Dark arts: notes on scientism

The worship of science has rotted the mind and deracinated Western culture

With the arts in ruins, science is now the dominant rubric of all culture and power

“I saw in an American magazine the statement that a number of British and American physicists refused from the start to do research on the atomic bomb, well knowing what use would be made of it. Here you have a group of sane men in the middle of a world of lunatics. And though no names were published, I think it would be a safe guess that all of them were people with some kind of general cultural background, some acquaintance with history or literature or the arts — in short, people whose interests were not, in the current sense of the word, purely scientific.” — George Orwell, What is Science? (1945)

The rise of scientism is one of the darkest developments of the last century. Indeed, it is the development that has enabled the broader dismantlement of Western civilisation. The scientific ideal is now regarded as a kind of prime intellectual and moral virtue. The Academy has been infected by this for decades. So-called “social science” has largely replaced the arts. Pseudoscientific “lenses”, like Marxism and feminism, are overlaid on the world as if they are natural laws by which humans and cultures will necessarily abide.

The scientific zeitgeist has not only poisoned the realm of culture and the arts — it has usurped that realm entirely and now sits enthroned upon it. Disciplines once devoted to the highest ideas in philosophy and poetry are now cold wastelands of political absolutes and dogmatic “-isms”. Pseudoscience has wrapped itself around the entire Academy, and hence the whole of Western culture.

And the consequence of science’s cultural hegemony has been its political takeover. It is accepted, indeed expected, that elected rulers will do whatever scientific “experts” tell them to. Equally dangerously, such experts are often drawn upon selectively to support political outcomes, from weapons inspectors, to climatologists, to epidemiologists. Scientists now sit entrenched as the high priests of the post-Enlightenment age.

“In Modernity, graphs and statistics have become weapons of coercion and dogmatic enforcement.”

In his 1945 article What is Science?, George Orwell captured the spirit of this new widespread deference to the scientist and his theories: “The world [many people think] would be a better place if the scientists were in control of it.” As Orwell observed from his own time, this impulse is both dangerous and misguided. The Nazis’ crimes, he notes, were actively enabled by highly placed scientists, many of whom “swallowed the monstrosity of ‘racial science’”.

Orwell was attacking the replacement of the humanities (culture) with science. Science is the inquiry into the natural world via hypothesis and falsification. That is its sole remit. Its advancements have nothing to tell us about ethics, nor aesthetics, nor metaphysics, nor any of the political considerations that follow from these. In other words, it contains within it no philosophical or moral meaning. Science is a tool — but one that carries before it the potential for immense material, and thus political, power. It is the responsibility of culture and philosophy to provide the higher guardianship for that power: to constrain and channel it in accordance with virtue and good sense.

Importantly, Orwell also observed that scientific education, devoid of real cultural learning, impoverishes the Western mind. He wrote:

“Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess: and his political reactions would probably be somewhat less intelligent than those of an illiterate peasant who retained a few historical memories and a fairly sound aesthetic sense . . . At the moment, science is on the upgrade, and so we hear, quite rightly, the claim that the masses should be scientifically educated: we do not hear, as we ought, the counter-claim that the scientists themselves would benefit by a little education.”

This point is even more obviously true now than it was in 1945. The scientistic mindset has bred a kind of obnoxious, ignorant certitude into our culture. Every matter of political and cultural importance is now treated with dogmatic assuredness, from Covid policies, to the Ukraine conflict, to the prominent leftwing cultural attacks. A single dominant critique takes hold — frequently underpinned by bogus science — and opposition to it is treated with a degree of contempt that is redolent of the Soviet Union.

Thus we see that the scientific spirit, of absolute laws and implacable causal explanation, has been misapplied to the world of culture. Importantly, as Orwell observes, the largely scientific education that the modern mind has received makes it the slave to scientistic thought. Deprived of any profound education in the arts — in philosophy, literature and the classics — the intellect is captured by the hubristic assertions of the scientific establishment and its political overreaches.

The greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was another great prophet of the scientistic threat. In Culture and Value (c. 1945), he wrote:

“People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.”

