Science Nazis & Scientistic Supremacy
by Asa Boxer
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During the lockdowns, calling opponents Nazis became reflexive. This behaviour wasn’t new, of course, but it reached new levels of urgency during that time as proponents of one side or the other claimed they were on the right side of history whereas those who disagreed were on the wrong side. The Nazi analogy was useful in making it clear what the wrong side of history looked like. Thus the trucker convoy was deemed Nazi to vax Nazis. Anti-lockdowners and those opposing coerced vaccination and segregation used swastikas to label government authoritarianism as Nazi, and the media took their swastikas to label the users of the symbol, Nazis. Some wore the yellow star that the original Nazis forced the Jews to wear as a method of segregation during the Holocaust to protest the segregation practices that went on during the covid hysteria. Leaders of Jewish organisations stepped up and announced that this behaviour was essentially antisemitic and a trivialisation of the Holocaust, ergo, those wearing the symbol were Nazis.
It was very clear to me, however, who the true Nazis were: they were the segregationists and authoritarians who wished death upon those who refused to comply with state diktats. The resemblances between the onset of Nazism in Germany and the militant Covidianism globally were so striking, that it is still a wonder to me that anyone could miss the analogy. What was shocking to me was that even when you laid it out point for point, those who were committed germaphobes and worshippers at the feet of the almighty science ignored the resemblances as coincidental. To their minds, present circumstances were different because we had TheScience™ now and today’s science is the one true Truth. Pointing out that the Nazis felt the same way about their sciences fell upon deaf ears.
By and large it was atheists (though not exclusively) who took the side of the authoritarians because they were believers in TheScience™. For them, science is infallible. As bizarrely anti-scientific as that position is, that was (and still is for many) the basic view. The driving paradigm is that at the very least, the scientific position on any subject is superior to any other. Owing to the pushback from prominent scientists in the health and medical fields, however, part of the trouble was determining whose science was the one true Truth, and the science believers were happy with government experts and institutionally sanctioned science. In other words, believers rejected science as a sceptical way of life occupied with questioning and debating. To their minds, scientific knowledge is a thing that once possessed is eternal, not an ongoing process of investigation and review, of correction and response to new data, new approaches, and new perspectives. For these types, science is fundamentally authoritarian because it represents a final revelation. A direct consequence of believing that science is superior to all other perspectives, be they religious or humanist, is that it allows Science to reorder society according to its one true Truth. All those centuries of humanist progress toward developing a just and humane democratic civilisation could be relegated to the hazmat heap. Who needs history, human rights, and ethical philosophy when TheScience™ can engineer a superior world?
Shocking as it may be for those who believe in the science, this position was typical of the Nazis, and not merely coincidental, but central to the destructive and immoral behaviour of the regime. Most are aware that a key identifier of Nazism is white supremacy, but too many are unaware that the racism was backed by science. Worse, extermination of inferior races, the disabled, homosexuals, and the mentally ill, was objectively ethical by scientific standards, in which, ideally, no sentimental human values and emotions cloud one’s judgement. In Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, we learn that the doctors of the Third Reich “felt, wrongly, that their ‘objective and scientific’ attitude was far more advanced than the opinions held by ordinary people.”
I can’t stress enough how unhinged and acutely dangerous this sort of hubris truly is. No doubt, this ongoing narcissism in the medical community has everything to do with the idea (continually drilled into them and the public at large) that they are “the best and the brightest”—a notion so far from true as to qualify as delusional. But delusional doesn’t capture the most important element, which is how socially destructive it is to elevate a profession to that level. Let’s not forget that MDs and medical boards promoted the idea of segregation of the so-called “unvaccinated,” and many went so far as to introduce policies denying organ transplants to these unclean, and inferior specimens of humanity. Some readers may recall from a previous essay how some MDs refused treatment to the unvaxxed and condemned them to death. It should go without saying that such behaviour has a sharp, Nazi flavour to it.
This culture of scientific supremacism is not unique to Nazism; the analogy applies to any authoritarian regime that draws legitimacy from a secular source. With older forms of authority like divination and religion set aside, science becomes the means to political rationale. Once a worldview takes that priestly place in a society, it marks the decline of a civilisation. Divination, religion, and science got their start as novel and revolutionary guides to reading the great book of natural phenomena. But inevitably, they all became political tools guiding government policy and action. The historical process ends with those paradigms coming to be seen as corrupt, inconsistent, and incoherent, giving rise to ongoing struggles with new paradigms vying for supremacy.
As regular readers know, I like to bring matters round to the inner world because the root of the problem lies in the human heart. An individual can have an immense impact if he simply chooses to be upstanding and show integrity. Indeed, if enough of us behaved this way, our society would be healthy. As all political philosophers have observed, without virtuous citizens, democracies fall to the hands of dictators because someone needs to come along and set things straight.
By my lights, a big part of what’s going on has to do with storytelling, and I’ve troubled over these issues in previous articles, demonstrating how science tells stories about itself, and how, in fact, it invents myths about its own supremacy. I’ve examined untrue tales relating to all manner of scientists from Galileo to Pasteur to Darwin to Einstein and Feynman. And I’ve looked at false narratives about scientific progress and the scientific method.
