Scapegoating Science after Deep Sleep
Jordan Peterson's search for someone or something to blame
A Deflection of Faith
Jordan Peterson asked Richard Dawkins a public question.
In his equally serious response1, Dr Dawkins gives three ways in which woke ideology resembles religion, that make good reading. I offer a fourth; the anti-scientific retreat into faith-based philosophy.
The Mutability of Truth
Referring to the George Orwell novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dr Dawkins writes.
… Winston Smith, was eventually persuaded by O’Brien that, if the Party wills it, 2+2 = 5. Winston had earlier found it necessary to stake out his credo. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows”.
“Replying to Jordan Peterson”, The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins
Winston Smith, who worked in the Ministry of Truth (rewriting history in real time), had found something outside the propaganda complex that he could hold to be immutable. This was precisely why the party had to destroy this thought.
It was not simply a matter of forcing Winston Smith to pay lip service to a perversion of arithmetic. He had to be mentally broken so he could no longer understand how it could add up to anything else but five. It’s not that he believes in a falsehood but that the truth has been changed for him.
“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past”
Winston Smith, Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell, 1949
In Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Newspeak, the approved language form is designed to curtail expression and limit what’s possible to think. Compelled speech allows the past, the present and the future, to be altered as needed; the mutability of truth is the mark of totalitarianism that Orwell warned us about.
Rash and Rationality
Religion makes certain things unthinkable for those imprisoned in it’s dogma. The compelled speech that Dr Peterson opposed followed the same template as any religious axioms of truth. As science became heresy, it is unsurprising that the best analogy he could devise for the rashness and irrationality of ‘woke’, was religion.
He follows this up with an oddly convoluted accusation that the humanist movement created post-humanism.
Brief Candles
Science literature showed us that we can find wonder in the unintended beauty of nature and that it is not hopeless or nihilistic to accept that we are perishable human beings. It made clear that the truth is discoverable through objective exploration and humility and most importantly, that the truth is not mutable, even though our interpretation of it is an ongoing process. It was Richard Dawkins more than anyone who gave the public most reason to marvel at biological life, as a vehicle for genetic material and overcoming mortality.
Absolution of the Craven
Meanwhile it was the humanities that failed to manage the expectation that ‘subjective truth’ was just as valuable the empirical. They cowered from correcting the notion that ‘speech is violence’, a phrase that would not be out of place in the Orwellian world of; ‘War is Peace’; ‘Freedom is Slavery’; ‘Ignorance is Strength’.
It was on their watch that academic dialogue descended into mindless angry chants. They made little effort to prevent institutionally induced neurosis from taking over the conversation. Science has become a resource to be cherry picked and the search engine has become an oracle to support dogma.
How is any of this different from a religion that assumes our understanding of existence was fully formed before the clay denting and papyrus drying technologies had been perfected? Does Dr Peterson seriously suggest that Christianity provided a framework for rationalism until science and atheism displaced it?
Christianity in its mostly modern benign form survived by adopting or coopting any pagan traditions that could help it hitchhike around the world and down the generations. Consequently, Christianity is more ‘neopaganist’ than any other Abrahamic religion, so why did Dr Peterson pick that as an example?
Could someone of his intellectual stature be so easily swayed by availability-bias? The answer ‘yes’ is evidently part of the problem. Can the doctrine of the Trinity be credibly called anything other than polytheistic once you get past the ‘doublethink’ of one God in three divine persons? The theological gymnastics changes nothing about this contradiction.
Amongst the ugly history of religions, Christianity did it’s fair share of establishing order through oppression, manipulation and fear but never through rationality. Its stance on science it best typified as consistently getting it wrong. To establish the aspiration to ‘holiness’ it had to create new conceptions of evil and sin. What could be more perverse?
Cultural Contagions
It is true that to understand the history of civilisation and also the present we have to see how religions shaped our societies, through institutions, art and culture. The most plausible case for the importance of religion as artefact of humanity was made by Camille Paglia - an atheist scholar. Yet where were her allies in academia when she was fighting, almost single-handedly, the ‘mal-educated’ within post-modernism?
Infection
It was religion and not science that made Marxism, the template for ideologies beyond the economic, by making them seem plausible by comparison. If ‘woke ideology’ is filling a vacuum it’s not one created by secular humanism but by the failure of religion to explain anything.
Post structuralist concepts were created from a buffet of poorly interpreted ideas which mainstream academia didn’t bother to challenge while it had the chance. Perhaps they reasoned (rightly it so happens) ‘we have believed more ridiculous things than that’.
The infiltration of these ideologies into STEM that Dr Peterson detects (with ‘genuine sorrow’ that somehow manages to seem simultaneously gleeful), came from these ideas becoming endemic in the school system, i.e. via the social sciences. It was there that ground was given without whimper of protest.
Necrosis
I appreciate Dr Peterson’s expertise but at times his views seem barely cogent or lucid. While I persisted through some of the more excruciatingly over-wrought passages in ‘12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos’, I thought, ‘we have to do better than this.’
Accusing atheist-scientists for facilitating post-modernism is a nonsensical deflection. The humanities and social sciences slumbered for over half a century while being devoured by an intellectual necrosis of its own making.