At Quillette Keith E. Stanovich worries about the "Social Science Monoculture." The monoculture's latest wizard wheeze is "faith in science" questionnaires. Only trouble is that the way you score high on these tests is by parroting the liberal line on everything.
On about the same day over at UnHerd Tom Chivers reviews a book from a Harvard professor on trying to convince science deniers -- you know who they are -- that they are wrong in "How not to talk to a science denier."
Hey, maybe the only common thing about these science deniers is that they don't want to take their science from conceited puffed-up liberals.
But I want to know what is wrong with these liberals that they think that their saving faith is the only saving faith, indeed the only truth.
Actually, we know. It was all told to us years ago by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Despite all their talk about experiments and reason and logic, real scientists act like any other human group: they don't like people that rock the boat and don't go with the program. So, Kuhn writes, scientific revolutions only succeed when the old generation dies off. In other words, the old science is good enough for the old generation.
In a sense every science is a church of its current members. It has an orthodoxy that all sensible church members believe. And the members are not too kind with heresies and the heretics that advance them.
Of course, this monoculture can condense into a war strategy, such as "the long march through the institutions" that La Wik attributes to Sixties activist Rudi Dutschke (I thought it was Antonio Gramsci).
What ties all these world views together is the notion that "we" know the truth, the real meaning of "life, the universe and everything." And it is our sacred duty to preach that truth throughout the world and banish the Evil One from the face of the Earth.
No we don't!
If you remember, one of the Temptations of Christ was when Satan took "him up to an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them." And the point is that all that power and all that glory counts for nothing, for less than nothing.
But in every human burns a fierce flame that, if only he or she had the power they could force the world to "get sorted." And everyone would live happily ever after.
No it won't!
Monocultures don't work!
Why? Because the way the world works is by adaptation, by fixing things that go wrong, because even "The best laid plans o' Mice an' Men / Gang aft agley." The world does not work by implementing a prophecy, just like the prophet imagined it.
So if you are an academic department and all the professors are lefty liberals and there is no room for a conservative, then your scholarship will shrivel into counting the number of victims on a pinhead.
If you are science researchers and anyone that disagrees with you is a "science denier" then the work you do is probably rubbish. Because even a science denier can probably point to a problem or two in your magnificent theory.
And when it comes to morality and politics, my reductive Three Peoples theory shows, as clearly as can be, that the different kinds of people in the world need, and naturally turn to, different religions and different politics. And if one group of people forces their religion and their politics on the rest of society, then they are going to Make Things Worse -- for the rest of the world and even for themselves.
It is telling that the two most obvious monocultures are those of a strict religion and of an army. What is telling is that in these strict hierarchical structures the folks at the tip of the spear are expected to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the ultimate, inevitable victory. In other words, it is all about the agenda of the Chief Priest or the General-in-chief. And the job of the lesser mortals is to sacrifice themselves for the good of the order.
The whole point of our American system is precisely to break up all this: to limit government by dividing it into three branches; to limit moral hegemony by separation of church and state. And indeed to separate the political sector from the economic sector from the moral/cultural sector as envisaged by Michael Novak in what I call the Greater Separation of Powers.
Why? Because nobody knows the real, ultimate, God-spoken meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" and anyone that forces the rest of the world to bow to their vision of the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" will only build a pile of skulls, butcher's bill to follow.
It's fascinating that after a century of mammoth world wars and slave states, our best and brightest still don't get it.
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