Follow the Scientism

When science becomes an ersatz religion—a closed and exclusionary belief system—we are dealing with scientism.

The following was originally published in Humanum and is reprinted here with permission.

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Because we would all prefer to forget the Covid crisis and move on, the following may have already faded from our collective memory. Only a few years ago Australia rounded up citizens exposed to Covid, including asymptomatic people, and shipped them involuntarily to detention facilities against their will. Videos of Australian quarantine centers made their way onto social media before tech censors, at the behest of governments, dutifully scrubbed them from the internet. Many provincial governors in Australia abused their emergency powers: while not every Australian state chose full-throated authoritarianism, several of them did. Canada likewise built detention facilities for infected persons, and the state of New York fought an ongoing legal battle to do so.

Authoritarian measures during the Covid crisis went beyond forced detainment of suspected or actual cases. The Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPS) in Australia, which provides medical malpractice insurance to all the country’s physicians, published twelve commandments for physicians on their website to avoid disciplinary “notifications”—an Orwellian euphemism for investigations overseen by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency, the governing entity overseeing all physicians. The MIPS Commandment #9 instructed Australian doctors as follows:

Be very careful when using social media (even on your personal pages), when authoring papers or when appearing in interviews. Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. This is particularly relevant in current times. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.

Read that last sentence one more time: “evidence-based material” refers to peer-reviewed scientific papers or other sources of credible medical information. So, if Australian doctors mention findings of a published study which are not consistent with “public health messaging”—i.e., the approved views of the public health bureaucrats in power—these physicians could potentially lose their ability to practice medicine. Notice that this applies also to physicians “authoring papers,” meaning that if a doctor conducts research and his findings contradict “public health messaging,” he’d better think twice before publishing the results.

Likewise, in the U.S., the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), an authority on medical licensure and physician discipline, passed a policy in May 2022 on medical misinformation and disinformation that guides all state medical boards and the nation’s physicians they license. My home state of California took up the FSMB’s suggestion to codify these recommendations in law with Assembly Bill 2098. I traveled to Sacramento to testify against this legislation when it was debated in the State Senate. The law would empower the state medical board to discipline physicians—including revoking their medical licenses—for spreading “misinformation,” defined in the law as statements that contradict the current scientific consensus. Undermining its own central claims, the text of AB 2098 made three statements about Covid that were already outdated by the time I testified, because science constantly evolves. Science relies on evidence, not on consensus, which is why I argued in my testimony:

A physician with a gag order is not a physician you can trust. Advances in science and medicine occur when doctors and scientists challenge conventional thinking or settled opinion. Good science is characterized by conjecture and refutation, lively deliberation, fierce debate, and openness to new data. Thus, fixating any consensus as “unassailable” will stifle medical progress. Frontline physicians challenging conventional thinking played a key role in advancing knowledge of Covid treatments. In medicine, yesterday’s minority opinion often becomes today’s standard of care.

Following my testimony, the Senate committee voted on strict party lines to move the bill to the Senate floor, where it was voted into law. Along with three other physicians, I challenged this law in Federal Court in a case called Hoeg v. Newsom. After the judge in our case issued a preliminary injunction against the law for violating Constitutional rights, the state legislature saw the writing on the wall and repealed it. Nevertheless, in passing this legislation, California lawmakers showed just how far they were willing to go to exercise raw power over the authority of the physician’s clinical judgment.

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How did we get here? The Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who came of age in the 1930s and observed with horror the emergence of Mussolini’s fascist regime in his native country, warned that “the widespread notion that the age of totalitarianisms ended with Hitlerism and Stalinism is completely mistaken.” After witnessing the bloody contest of ideologies in the twentieth century and the apparent triumph of liberalism as that century came to a close, Del Noce soberly observed:

The essential element of totalitarianism, in brief, lies in the refusal to recognize the difference between “brute reality” and “human reality,” so that it becomes possible to describe man, non-metaphorically, as a “raw material” or as a form of “capital.” Today this view, which used to be typical of Communist totalitarianism, has been taken up by its Western alternative, the technological society.[1]

By technological society he did not mean a society characterized by scientific or technological progress, but a society characterized by a view of rationality as purely instrumental. Human reason, on this view, is unable to grasp ideas that go beyond brute empirical facts: we are incapable of discovering transcendent truths. Reason is merely a pragmatic tool, a useful instrument for accomplishing our willful purposes.

Totalitarian ideologies deny that all human beings participate in a shared rationality. We therefore cannot really talk to one another: it is impossible to deliberate or debate civilly in a shared pursuit of truth. Reasoned persuasion has no place. Totalitarian regimes always monopolize what counts as “rational” and therefore what one is permitted to say publicly.

