The Cults of Scientism in Philosophy and Economics
Secular cults are paradoxical…and just as hard to escape from
As a philosophy graduate in an old-fashioned analytic philosophy department, I took a peculiar course on the philosophy of science. Practically the whole class was taught in symbolic logic, with very little in the way of English explanation of what the professor was talking about.
The professor, a well-known writer on Rudolph Carnap would fill the blackboard with formal symbols like a wannabe Einstein, copying from his handwritten notes.
Meanwhile, the students, who were expected to know the meaning of all the abstract concepts, would rush to scribble down everything in our notebooks so we could figure it out later on Google.
Logical Positivism
I’m a keen observer of situational irony, of how our expectations can fail so exquisitely when we receive the very opposite of what’s supposed to happen.
This kind of irony can be humiliating but can amount to a practically sacred breakthrough of reality so that we’re reminded that everything human we take for granted is like a tiny home base on an alien planet.
As I suspected when I took that course, all was not as it seemed. This was supposed to have been a hyper-rigorous philosophy of science class, taught by a dinosaurian holdover from the days of logical positivism.
Yet what do we call a decisively refuted worldview that’s still upheld by a few fanatics? Is that more like a science or a religion, a reconstruction of how science works or a self-reinforcing delusion?
Just think of it — while the foolishness of evangelical Christianity might be obscured by the mellifluous Old English verbiage of the King James Bible, so too there’s such a thing as the fundamentalist worship of science. And these “positivists” or “empiricists” likewise cloak the dubiousness of their utopian conceptions beneath impenetrable, pseudo-mathematical formalities.
Even in the twentieth century, long after the science worship from the likes of Francis Bacon and Auguste Comte, there was a cult of science called the Vienna Circle, which met at the University of Vienna from 1924 to 1936.
Key figures associated with this cult were Schlick, Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, Neurath, Frege, Mach, Einstein, Popper, and also some non-Germans, namely Russell, Quine, Ayer, Hilbert, and Ramsey.
The timing and location of their worship of science weren’t accidental since the members seemed to draw not just from the world-famous rigors of German engineering, but from the Germanic utopianism which fuelled the rise of Nazism.
That was the first irony in this sordid tale. What these logical positivists were after was a way of verifying knowledge that would rule out certain ideas as meaningless and pseudoscientific.
They sought to reduce mathematics to logic, and also theoretical statements about unobservables such as atoms, to statements about observables.
They drew up dichotomies between fact and value, theory and observation, and analytic and synthetic statements (or logical and empirical ones). They declared that any statement that couldn’t be empirically verified was meaningless or had at best emotive significance; thus, ethical, theological, and metaphysical discourses were dismissed as worse than false.
And all of this fundamentalist empiricism was often cast in a highly technical, artificial language that was indecipherable to the average person.
The idea was to mimic the rigor and formalism of physicists such as Albert Einstein. After all, the logical positivist’s conceit was that legitimate philosophy is only a clarification of science, not an independent source of knowledge.
In short, this fundamentalist empiricism was the essence of scientism, the faith-based hostility to nonscientific claims to knowledge.
The arrogance of these pseudo-secular cultists can be gleaned from their admiration for the early Wittgenstein who published the pompous Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, which inspired much of the Vienna Circle’s agenda with its correspondence theory of truth, picture theory of language, and verificationist criterion of meaningfulness.
With that book Wittgenstein believed he’d solved all the problems of philosophy so that no further philosophical work was justified. Later, he came to believe philosophical problems don’t even deserve to be solved because they’re pseudo-problems produced by the misuse of ordinary language.
Notwithstanding the wholly religious nature of their initial utopianism, members of the inner circle of logical positivism, such as Carnap, eventually realized they’d gone too far, since their purity tests consigned even some scientific generalizations to the outer darkness of semantic vacuity.
Universal generalizations (laws) or generalizations that couldn’t be verified because of only technological rather than conceptual limitations, such as that there are craters on the dark side of the moon, were lumped in with what was supposed to be gibberish, namely morality and theology.
Carnap, Hempel and Ayer softened the fundamentalist formulations in a bid to retain their cult’s respectability, but after WWII, the more pragmatic philosophy of the US spanked the double-talking utopianism of the German empiricists. Thus, besides Hempel and Popper, Quine, Hanson, Kuhn, Goodman, Austin, Strawson, Putnam, and Rorty systematically dismantled fundamentalist empiricism, otherwise known as logical positivism.
All the hallowed dichotomies were shown to be castles on sand. For example, Norwood Hanson showed that observation statements are laden with theoretical presuppositions.
Building on Kant, Hegel had already explained as much in his Phenomenology of Spirit, when he pointed out that strictly empirical statements about sense data (about, say, the mere patches of color that are literally seen) would themselves be empty without input from background knowledge.
But the analytic/synthetic distinction fell to Quine; Richard Rorty pointed out that the correspondence theory of truth was just a metaphor about the mind as a mirror of nature; and Thomas Kuhn implied how, instead of receiving divine revelation from the nature of science, the logical empiricists were subject to sociological dynamics, namely to “paradigm shifts” between normal and revolutionary periods of inquiry.
Not only was the cult nothing special, but its principles were also soundly, decisively, comprehensively refuted.
