Intellectual Sacrifice to TheScience™

by Asa Boxer

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Max Weber (1864-1920). German sociologist and political economist.

The canonized story of orthodox scientism is one about conclusiveness, closure and final revelation. In that tale Science Jesus has come and we are already saved if only we’d obey the Brights and their way of doing Science. That story demands of us a sacrifice of our analogical minds. Let the Science do the thinking, using AI and mathematics beyond our ability to verify or question. Abandon nullius in verba. Trust and follow the white robed class, the duchoisies, if you’ll permit a snarky coinage.

Irony abounds. Max Weber (1864-1920)—famous for celebrating science’s “disenchantment of the world,” its de-magification of our outlook on natural phenomena—“wrote that ‘the decisive characteristic of the positively religious man’ is what he termed ‘das intellektuelle Opfer’, the ‘intellectual sacrifice—the surrender of judgement to the prophet or to the church’.”¹ How familiar this demand that we surrender our hearts and minds in return for our salvation. This is the story told by the left brain, by the emissary that would be master.

Though I reject his idea of “Entzauberung”—disenchantment or demystification, Weber has some ideas worth consideration. Horace Judson quotes him as follows:

“[S]cience has a fate that profoundly distinguishes it from artistic work,” he said. “In science, each of us knows that what he has accomplished will be antiquated in ten, twenty, fifty years. That is the fate to which science is subjected; it is the very meaning of scientific work.” He went on, “Every scientific ‘fulfilment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be surpassed and outdated.” He said, “We cannot work without hoping that others will advance further than we have.”²

Meanwhile for the past one-hundred years the grand theory of relativity (I’m referring to both general and special relativity) has resisted scientific displacement. This sort of stagnation and sclerosis come about through institutional capture, government granting, and the desperation of scientists to keep their projects funded. Hence the need to save (in the sense of rescuing) the Theory long past its due date. Such is the common bias of our times: the presumption that TheScience™ is settled, the lines are drawn, and it’s the job of the skeptic to look over your shoulder and scold when you colour outside the lines.

Echoing William James’s point, already quoted numerous times,³ regarding the popular sense at the close of the nineteenth century that TheScience™ was settled, here’s a source (I have this through Judson again):

In 1894, the physicist Albert Michelson [yes, the Michelson-Morley Michelson] said, in a speech that has achieved an ambiguous celebrity, “While it is never safe to say that the future of Physical Science has no marvels even more astonishing than those of the past, it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” But predicting the end of science is a fool’s conceit. Mind you, some even then were less satisfied than Michelson. But nobody could have predicted the miraculous decade that began just a year later. In 1895 in Wurzburg, Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen discovered x rays. In 1896 in Paris, Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity. In 1897 in Cambridge, Joseph John Thomson discovered the electron. In 1900 in Berlin, Max Planck laid the foundation of quantum theory. In 1905 in Bern, Albert Einstein promulgated the special theory of relativity. Physics was not done.⁴

The entire nineteenth century can be similarly mapped. The enormous potential of scientific exploration and discovery from the end of the eighteenth century till around 1920 scintillates with Enlightenment hope. There was a story there that helped inspire those minds who were far fewer than those participating in the scientific industry underway at present, which really is involved “chiefly in the rigorous application of [established] principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” What I’m after today is how this canonical tale has brought us to the aberrations of social constructionism—which is where bad science leads.

Judson explains: “In the last decades of the twentieth century. . .The subversion [of the idea of the norms of science] began with Thomas Kuhn and his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Judson informs us that it was Kuhn who introduced the term “paradigm shift” to denote the societal convulsions by which scientific norms are overturned and replaced with new theoretical frameworks. Kuhn’s ideas have been criticised as over-simplified, but his sociological critique of science has had lasting impacts. Because the twentieth century may be viewed as the age of settled science, sociologists have had a handle on how false consensus in the scientific class comes about. The consequences have been devastating:

Sociologists’ attempts to analyze the workings of science became rent by bitter disputes over the extent to which scientific theories, or even what most people take as scientific facts, can claim a reliable grounding in a reality independent of presuppositions and prejudices of the scientists themselves. A camarilla of sociologists of science flourished in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, who declared it their program to show that all sciences, their theories or hypotheses, methods and apparatus, and the facts themselves, are constructed by the agreement of scientists—in the strong, or extreme, program, by nothing other than a consensus of scientists achieved by negotiation—and that no grounding of these in some putative objective reality can be proven.⁵

In short it’s the very idea of settled science and scientific consensus that brings about social constructionism, the idea that all knowledge is a social construct, and that therefore there is no such thing as objective reality. Who can blame a sociologist observing TheScience™ at the end of the twentieth century for coming to that conclusion? And once social constructionism is established, it is no surprise to witness as I pointed out in “Scientism Subverts Secular Society” how terms like pandemic and vaccine might be as easily reconstructed as the terms man and woman.

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Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.

1. Judson, Horace Freeland. The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science. Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2004. p. 31.

2. Ibid. p. 30.

3. Here’s the quotation from William James’s 1895 address to the Harvard Young Men’s Christian Association entitled “Is Life Worth Living?”:

I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude.

from The Will to Believe

4. Judson op. cit. pp. 404-5.

5. Ibid. p. 41.