Authorities in such regimes assume that dissenting opinions must be motivated by class interests, or racial characteristics, or gender, or whatever, which dissidents are trying to defend. You don’t think such-and-such because you reasoned logically to that conclusion; you think such-and-such because you are a white, heterosexual, middle-class American male, and so forth. In this way, totalitarians do not persuade or refute their interlocutors with reasoned arguments. They merely impute bad faith to their opponents and refuse to engage in meaningful debate.

The totalitarianisms of the twentieth century were grounded in pseudoscientific ideologies, e.g., the Marxist pseudoscience of economics and history, or the Nazi pseudoscience of race and eugenics. In our own day, the pseudo-scientific ideology that drives societies in a totalitarian direction is scientism, which must be clearly distinguished from science.

Science is a method, or more accurately, a collection of various methods, aimed at systematically investigating observable phenomena in the natural world. Rigorous science is characterized by hypothesis, experiment, testing, interpretation, and ongoing deliberation and debate. Put a group of real scientists in a room together and they will argue endlessly about the salience, significance, and interpretation of data, about the limitations and strengths of various research methodologies, and about the big picture questions. This is because, contrary to how it is often presented to the lay public, science is not an irrefutable body of knowledge. It is always provisional, always fallible, always open to revision.

Scientism is the philosophical claim—which cannot be proven scientifically—that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “Science says…” is likely in the grip of scientism. Genuine scientists don’t talk like this; they begin sentences with phrases like, “The findings of this study suggest,” or “This meta-analysis concluded…”. Scientism, by contrast, is a political, or even a religious, ideology. “It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion,” Georgio Agamben observed, “the thing which people believe that they believe in.”[2] When science becomes an ersatz religion—a closed and exclusionary belief system—we are dealing with scientism.

The characteristic feature of science is warranted uncertainty, which leads to intellectual humility.

The characteristic feature of scientism is unwarranted certainty, which leads to intellectual hubris.

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Del Noce realized that scientism is intrinsically totalitarian, a profound insight of enormous importance for our time. To understand why, consider that scientism and totalitarianism both claim a monopoly on knowledge. The advocate of scientism and the true believer in a totalitarian system both assert that many common-sense notions are simply irrational, unverifiable, unscientific, and therefore outside the scope of what can be said publicly. Antigone’s claim, “I have a duty, inscribed indelibly on the human heart, to bury my dead brother” is not a scientific statement; therefore, according to the ideology of scientism, it is just meaningless nonsense. All moral or metaphysical claims are specifically excluded because they cannot be verified by the methods of science or established by the reigning pseudo-scientific totalitarian ideology. In A Guide for the Perplexed, E.F. Schumacher captures this move brilliantly, describing it as a “methodological aversion to higher levels of significance.”[3]

Of course, the forced exclusion of moral, metaphysical, or religious claims is not a conclusion of science, but an unprovable philosophical premise of scientism. The assertion that science is the only valid form of knowledge is itself a metaphysical claim, smuggled in quietly through the backdoor. Scientism needs to hide this self-refuting fact from itself, so it is necessarily mendacious: dishonesty is baked into the system, and various forms of irrationalism follow. Because scientism cannot establish itself through rational argument, it relies instead on three tools to advance: brute force, defamation of critics, and the promise of future happiness. Incidentally, these are the same tools deployed by all totalitarian systems.

To hide its own internal contradiction from view, the self-refuting premise of scientism—that science is the only valid form of knowledge—is rarely stated explicitly. Scientism is instead implicitly assumed, its conclusions repeatedly asserted as propaganda, until this ideology simply becomes the air we breathe. Careful policing of public discourse admits only evidence supposedly supported by “science,” and this atmosphere is rigorously enforced. As we experienced during the Covid crisis, qualitative (e.g., familial, spiritual) goods were repeatedly sacrificed to quantitative (e.g., biological, medical) goods, even when the former were real and the latter only theoretical. This is the fruit of scientism, which turns our scale of values and priorities upside-down.

It would be hard to find a more effective ideological tool to impose a totalitarian system than by appealing to “science” or “experts” and thereby claiming a monopoly on knowledge and rationality. Those in power can readily choose which scientific experts they endorse and which they silence. This allows politicians to defer inescapably political judgments to “experts,” thus abdicating their own responsibility. One’s ideological opponents are hamstrung, their opinions excluded as “unscientific,” and their public voice silenced—all without the trouble of maintaining a regime of brute force and physical violence. Defamation and exclusion from public discourse works just as effectively. Those in power maintain a monopoly on what counts as Rationality (or Science); they do not bother talking to or debating the [fill-in-the-blank stigmatized group] “bourgeois,” “Jew,” “unvaccinated,” “unmasked,” “anti-science,” “Covid-denier,” etc.