The humanities, derided and neglected, have fallen in Western civilisation. The classic texts of Homer and Virgil, once compulsory in school, are barely read. The “dead languages” of Latin and Greek that provide the indispensable portal to the roots of Western culture are actively disparaged as useless. Poetry and philosophy are treated as articles of mere interest, rather than foundational pillars of learning without which no mind can hope to be educated.

Education used to be almost synonymous with the arts. Once they are diminished or diluted, entire branches of the human intellect become closed to reason. Vast portions of our critical faculties lose all vitality. The mind becomes governed instead by the linear and narrow methodology of the scientist. Thus Wittgenstein writes that “science is a way of sending [a mind] to sleep.” Scientific learning, in isolation from the richness of cultural education, will not only rot important faculties of a mind, but will train what is left of that mind to see the world and everything in it through the mechanistic rubric of causality and use.

“Science has been sublimated beyond its proper limits, and remoulded into a surrogate outlet for the intellect, the morality and the spirituality of modern Western man.”

Thus the connection between scientism and despotism becomes clear. The twentieth century transmogrified science from a mere intellectual tool into a sacred observance that bears a moral significance unto itself. As the British philosopher Roger Scruton remarked, the error lies in the modern expectation that science will “pass from an explanation of something to the meaning of something.” The theory of evolution is treated not merely as an explanation for genetic variations within species: it accounts for the very meaning (or meaninglessness) of life itself. Cosmology is now taken to have usurped the divine. And the very creation of new technology is regarded as a moral imperative to use it. Ethics and metaphysics have been subsumed by science.

This is the true heart of scientism in the modern world: it fills the philosophical and moral void that was left by the decline of Western Christianity. Science, often framed more broadly as “reason”, has been sublimated beyond its proper limits, and remoulded into a surrogate outlet for the intellect, the morality and the spirituality of modern Western man.

Indeed, it is through this outlet that the darkest aspect of scientism has emerged to the fore — its use as an instrument of political control. Scruton observed:

“Scientism is really a king of magic. . . It involves using science to conjure things, to reassemble human life in order to exert a sort of control over it.”

In the modern despotism, science is engineered in reverse to fit some anti-human political end-state. To keep favour with the prevailing ideology of Nazi Germany, scientists avowed and developed racial Darwinism. In Stalinist Russia, state dogma was underpinned by pseudoscientific geneticists, who claimed that parents pass socially acquired characteristics on to their children. The new Soviet man and woman could therefore be created, it was claimed, by people embracing desirable traits which could then be passed on to their offspring. Dissenting scientists were exiled, imprisoned or executed.

Indeed, one of the most important scenes in Orwell’s Animal Farm is that of the pigs’ initial theft from their fellow animals following the revolution. Having liberated themselves from human control, the animals are perturbed at the pigs stealing milk and apples from the communal stores. Squealer, the pigs’ advocate-in-chief, explains the act:

“Comrades!” he cried. “You do not imagine, I hope, that we pigs are doing this in a spirit of selfishness and privilege? Many of us actually dislike milk and apples. Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig.

Orwell here mimics the reliance of the despot upon science as an instrument of control — a dark art of conjuring and deception. In Modernity, the scientist acts as both master and servant. He marks out new philosophical territory in the culture and defines future political ends. Yet he also serves the powerful in the role of an advocate and inquisitor, convincing the sceptical to acquiesce against their better senses, and defeating scientific opponents with venomous slurs (“denier”; “liar” etc.) designed to intimidate and exile. In Modernity, graphs and statistics have become not only political instruments, but weapons of coercion and dogmatic enforcement. And this dynamic is all too familiar to us.

What is the remedy to scientism? It lies in the conscious rebuilding of the West’s foundation in the arts. Orwell wagered that the scientists who doubted the wisdom of the atomic project would be those possessing “some acquaintance with history or literature or the arts.” He was surely right. This is the learning which fundamentally civilises us — which connects us to the roots of our tradition, our morality, and to each other. Education needs rebuilt upon a foundation of the classics, literature and philosophy, on top of which the hard sciences should stand as a single pillar.

Scruton told us that one of the foremost duties of the arts lies in helping us to recognise fakery from the genuine article — not only in a work of art, but also in the quality of an idea. Only through the arts can we learn to differentiate wisdom from folly, truth from deception, culture from pseudoscience, and good from evil. It is only through our cultural heritage that scientism can be dethroned and our civilisation regrown.