooking).
I've had reason to think quite a bit about the evolutionary status of culture. And I've concluded that from an adaptive perspective, culture is largely white noise, rapidly shifting null mutations whose influence on survival tends to cancel each other out. Until one day someone with HIV visits your local sauna club etc.
HP: You are correct about distributions of traits. For which reason I said disposed to be conservative. Like all dispositional traits, some are more disposed than others, but we are all likely to believe most of what we see around us, or else how does anyone learn anything? But some of us are more likely to be able to challenge some beliefs as the occasion arises. Most of the time new approaches fail, but they don't leave the individual in trouble since almost everything else the individual knows is conservatively learned.
Tyler, I think that social evolution actually is something that escapes the confines of biological evolution. For a start, we are disposed to favor kin, but the social evolutionary process has delivered a social ideal in which everyone is equal before the law, and so on. Science evolves in its own way because it is not tied to the biological reproductive process. The same is true for society in general.
Great stuff, I really enjoyed your thoughts on this. A good concept. I see I will have to read some of your older entries now as I grasp the context of what you are saying and have gained some new understanding myself.
If you had to define "modern," what would you come up with? Even a short list would be important.
This would be pretty consistent with the very thinly veiled deep desire of the sick-fuck political far-right in the United States for feudalism: lords and peasants, bitchez staying in the fucking house, free-flowing militarism, permission for racial hatred, religious control of the state, etc.
"Modern" is a relative term, defined not so much by a particular set of traits, but by being newer than other social conditions or ideas. But the sort of modernism that people are presently objecting to includes modern science and a demythologising of religious and philosophical doctrines like dualism. This, they think, undercuts the supporting ideas for everything from social responsibility to explanations of mind and reality.
Your new idea fails to address post-modernism however. It's a new idea that is the extreme rejection of any existing framework of knowledge and just as harmful to science as creationism.
I think it's the extremism.
There's something poetic about characterizing science as the permanently modern (in that it constantly produces novelty), and then saying that antimodernism is the greatest threat to science. Great post!
John Wilkins: Would it be fair to claim that if we take your argument seriously that we need to focus on getting people who are well-versed in rationalism/science to teach K-12 classes (either full-time or part-time)?
If so, then do you see any ways this would work? I know the philosophy department at UNC has an outreach program where they either directly develop or assist in the development of courses that deal with philosophy and ethics in local schools. Maybe you're in a better position to tell, but I don't think that sort of emphasis is very common. And I certainly have not heard any mention of this sort of program in other departments. I also do not think this sort of approach is sufficient, although it is a good first step. I suspect departments need to emphasize the good that can come from being a full-time K-12 teacher since the outreach approach only helps in towns with decent universities and colleges.
Mr Wilkins (it's an affectation, you know!) on the whole I agree with your analysis and think it goes some of the way to explaining the post-modern. I have used the p-word and as you will see there is a reason for this. People do have an inherent tendency to be suspicious of/resistant to innovation "if it aint broke don't fix it!" that is almost certainly a survival tactic. This can even be witnessed within the evolution of the sciences themselves, conservatism or maintenance of tradition has been used by the Popperians to explain why falsified theories aren't dropped immediately and I think it was Dirac who said that new theories don't supersede old ones but that old theories cease being held when the last of their supporters die off. That science is innovative and therefore to be resisted was already clear in the 17th Century in the so called quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns that generated, amongst many other polemics, Swift's wonderful Battle of the Books. However the trait that you describe is not in my opinion adequate to fully explain the level of the anti-science polemic in postmodernism that has developed since the 1960s.
Starting around the middle of the 19th Century scientific/medical/technological innovation (hereafter referred to as Big Science) began despite its innovativeness to achieve a very positive status within western society and was regarded as a guarantor of survival and no longer as a threat. Big Science was placed on a pedestal, which increased in height steadily over the next one hundred years. Big Science could solve all problems and ensure the future of the human race. The view took somewhat of a knock in the First World War but advances in technique and medicine (e.g. air travel & penicillin) between the wars raised its status yet again. Then came the Second World War, the Manhattan Project and The Bomb; Big Science had SINNED! It was not the wartime generation themselves who recoiled but the immediate post war generation those like you and me who grew up in the shadow of The Bomb, the arms race, the Cold War, Mutually Assured Destruction (I do love the acronym!) and the rest of the insanity. This generation rebelled when they came of age, in the 60s, rejecting Big Science and everything it stood for. One of the leaders of the counter culture in Britain Jeff Nuttall even wrote a cult book about it called Bomb Culture (London 1969). The counter culture even found scientifically trained gurus such as Bateson (Gregory the son and not William the father) and Capra who were prepared to fundamentally criticise and call into question both the aims and methods of science. Philosophers of science such as Kuhn and Feyerabend were also grist for the mill. The people who rejected science many of the highly intelligent and well educated sought security in a whole raft of woo from Astrology to a Yaqui Indian Way of Knowledge.