Repressive social conformity is thus achieved without resorting to concentration camps, gulags, Gestapo, KGB, or openly despotic tyrants. Instead, dissenters are confined to a moral ghetto through censorship and slander. Recalcitrant individuals are placed outside the purview of polite society and excluded from enlightened conversation. The political theorist Eric Voegelin observed the essence of totalitarianism is simply that certain questions are forbidden.[4] The prohibition against asking questions is a deliberately and skillfully elaborated obstruction of reason in a totalitarian system. If one asks inconvenient questions—“Do we really need to continue locking down?” or “Are we sure these vaccines are safe and effective?” or “Why has the promised utopia not yet arrived?”—this will not spur reasoned discussion or civil debate. Instead, one will simply be accused of being a pandemic denier, wanting to kill grandma, being anti-science, or of placing oneself on the “wrong side of history.”'

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We can now appreciate why Del Noce claimed that a technocratic society grounded in scientism is totalitarian, though not obviously authoritarian in the sense of openly violent forms of repression. In a technocratic society, one ends up in a moral concentration camp if one is not on board with the pseudo-science du jour, the ideological trend of the moment. Whatever questions, concerns, or objections one might raise—whether philosophical, religious, ethical, or simply a different interpretation of scientific evidence—need not be considered.

Scientism is a totalitarianism of disintegration before it is a totalitarianism of domination. Recall that lockdowns and social distancing during Covid, with their inevitable social isolation leading to profound loneliness, necessarily preceded vaccine mandates and passports, when the repressive regime really tipped its hand. Each of these measures relied on exceptionally sloppy data presented publicly as the only authoritative interpretation of science. In most instances, the pretense of scientific rigor was not even required.

In a scientistic-technocratic regime, the naked individual—reduced to “bare biological life,” cut off from other people and from anything transcendent—becomes completely dependent on society. The individual, reduced to a free-floating, untethered, and uprooted social atom, is more easily manipulated than a person with deep social and familial ties. Del Noce made the startling claim that scientism is even more opposed to tradition than communism, because in Marxist ideology we still find messianic and biblical archetypes dimly represented in the promise of a future utopia.[5] By contrast, “scientistic anti-traditionalism can express itself only by dissolving the ‘fatherlands’ where it was born.”

This process leaves the entire field of human life wide open to domination by global corporations and their suborned political agents. In this global non-society, individuals are radically uprooted and instrumentalized. The ultimate result, in the last analysis, is pure nihilism: “After the negation of every possible authority of values, all that is left is pure total negativism, and the will for something so indeterminate that it is close to ‘nothing,’” in del Noce’s bleak description.[6] This is clearly a society suited neither to a meaningful human life nor to social harmony.

The technocratic society, with scientism as its public theology, is not the inevitable consequence of scientific advance or technological progress. The problem is not science, but the mischaracterization of science as the only valid authority, the enthronement of science as the exclusive reigning principle for all knowledge and for all of society. This ideology rests upon a particular interpretation of contemporary history implicit in scientism’s founding myth. It is not the pursuit of science or technology as such, but a myth of progress via radical rupture with the past, that lies at the root of our technocratic society and its totalitarian threat.

Del Noce described this myth as follows: “What motivates the criticism of tradition and all its consequences is the millennialist idea of a sharp break in history leading to a radically new type of civilization.”[7] Scientism is founded on a revolutionary utopian dream that destroys everything which came before in preparation for a totally different future. This interpretation of contemporary history began to take hold in Western countries in the decades following the Second World War; but as I’ve suggested here, the idea accelerated dramatically during the Covid crisis.

A genuine historical awareness allows us to question the idols of our scientistic-technocratic society. This non-society has become focused exclusively on purely material wellbeing, understood as the increase of vitality and the preservation of bare biological life. However, there is nothing “scientific” about enshrining raw vitality and bare life as our highest goods, at the expense of all other human and spiritual goods. Likewise, there is nothing “scientific,” much less rational, about ignoring such universal human goods as family, friendship, community, knowledge, beauty, worship, devotion, virtue, and God.

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[1] Augusto del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 232.

[2] Georgio Agamben, Where Are We Now: The Pandemic as Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), 49.

[3] E. F. Schumacher, A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 44.

[4] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, Charles R Walgreen Foundation Lectures (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1952).

[5] Augusto del Noce, The Crisis of Modernity, 90.

[6] Augusto del Noce, The Age of Secularization, trans. Carlo Lancellotti (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2017), 29.

[7] Ibid., 85.