Perhaps the Vienna Circle should have foreseen the dead end, since all of their highly technical “clarifications” of cognition were obviously motivated by utopian enthusiasm for science.
The positivists assigned human emotion to the sphere of the noncognitive. While it’s true that it would be fallacious to discount positivism on that ground, by pointing to its emotional underpinnings, the positivists themselves might have been irked by the situational irony at work.
What are the chances that a meta-scientific reconstruction of the nature of knowledge would be sustainable when that reconstruction functioned socially as nothing short of a utopian cult of scientism?
Neoclassical Economics
One reason we can speak safely of a common social process underlying religious and secular fundamentalisms is that there was clearly a second secular example, besides logical positivism, namely neoclassical economics.
Just like the positivists and their cousins in theology, these economists hid the absurdity of their claims by resorting to abstractions which they managed to sanctify.
Monotheists claim their creeds are God’s revelations to humanity, while the positivists and neoclassical economists appealed to Science as their God, employing logical and mathematical formalisms to disguise the nonscientific assumptions of their disciplines.
But if you can imitate some of the scientific procedures, flooding your textbooks with math and even adapting concepts from physics to economics, as Philip Mirowski showed the neoclassical economists did, in More Heat than Light, you can inherit the authority and prestige of hard science.
The difference, of course, is that real science works by experiment which tests hypotheses and leads to technological applications that change the world.
Philosophy as the empiricist clarification of science wasn’t itself any kind of science, since it proposed no testable hypotheses and had no such applications. If legitimate philosophers did so little, why would scientists even need them?
You might think neoclassical economics would be more useful and testable since its models are meant to explain real-world economic transactions. But technically no such explanations are forthcoming, because this school of economics manages only to describe an ideal world that satisfies Pareto optimality.
For example, for the neoclassical models to work, buyers and sellers have to be members of “Homo economicus,” meaning perfectly rational maximizers of their utility.
No such sane person has ever existed on earth as a member of that species.
Rather than being selfish and independent, we’re empathetic and interdependent cooperators; moreover, contrary to neoclassical utopianism, free-market capitalism and consumerism are obviously unsustainable if only because of the planet’s physical limitations.
But neoclassical economics ignores the unreality of its presumptions — because it’s a pseudoscientific, utopian cult, and its practitioners are either victims of a self-reinforcing delusion or are wily perpetrators of a con that enriches themselves, just like the cult leaders, televangelists, and priests of theistic religions.
Just as the American pragmatists eviscerated the occultist obscurantism of the logical positivists, behavioural and experimental economists have been questioning what they call the “normative bias” and thus the pseudoscientific status of neoclassical economics.
These more progressive economists insist on distinguishing between a genuine science that rests on empirical testing of its assumptions and predictions, and a fraudulent cult for creepy impostors.
This is much to the chagrin of cheerleaders of the so-called free market who use the pseudoscientific math of neoclassical economics to lend an air of scientific legitimacy to their Darwinian or anarchical political policies.
While secular advocates of a strict division between church and state have labored to prevent Christian fundamentalism from infiltrating public schools, they’ve neglected to address the fact that free-market cultists have taken over both the governments and the economies of civil societies around the world.
Instead of appealing directly to neoclassical economics, these champions of deregulation and (effectively) of plutocracy deliver informal prescriptions based on the neoclassical ideals that were only ever presupposed by the scientistic economists. The body of their prescriptions is known as “neoliberalism” or as “the Washington consensus.”
In short, the idea is that when left to themselves, markets are self-regulating. Thus, neoliberals advocated turning everything into markets that could then be freed from the flaws of artificial (human) management.
Again, that self-regulation happens only in an ideal world which is as magical a place as the theist’s supernatural Heaven.
But you can sing the mathematical praises of that ideal world, leaning on governments and businesses to attempt to fulfill the ideal, all while trashing the real world’s ecosystems and pretending you’re not beholden to any religious agenda but are only practicing a rigorous discipline of scientific modeling.
It’s as though the crackpot libertarian schemes of Republican politicians and of megalomaniacal, social Darwinian CEOs weren’t only inheriting the flavor of their doomsday cults from the arrogance and Ur-religiosity of the neoclassical economists.
The Search for a Nobler Secular Faith
Perhaps instead of confusing religion with theism, secularists such as the new atheists should reflect on the social role of religion.
Maybe the goal shouldn’t be the elimination of religion, in the existential sense of a way of life flowing from our ultimate values, but as Nietzsche said, a revaluation of our values, one that ensures our values’ respectability or “nobility” in light of the death of God.
Once exoteric theism is abandoned as an obsolete, dehumanizing basis of religion, we’re left with the task of developing an unembarrassing religion for hypermodernists.
The reason logical positivism and neoclassical economics are only ignoble pretenders to the throne is that their advocates are hypocrites who lack the courage of their convictions since they pretend to be scientific rather than religious.
They pretend they’re only explicating the nature of knowledge or calculating equilibriums with mathematical models, whereas in reality, they subscribe to a cult of scientism that informs every last one of their highfalutin utterances.
Here’s to the prospects of a worthy secular religion based not on empiricist or economic utopianism but on cosmicism awe and disgust!
