Ed wrote:
EW> I said that I'd send along more comments on the paper that you and
EW> Mike Hollinshead put together for the commissioin investigating
EW> the residential school system. [1] You say: Economic progress
EW> (embodying linear time) and the scientific method are the modern
EW> European's mythology. They tell him everything which is important
EW> to know about the cosmos and his place within it. That is a
EW> mythology. Unfortunately, modern Europeans do not believe they
EW> have myths and a mythology. Those are things the ancient Greeks
EW> and Aboriginals have They are utterly convinced they do not have
EW> one. That creates a huge problem for the future. How do you get
EW> people to change something they do not believe exists?
EW>
EW> Personally, I don't like the idea of the scientific method being
EW> thought of as part of European mythology. I'd argue that it
EW> belongs to everybody, that everybody can contribute to it, and
EW> that it deals with reality and is not therefore myth.
One thing that we'uns erudite debaters forget (or overlook in a spasm
of Political Correctness) is this: A large fraction of the public is
stupid. An even greater fraction is ignorant. Many of the latter
category are non-stupid and some have the credentials of extensive
education.
The ignorant are not, typically, ignorant of everything because, if
not bone stupid, they learn to survive where they find themselves and
often excel at a trade, craft or profession. But a majority of the
population is ignorant of science. [2] They are ignorant of the
scientific method and of the basics of the hard sciences. An example
occurs in the Wired magazine article, "Welcome to Armageddon, USA",
about Picher, Oklahoma that Ray recently circulated:
Outside Garner's little colony, others have found their own ways
to survive. Fred Von Moss, a 64-year- old former school custodial
supervisor who still remembers the boomtown days, has rigged a
makeshift security system--a motion-sensitive light, two dogs,
and a shotgun full of birdshot. Around 1988, he and his wife,
Marsha, bought a ranch house here just before they got married,
and they won't leave. She keeps a small garden with tomatoes and
zucchini and okra, and he picks wild asparagus from around the
edges of the chat piles, hunts quail and duck, and fishes for
bass in nearby rivers. Both say they figure that cooking or
freezing will eliminate any toxins.
It's elementary science fact that freezing & cooking don't detoxify
heavy metals. This sort of ignorance is depressingly widespread, not
just the manifestation of neurological damage occurring in Picher.
So science and the scientific method are not, themselves, myth. What
does qualify as myth is what is written, said and done "under color of
science". Science has been a pop subject for over a century.
Electrification entered electricity into the lists as The Secret Power
of the Universe. Invisible X-rays led to all kinds of
mysto-scientific rays and you can still find Q-ray bracelets in
(putatively) respectable pharmacies. After Einstein's publication on
relativity, the word was, so to speak, on every tongue. After the
Manhattan Project, there were Atomic Cafes and Atomic
$WHATEVERS. Better living through chemistry. Electronic brains to
whom [sic] were addressed the question, "Is there a God?. [3] DNA and
the secret of life. Finally, we have quantum everything. Put the
quoted phrase "quantum x" into google, substituting any one of your
ten favorite nouns for 'x' and you get a hit on most of them. [4]
As a component of popular culture, science is a large myth construct.
Because there are practitioners whose credentials involve years of
study and multiple advanced degrees, you might even call it -- the
popular embodiment science -- a religion, a religion made manifest in
its miracles, for prosthetic ceramic hips and cell phones work
miraculously. Some people, those who are put off by ex cathedra
pronouncements that can't be explained or defended in a few words or
pages of commonplace words, consequently dismiss science as *just*
another religion or myth system. Perhaps the epitome of the latter
hostile (scornful?) reaction is the PoMo movement that wants to boil
the entire universe of discourse (and tangible reality along with it)
to a universal semantic quibble. Everything is metaphor, including
this one. [5]
People generally hate uncertainty and ambiguity. They like to know
they're doing the best they can. Schumacher wrote that "When people
ask for education,....what they really are looking for is ideas that
would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them."
Most religion offers surcease from hateful ambiguity. So does the
religion of science, albeit a "science" no better understood in detail
than other myth structures. And you don't have to restrict your diet,
go to confession or wear special clothes to believe in science.
A problem arises in that science -- real, methodical science -- offers
*only* ambiguity. No answer is final. Some "facts" are established
beyond doubt -- that iron is needed for healthy human blood, that
there are only 92 naturally occurring elemental substances -- but in
general, uncertainty is the basic state of science. It's only the pop
version, the version explainable to someone who has never learned the
basic principles, that offers certainty.
Worse than the clathrosynclastic coprocephaly of the PoMos, however,
are the putative sciences that aren't sciences at all, the
intellectual pursuits suffering from physics envy. B. F. Skinner
proclaimed that there was no such thing as an "inner state" of mind;
there was only observable behavior. And then he had the hubris to
call what he did a science. [6] Economics as it is practiced is
(AFAICT) based on numerous assumptions, many of which are false.
