Having brought up science earlier, it seems reasonable to choose this time to address a prevalent understanding: that the questions of ethics, human interaction, etc. are all definable and resolvable in a scientific manner. Indeed if we look at harmful ideologies developed over the past 150 or so years, we see the attempts to put a "scientific" footing at the basis of these new ideologies.
The first is Marxism. Marx was the first social scientist, and I cannot count the numbers of times I had been told (by Marxists) that Marxism was based in the science of the historical dielectic. The second is strong nationalism: one can see the attempt to understand it as science in "the Genealogy of Morals" by Friedrich Nietzsche. (By strong nationalism I mean the understanding of a nation as a people that is identifiable by shared biology.) The third is Social Darwinism, which has been used as an excuse for all sorts of selfish behavior. With a better understanding of evolution, Social Darwinism in its stark simple, initial form, has been refuted. But, there are still attempts to reduce morality to that which is evolutionarily favorable. It is possible to define morality that way (as it would be possible to define morality many different ways), but it would be a different set of morals than what is commonly accepted by Western Society. For example, Genghis Khan would need to be considered the most moral man in history, since 10% of the Chinese have his gene marker. Colonialism, conquering and rape would be considered moral. An Englishman dying to save the lives of 100 children from Africa or Asia would be considered immoral by this definition. The purpose of science is to model the empirical. Better, worse, good, bad, should, shouldn't are not part of scientific models. The fact that the position of electrons in an atom is slightly affected by mixing between electromagnetic forces and weak forces is neither good nor bad: it simply is a fact that helped verify the standard model. Or, as another example, labeling the Permian-Triassic extinction as either good or bad adds nothing to the science of evolution theory. The models have no more predictive power if we add moral judgments to them. Science is inherently amoral, as is arithmetic. It is not teleological in nature. It simply describes observables. So, when it comes to ideologies, we cannot simply replace them with reason and science. They operate in such different spheres, that action is not possible. (Having said that, I agree that people have rejected the results of science and have done science poorly for ideological reasons, but that is a fact that can be separated from the point I'm making in this post). The next area of exploration is something that I think is associated with ideology, although not the same the same thing. That is the ideals of a person: that set of beliefs/axioms that they use to make judgments. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
