Scientism and an Age of Progress

I. Faith in Science

1. Auguste Comte and Logical Positivism
According to Comte, History has moved in three phases (note the magic 3s):
THEOLOGICAL: when people looked to God or the gods for explanations
METAPHYSICAL: when people looked to philosophy for explanations
SCIENTIFIC: the final phase, when people turn to the "logical" and "positive" explanations provided by science

2. Comte included what he called the Social Sciences in this.
Sociology and the other sciences would lead mankind away from the fuzzy and confusing ages of religion and philosophy, and into the clear truth, peace and prosperity created by Science

3. "Scientism": by the last half of the 19th century the man in the street believed that Science would provide the answers to all of life's questions. The intellectual version of "realpolitik" - problems will not be solved by liberalism or by nationalism, but by the clear truths of science.

4. What people hoped would disappear with the advent of Scientific Society: "infanticide, polygamy, legal prostitution, capricious divorce, sanguinary and immoral games, torture, caste, and slavery."

II. Why Trust Science?

1. Philosophers, politicians, and priests seemed to have failed.

2. Industry had obviously transformed the world almost overnight, providing not only wealth and power, but also comfort and entertainment.

3. Science delivered the goods: telephones; telegraphs; fertilizers; dyes; food flavorings; new fabrics; electricity; the internal combustion engine; radio, etc, etc.

4. Medical science was especially impressive:
PASTEUR discovered the cause of disease - germs - and that allowed doctors to prevent as well as treat disease (sterilize milk; clean up operating theaters; quarantine infectious cases)
ROENTGEN invented a way of looking inside people without cutting them open: the X ray
ASPERIN invented by a Frenchman in 1853, and re-invented by a German chemist in 1893; the first practical pain-killer whose effects still amaze us (ie, treatment for heart attacks)
SEDATIVES, or BARBITUATES first developed by the German Baeyer in the 1860s, a mixture of malic acid from apples, and urea from human urine; named after a waitress named Barbara, who provided the second ingredient.
CONTACT LENSES invented in Switzerland in 1887
ANTI-PERSPERANT invented in America in 1888, under the brand name of Mum
LISTERINE, an antiseptic invented by Dr Lister, a colleague of Pasteur

III. Social Sciences

1. Beginning of idea of "social sciences" - that is, that human behavior could be studied like a machine, and that "models" could be made to solve all social problems.

2. "Behaviorism" -

1. Russian Pavlov studied behavior, and decided that it was all a matter of "conditioned reflexes" - in Pavlov's famous experiment, he trained dogs to associate the sound of a bell with being fed; after a while, they would start to salivate just at the sound of the bell, with no food present.
2. American theorist Skinner taught that all behavior, including human behavior, is simply the result of people reacting to "conditioned reflexes"; theory was and remains very influential in education

IV. Darwin (1809 - 1882) and the Theory of Evolution

1. Charles Darwin, grandson of Erasmus Darwin who proposed a sort of evolution theory in the 18th century, published two works that questioned the long-accepted theory that life was created by God and has not changed since it was created. Instead, he suggested that man, and life itself, was the result of the random action of physical matter.

2. In 1859, after traveling to the Galapagos islands with a naval scientific survey ship, The Beagle, he published The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.

1. This book argues that everything changes all of the time. Species, too, change by means of two mechanisms:
Natural Selection (out of a grab-bag of possible qualities, mating individuals will be attracted to those that ensure survival)
Survival of the Fittest (Nature, "red in tooth and claw", is a constant struggle in which only the fittest survive to pass on their characteristics to the next generation)
2. He based this theory on his observations of variations among animals on the Galapagos islands, most notably finches (birds).
3. In 1871, he published The Descent of Man, which added humanity to the theory.

3. Objections to Darwin's theory:

1. Although the vast majority of biologists still consider evolution to be a fact, scientists from other fields such as Information Theory and Physics have begun to question some of its assumptions.
2. Atheist Fred Hoyle (astronomer) has said that the likelihood of life developing by a random process is on the same order of probability as the likelihood that a typhoon could blow through a junkyard and construct a 707 jet aircraft. (He thinks spacemen did it.)
3. Evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest would require unimaginably vast spans of time if were possible at all: almost all mutations are fatal, and of those that are not, most have little or no survival value.
4. Organisms are much more complex than Darwin realized. Many organs, such as they eye, have no survival value at all until they are complete.
5. Neo-Darwinists, which retaining the idea of evolution, have greatly modified Darwin's original theory.
6. Some, who accept micro-evolution (minor changes within a species), continue to doubt macro-evolution (major changes from one species to another)
6. While most religious groups have agreed that evolution itself does not contradict the idea of creation (it mere alters the way in which it was accomplished), others reject it on the grounds that it contradicts the Bible, and makes man an accidental part of nature rather than a special creature.

4. Social Impact of Darwin's theory

1. "Progress" was in the air; Darwin, like Marx and Freud, took ideas that people had had before and made them "scientific"
2. A new view of Nature developed - rather than the Romantic concept of a benevolent Nature, people began to see it as an enemy, "red in tooth and claw" ("God may love you; Mother Nature does not."
3. Social Darwinism preached that only the fittest humans should survive; helping the weak and unproductive simply holds the human race back. This also could take the form of Nationalist Darwinism - only the strongest and most advanced races should survive; the weak, the "backward," the primitive, should be eradicated.
4. An essay contest sponsored by the arms manufacturer, Krups, was won by a man who wrote that "laws are simply a way of the weak undermining the natural right of the strong to dominate society:
5. Eugenics, the "science" of human breeding, became very popular (sterilizing "unfit" persons to prevent their breeding, etc). Early proponents of BIRTH CONTROL (such as Margaret Sanger) argued that this should be used to keep poor, unintelligent, or racially inferior persons from having children. Only after the disaster of Hitler and Nazi eugenics did this go somewhat out of fashion.