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Wednesday, June 22, 2005
Total Worldviews
At Butterflies and Wheels, Thomas R. DeGregori points out that:
Scientists have to recognize that when they are countering a demonstrably false idea, they may well be entering a conflict with the total worldview of those who hold them. To the family in Kansas that rejects evolution, the biology teacher at the local school is doing far more than merely teaching science. The science teacher is in effect entering their home and family and undercutting beliefs upon which their family and sense of community is based. Is it any wonder that they feel like victims? To many activists, the plant bio-technologist is contaminating and polluting the planet as part of a corporate plot to dominate the global economy. Is it any wonder that they also feel like victims? To the absolutist mindset, breeching a principle is the same as abandoning it, and therefore any concession to differing views amounts to total surrender. This helps to explain why many disillusioned ex-communists became radical conservatives, why activists’ opposition to transgenic food crops is total, and why the scientific research use of embryonic stem cells is defined as taking a human life.
This seems to me a very astute analyis, but DeGregori essentially disregards it in his follow-up (and concluding) paragragh:
As the new millennium was approaching, there were many candidates for the greatest achievement of the past 1,000 years; one such candidate was the development of the scientific method. That candidate has my vote. If we work at it, one of the greatest achievements of this new millennium could be the continued refinement of the scientific method, its integration into the beliefs and practices of everyday life for the greater part of humankind, and the continuous improvement in the quality of life of earth’s inhabitants that could be realized as a result.
There’s nothing objectionable about these sentiments, except for the underlying assumption that continuing to point out the felicities of the scientific method will eventually overcome the resistance of the “absolutist mindset.” It’s precisely the pragmatism of the scientific method--settling for what works as an explanation until a better explanation comes along--that those possessing this mindset won’t accept. As Stanley Fish argues in The Trouble With Principle, such people are here to stay, and no amount of tolerance of their views will result in mutual tolerance on their part. Ideology and “worldviews” are indeed at stake, and the only way to fight those who are “undercutting beliefs” is to destroy the unbeliever.
This doesn’t mean DeGregori is wrong in advocating the “continued refinement of the scientific method” or that scientists should back down in the fact of know-nothing intimidation. But if he really believes that advocacy and argument will eventually result in science becoming more significantly integrated “into the beliefs and practices of everyday life for the greater part of humankind,” I think he’s dreaming.
Comments
But doesn’t learning the original languages, per by post below, necessitate this pragmatism in the fundamentalist?
I should also point out that I’m largely thinking of autodidacticism here, which seems to me to be required by the Protestant-fundamentalist worldview.
As is often the case on Butterflies and Wheels, little effort is made to distinguish between legitimate criticism and a criticism from the “absolutist mindset”. And so concern about biotechnology is easily cast as luddite fundamentalism, in a move whose rather obvious political stance rather undermines the repeated insistence on value-free scientific enquiry.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the latter, I just think that a conservative stance posing as objectivity makes its own small contribution to undermining it.
But surely the absolutist mindset is at least partly taught. And surely there are a lot of people milling around in the territory between absolutist mindsets and the scientific worldview. And if both those suggestions are true, surely the absolutist mindset could at least become less numerous in the future.
How does one breech a principle? Can ideas wear trousers?