There’s yet another facet worth looking at and that’s the sci-fi future that many scientists envision and often enough hold subconsciously. In other words, there’s a prophetic angle to scientific supremacy, and it’s one that promises a future of scientific mastery of the powers of the universe. It’s a kind of super hero comic book vision that reveals the workings of undeveloped psyches, and childish imaginations that never matured—a condition arising out of neglect. Since science doesn’t tend to these aspects of human development, it makes sense that those who steep themselves in science to the exclusion of other paradigms, will fail to grow proficient in those other areas.
To provide an example of this sort of psychological trouble, I‘m going to quote a passage from philosopher of science, Mary Midgley (1919-2018). This is from Evolution as a Religion (1985):
That distinguished physicist J.D. Bernal shaped it in a way which bears some relation to Day’s in a remarkable Marxist Utopia published in 1929. Pointing out that things might get a trifle dull and unchallenging in the future, when the state had withered away after the triumph of the proletariat, Bernal predicted that only the dimmer minds would be content with this placid paradise. Accordingly, “the aristocracy of scientific intelligence” would give rise to new developments and create a world run increasingly by scientific experts. Scientific institutions would gradually become the government and thus achieve “a further stage of the Marxian hierarchy of domination.” The end result would be that scientists “would emerge as a new species and leave humanity behind.”
As Midgley points out, this kind of supremacist phantasy is not unique to Bernal or to a few nutters in the field. This sort of self-aggrandising appears often in introductions and conclusions to popular science books, leading gullible, lay readers into feeling they are partaking in cosmic superpowers just by reading and believing in the perspectives espoused by these texts.
What I’m after is that these tales hijack the psyches of folks who aren’t aware they even have an inner life—or at least not one of any significance. Instead of having minds and hearts consciously brimming with historical tales, biblical tales, and literary tales, minds that know what stories are, what they look like, and how they operate. . . they have a barely conscious sense of a Marvel Comics world in which some avatar of science transforms society into a paradise without suffering because it has no heart. Any mature individual finds these phantasies at once laughable and tragic because such a mindset can only lead to deeper suffering and self destruction. Unfortunately, I can’t see any means of getting through to scientistic supremacists. And yet, it seems paramount that we find a way to reach these folk because their perspective lies at the heart of the political decay we’re experiencing. What’s needed is a movement like the one that arose at the end of the 1800s promoting psychological awakening and the nurturing of healthy inner lives.
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 the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
"Nazis, Nazis everywhere, yet no-one stops to think," if I may paraphrase Coleridge to breaking point. The resort to the 'lowest common dominator' (Nazi Germany) has reached fever pitch in recent years, hasn't it? Yet there seems to be nothing to be gained in this analogy, which serves largely as an attempt at thought-stopping.
Remember the object-oriented ontologists I mentioned over at Stranger Worlds? One of them, Timothy Morton, engaged with me in the most unexpected fashion. While I was in Manchester over the summer, I ran a thread on TwiX about my first hand experiences of protestors in the city and how the news reporting on the rioting in the wake of the government's shockingly poor handling of the murder of small children was not reflective of the conditions on the ground. To this, Morton posted a single image of a rioter displaying a swastika. It was literally intended to end the conversation. I challenged him on it. He declined to discuss it further.
I mention this example, as this impulse to jump to the Nazis is the single least politically productive trend I can think of ('fascism' serves the same role of course). Once you've escalated to comparisons to the Nazis, any further thinking is ended. This is a disastrous approach!
I'm very pleased to see you getting good ground out of Midgley's work. I continued her project in this regard in The Mythology of Evolution. One of my purposes in this book was to avoid collecting under the banner 'atheist' (which is a problematic label precisely because at the intellectual end of the educational spectrum the label is avoided as passe and associated with 'the wrong sort of intellectual'). Instead, I grouped under the name 'positivists', a term which has a relevant history here, and seems to me somewhat 'safer', although still problematic in that it is not what such people call themselves. But herein lies one of the root-clusters of the issue: that there is a collective of like-minded folk who cannot recognise this quality about themselves. It is one of the major contemporary issues that does not get discussed.
Thus I continue to push to find ways to break through on the Covidian front, but struggle because militarising this front only exacerbates the problem in terms of further disrupting the lack of discourse. I know you have also struggled with this problem in your own contexts. What is needed is the precise opposite of the 'cardboard Nazi' manoeuvre: we need a framework that someone on 'the other side' can recognise themselves within, such that the conversation can be begun. And this, it turns out, is immensely difficult.
I hope that these scattered notes contain something of interest!
With unlimited love,
Chris.
Thanks for another excellent and exciting post. "Nazi" has, for me, always been a label and little more, a particular form of evil that has no history, no period of development, almost no connection, on the surface, to deep social networks and their workings, including private life. I was happy to see the emphasis here and in your comment below on the inner world. I used to think that people who lived on their phones were self-absorbed, but I see now that they are other-absorbed. "A medium conducive to dialogue," you write. My thought was, hmmm, dialogue with people who have nothing to say? I celebrated a birthday recently with my two brothers and one of my sisters. Some of took long drives to make this happen. We all agreed, sitting around a birthday cake for a couple of hours, that a medium is no substitute for the face-to-face contact that helps us express our inner lives and respond as others do the same. I am happy to be among the people who know what we are missing. A great read, made my day. Thanks!