Candide

           This is an extract from an essay I wrote two years ago about whether science is the best way of finding things out. I was fifteen so some of the sentences are very flowery, and there are some dodgy simplifications. But I think its quite a funny read. There is also a very dismissive section on postmodernism I might post later.

“The supremacy of science was first proclaimed by the 19^th century positivists. Their leader Auguste Comte explained that positivists “regard all phenomena as subjected to invariable natural law.” Mankind had a duty “to pursue an accurate discovery of these laws, with a view to reducing them to the smallest possible number.” Comte’s heirs are those modern physicists searching for a Theory of Everything. They want to know why and how we and the universe exist. Stephen Hawking tells us that “if we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason – for then we would know the mind of God.” Yet is the quest for a final and universal explanation merely a naïve but universal delusion?

            Science arises from the need within the human spirit to explain why. Being conscious of our own existence is what divides us from the animals. Sartre was wrong – our existence does not precede our essence; our essence is the fact we are aware we exist. Comte charted the progress of human history as a gradual unravelling of this existential riddle. In the beginning, there was myth. It rained because the Sky-God was satisfied with his seven sacrificed virgins. Then Greeks, Scholastics and last-but-not-least Descartes believed that reason alone was the key to understanding. They succeeded in understanding the logically-consistent world they’d created inside their heads but not the big wide world outside. Following the failure of rational philosophy, the scientific or “positive” view was triumphant: typically, one posits a hypothesis and then tests it empirically in order to either prove or disprove.

            Positivism sees the scientific method as the end-product of human progress. But both myth and reason are born of the self-same instinct to explain. What, therefore, makes men like Comte and Hawking think science supreme? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, science is “the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment.”  An older meaning of science, found in Aristotle, is that of a reliable body of knowledge that can be logically and rationally explained. The crucial difference between the two definitions is that the experiment lies at the heart of modern science. A hypothesis is only true once proved experimentally and published in a journal. Then it becomes a theory and is free to be disproved by experiment at any time and by anyone. Popper called this “falsifiability” which has since been taken up by Richard Dawkins among others as the paramount reason for the supremacy of science.

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We had a talk from a Jesuit priest in school today. He seemed like a guy who had led an interesting life, working in India etc, and engaged in a bit of banker bashing, which is always fun. There was one thing he said that irked me, however. He talked about leadership, classifying leadership into three different ‘forces’ by virtue of the goal or product of that form of leadership:

Politics … Power

Economics/Banking … Wealth

Religion … Redemption

I accept that political leadership tends to be motivated by the desire for power - not always a bad thing, Martin Luther King wanted the power to change the status of black people in America, even most career-politicians want power in order to achieve their aims, whether they be conservative, or social-democratic. Power for its own sake, or power such that history remembers you is, I think, a very special kind of motivation, which drives only very special leaders, such as Napoleon. Although even Tony Blair seemed to want power in order to build himself a legacy.

Whether bankers are wholly motivated by greed, I don’t know. Leaders in the world of finance, I suggest, get so rich that they reach the stage that wealth itself is not a force, merely the praise and reputation gained by accruing wealth. Its easy to bash money-makers but I guess many economists really do want to improve the lot of the poor. I mean if they just wanted personal wealth these economists wouldnt work for NGOs would they? Its easy for a Jesuit to chastize people for valuing the material but for much of the devoloping world, including where the order operates, prosperity means improving economic conditions. Fr Colin in Equador for instance has dealt with the material welfare of his parish because, for 40,000 dirtpoor shanty-dwellers, that is the most important thing!

The obvious thing to say is that many religious leaders are not driven by redemption or a desire to help but by base human desires. We all know this so I’m not gonna dwell on it. Moral leadership as undoubtedly shown by the likes of Jesus or the Buddha is also shown by, say, a civil rights leader like Martin Luther King. Even the rascal Tony Blair saw himself as being driven by a desire to better the world, morally not just materially, as do many social conservatives in the current government. Finally, moral leadership can be part-and-parcel of business too - in philanthropy, if we don’t take too cynical a view. 

The point I’m trying to make is that the priests’ three-point schema for leadership was dreadfully oversimpified. In my opinion, leaders of politicis, economics and religion are all of the same ilk - leaders of conviction and rhetoric. I propose we see leadership as being of two kinds:

Politics, Economic, Religion, etc: lead you

Science: lead you to truth

In my opinion politics, economics and religion produce leaders who lead you because they want you to follow them - these spheres of life are a mechanism for producing leaders. What they lead you too is their goal, whether it be power, wealth, redemption, even death. They require leaders in order to move, not progress, just move. The cult of the leader blinds us to the veracity of the leader’s claims, we take them on authority. There is no real mechanism for checking the leadership of the leader. This does not mean that they are wrong or evil, merely false - Gandhi was of the opinion India deserved independence, his was value judgement, which he persuaded others to believe. Value-judgements are false in the sense of being unchecked … historical processes like politics or economics only happen once: we cannot rerun the experiment to see what would have happened had Gandhi not been a peace activist, history provides no controls. History is dependent on how it is led - the leaders cannot thus then use their own unfolding history (future) to turn their value-judgements into truths. The curious circularity of this form of leadership is what leaves it false.

Conversely, science progresses, improves, is led forward, but is not itself led by anything. Pioneers certainly lead the way, open up new areas of inquiry, say when Crick and Watson discovered the genetic code. But the story of molecular genetics has not been one of following Crick and Watson but of overtaking and going beyond them. When a scientific discovery is made, when someone leads their field, other scientists do not wait in an orderly queue behind them waiting to see what happens next - instead they jump ahead and start exploring the world opened up by the discovery. What is leading them to do this? Their own curiosity. But curiosity alone does not lead the progress of science - what leads the prohress of science is science itself. Science as a process - hypothesis-generation, experimental testing, data analysis, peer review - functions as a kind of blind algorithm to progress. Through the curious scientists, science is furthered as a whole body of knowledge, moving forward with each cycle of the algorithm. So while politics, economics and history are led by falsehood, science itself leads forward into truth. Science is always eating away at mystery to gain truth and constantly attacking istelf with the algorithm to make sure it is truth. The kind of leadership which suffuses politics, economics and religion is a barrier to this process as it usurps it for its own goals, masking truth with opinion, ideology and value-judgement - we see how empirically-testable models of economics become justification for the rule of various leaders. When the models fell apart as in 2008 rather than face the algorithm many of the leaders used their influence to hide the truth. But the court of public opinion which, of all things fuels leaders, turned against them, revealing the one truth-seeking method of politics, economics and religion - a leader’s success or failure.

We see then how what leads science forward is the fact it is leaderless. I believe that politics, economics and religion are the enemies of science:

politics, economics, religion etc: led by lies

science: leads to truth

Leaders ply falsehood, do science - question them!