Such intellectual (or practical) pursuits as economics, political
"science" and behavioral psychology are not intrinsically wrongheaded
but they project a specious aura of scientific certainty that not only
deludes the stupid and the ignorant but, as well, feeds back onto their
practitioners a stream of self-confirming certainty.
All that is not to say that such non-science pursuits will not evolve
(or chance upon) useful strategies or even valid truths.
Some time ago, Arthur wrote:
AC> I like to define economics as the "allocation of scarce resources
AC> among competing uses".
Which does not a science make.
AC> I think this is still a valid way to see it but when it comes to
AC> operationalizing this within any particular system then we quickly
AC> see why economics used to be called political economy ...and
AC> should still have that name. Perhaps then we will be more
AC> realistic as to what it can or cannot do.
Yes. Allocation of scarce resources is a matter, variously, of
ethics, practicality, power, negotiation, law, subterfuge, kindness
and so on. There is no experimentally demonstrable correct answer.
An example of (what I take to be) a scientifically defensible proposal
by economics is the *concept* (not the embodiment in the Real World)
of the market. Like evolution, the market represents a distributed
(as opposed to a centralized) system where decisions are made locally
or local rules obeyed. In non-exceptional circumstances, there is no
single point of (system-wide) failure. Local failures are replaced by
the exfoliation of local successes. In addition to the salient
example of natural evolution, research, both serious and ludic, with
cellular automata, show that such systems can exhibit stability,
emergent properties of interest and so on.
But a contradiction arises when (as Arthur implies) "when it comes to
operationalizing [market principles] within any particular system".
We don't want to live in a society (or, for that matter, in a world)
where whole populations live with destitution, endemic disease,
ubiquitous violence, slavery or continual fear. But that is the
natural outcome of "the market" because "the market" is an embodiment
of just such a cellular automaton. Unmitigated market economics
implies social Darwinism.
Sanwichman wrote:
1. A "new economic paradigm" would be like getting a dead man a new
pair of shoes.
2. The Hell's Angels need a new code of personal conduct.
and in another venue,
Besides this charade of calling for a new paradigm gets pretty tired
after a while. WHICH new paradigm?
Kuhn's "new paradigm" was that of scientific understanding, compelled
by new evidence and permitted by the eventual demise of an old guard
who refused to accept it. [7] That doesn't work so well in the
humanities where ambiguities and conflicts always emerge from the
human condition.
Circa 1970, Schumacher wrote,
The modern economy is propelled by a frenzy of greed and indulges
in an orgy of envy and these are not accidental features but the
very causes if its expansionist success....If human vices such as
greed and envy are systematically cultivated, the inevitable
result us nothing less than the collapse of intelligence. If
whole societies become infected by these vices, they may indeed
achieve astonishing things but the become increasingly incapable
of solving the most elementary problems of everyday existence.
Make everyone stupid, eh? Sounds like a case of "The Hell's Angels
need a new code of personal conduct" to me. Sandwichman wrote, "What
is needed is a different metaphysics" and Schumacher wrote, "The task
of our generation, I have no doubt, is one of metaphysical
reconstruction."
I'm weak on metaphysics. I tilt toward the positivist notion that
metaphysics -- the nature of things beyond the facts of their physical
existence and interaction -- is a pointless pursuit. But I see no
conflict between the notion that mind is an emergent property of brain
and the long-standing notions of human virtue. You know that you are
you. From other capabilities of mind, we all infer a similar
personhood in other people. "We hold these truths to be
self-evident..." doesn't need metaphysics.
But the Hell's Angels who naturally aggregate and gravitate to
positions of power in a social structure that intentionally promotes
and rewards "a frenzy of greed and indulges in an orgy of envy"
certainly need a new *something* and you can call it metaphysics if
you like.
I better stop here.
- Mike
[1] I try to archive everything from FW but I seem to have let this
one slip away, so I can't precisely verify what Ed is (indirectly?)
quoting here.Theory of the No-Good Shit
[2] I'm guessing here, based on my own observation and based on my own
experience. I have a degree in chemistry, have worked in
biochemistry and, over the last 50 years, have read, albeit
somewhat haphazardly, quite a bit of fairly hard-core technical
stuff, yet I find myself often unable to evaluate "scientific"
claims.
[3] Answer, after dimming the lights over three states for a hour:
"Now....there....is."
[4] Yes, 12,000 hits for "quantum sex". You had to ask....
[5] See: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, Alan D. Sokal, Social Text
#46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996).
[6] Ergo, Skinner had no ideas. ;-)
[7] Circa 1967, I went to a lecture by J. Tuzo Wilson on continental
drift. My date was a recent Smith grad in geology. She thought
he was a good speaker but simply spurned the evidence he presented
and its implications. The old guard isn't always that old, just
comfortably free of ambiguity and uncertainty. (She's now an
Anglican rector.)