On the basis of the thoughts sketched above I would and do claim that postmodernism goes well beyond the normal form of anti-modernism that you have so ably described. I do however have a feeling that with the changes in geo-politics in the last fifteen years or so that postmodernism is definitely on the wane.
It's not really that new, the way I see it. I see "postmodernism" not really as an idea, but as a sort of rhetorical device which is used to justify some other (arbitrary) set of ideas.
And such rhetorical tactics -- there's no absolute Truth, my Truth is good as yours, so I'll stick to my Truth, yadda yadda -- can be used fruitfully both by extreme feminists and extreme religious reactionaries.
I guess that's why Wilkins said that postmodernism "generally acts as an antimodernism".
-- bi, International Journal of Inactivism
Religion too may have to be "empirically adequate"...the question is: empirically adequate for what? Scientists tend to assume that religion is about true descriptions of the material world. I would suggest that while religion makes statements about the world that appear to be about "material stuff" like the origin of the universe, astrophysics, etc, that is NOT their main concern. Their main concern is social organization, group identity, etc...and they are pretty good at that. Almost certainly better than most explicitly fascist parties in history. And the Semitic religions do it better than "pagan" religions. Which is why they are displacing the pagans (with the interesting exception of Japan, whose non-semitic "japaneseness" formula seems remarkably resistant to semitic religion). Its true that the nuttier fringes are actively anti-science and in a rapidly advancing world, they will probably not do too well in the power game if they dont adapt. But then, how long would scientifically literate Dawkins or Dennet survive without a framework of nation-states and armies that owes more to our superstitious and delusional history than it does to the scientific method?
PS: I am on your side, but I do think the full picture is more complicated than "rational scientists" vs. "irrational religious nuts".
Omar, in my experience, it is not the scientists who think religion is about true descriptions of the material world, it is the Creationists who think that. Everyone else is quite aware that religion and science do not exactly overlap, except for a whole lot of fundamentalists who think that the Bible or the Koran are the true description of the world and how it got the way it has done.
Guthrie, My point was that the irrationality of religion looks less irrational when you change the frame of the question. Telling people tall tales about creator gods may be a very rational (short term) strategy if it is effective (relatively) at getting you more followers and more MOTIVATED followers. I am NOT arguing for "separate magisteria". That kind of wooly-headed thinking would get one laughed out of any jihadi cave. Religion is more rational than many of the people on this blog seem to think and it is ALSO less "ethical", if by ethical one means some kind "touchy-feely liberal niceness". In their stronger group-minded versions, the two most successful religions are cold-bloodedly rational about getting followers and keeping them (remember, in mainstream Islam, the punishment for apostasy is death). I would add that a lot of post-enlightenment Christianity clearly has a more individual and "spiritual" bent and we are not talking about that. I am thinking of the really aggressive, organized groups, like most muslim sects and evangelical christianity.....the sufi/quaker/reform/post-christian types are also rational about getting followers and keeping them, but their product is aimed at personal and individual salvation (like psychotherapy) and has a much weaker group component..and so on. got to run.
I've got to run too.
A 70-year-old retired high school teacher here, and I have long said that preK-8 is where we need to put our best teachers and the most money. Unfortunately, the pay scale is not organized that way in public schools (some elite private schools are another matter) and most elementary school teachers have literally an elementary school education in science and mathematics.
If I had my wish, I would have young men and women who are trained in botany and in invertebrate zoology teaching elementary school. Of course, in addition to being trained scientists, they would also have to be reading specialists and child psychologists, and would have to have the patience, selflessness, and motivation to dedicate themselves to teaching children. Do you know many people with that skill set, and how much would we have to pay them to lure them away from their other options?
Re #30, we should pay them whatever it took I guess, since the future of civilisation is at stake. Gets my vote. Problem is, badly educated people have more votes now, and vote for silly things that sound better. Like football. Shame I'd be no good at such stuff...
But do we look around and choose the best, or look around and do what others are doing? Why would evolution let us decide, when we don't yet know anything? What looks good to us might be crap, or crap if we tried to do it. Maybe we look around and see what looks like siblings and copy that. And then believe it is best (and is it a separate facility to believe what we first learned, or do we believe it because we learned it?)...