Toward Scientific Civilization

4th July 2020

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Toward Scientific Civilization

Narratives of Knowledge in Etiological Myths and Central Projects

It is easy to find attacks on the social sciences that are basically criticisms of the social sciences for not being the natural sciences. And it would be easy to immerse oneself in the worst sociological literature from the last few decades and come away with a very black pilled view of the social sciences, and a dismal impression of the direction of science over all. But it would be equally easy to immerse oneself in the worst physics literature of the past few decades and to come away with an equally black pilled view of physics and the future of science overall. But the latter rarely happens; the natural sciences forgive and forget when it comes to history.

The narrative of the natural sciences is more selective, fully indulging in the bias of survivorship, and more readily forgetting the blind alleys and bad theories. The social sciences are more apt to live in an eternal present where bad theories are kept alive both by naïve scientists and bad actors in the sciences. Does this mean that the social sciences have more bad actors and a greater level of naïveté than the natural sciences? Probably, but there are probably also other mechanisms at work in addition to these causes.

The solution is not for the social sciences to become more like the natural sciences, but for the social sciences to fashion a narrative for itself as a rigorous science in which the cause of human knowledge is relentlessly advanced. It should be noted that this must be a scientific narrative, and not the reigning political narrative that today dominates the social sciences. And a rigorously scientific narrative for the social sciences would be a fragment of a grander scientific narrative, an interdisciplinary narrative, that would weave together the accomplishments of the natural sciences and the social sciences into a whole greater than its parts.

The program for the unity of science among the logical empiricists of the early twentieth century was a program of the reduction of the many special sciences to physics, which was taken to be the foundation of all the sciences. This kind of reductionism plays into the contemporary criticism of the social sciences from the natural scientific perspective. In other words, a partial narrative for one branch of the sciences is made to furnish the narrative for all the sciences. Ultimately, this won’t work.

What would ultimately work would be a master narrative of all the sciences that was equal to being taken for the etiological myth of a scientific civilization. One could argue that an etiological myth of the heroic origins of science was implicitly if imperfectly present in narratives of progress up through the nineteenth century, but the experience of the twentieth century put an end to progress, optimism, and heroism. Today we prefer the anti-hero to the hero. It shows. The twentieth century sowed the wind, and now we reap the whirlwind. We may have been closer to being a scientific civilization during the early modern period, before the industrial revolution—a period that I sometimes call modernism without industrialism—than we are today. But that was the first blush of science, when it was as naïve as it was enthusiastic.

From a mythological perspective, an etiological myth is distinct from the central project of a civilization, so that a heroic etiological myth of the origins of science would be the origins myth for scientific civilization, but not the central project of scientific civilization (a civilization needs both an etiological myth and a central project). The central project would be distinct, but whether it would be focused on the growth of scientific knowledge as an end in itself, on the adventure of scientific discovery (the extension of the etiological myth into the future), on ever larger scientific enterprises (big science extrapolated to a cosmological scale), or on some other aspect of science, perhaps some aspect of science not yet known to us today, we cannot say. There has been in human history no instance of a properly scientific civilization, so we do not yet know if anything drawn from science can furnish a coherent and viable central project for a civilization; this remains to be seen.