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Scammed Out of Our Humanity?

There are forces and ideologies in society which rob us of our dignity and freedom, of our very humanity. Scientism is one of those forces or perspectives which depletes or blocks a higher humanism. We have to say that it  is not conducive to a holistic or healthy view of humans. Its reductive character has contributed to the devaluing of people through a number of ideologies in the twentieth century, many of which are still in play in the twenty-first century. Dehumanization of persons is the result of treating them in terms of their machineness or their biological being alone.  Scores of books have addressed this topic. In a very devastating sense, modern culture is deprived of some of the richest interpretation of the nature of humanity that history has available.[1]

Is this a wise way to go? E.F. Schumacher captures the problem of scientism for personhood in rather shocking terms.

The Universe is what it is; but he who … limits himself to its lowest sides—to his biological needs, his creature comforts or his accidental encounters—will inevitably ‘attract’ a miserable life. If he can recognize nothing but ‘struggle for survival’ and ‘will to power’ fortified by cunning, his ‘world’ will be one fitting Hobbe’s description of the life of man as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’.[2]

Under the mythology of scientism, people are viewed as sophisticated cogs in the cosmic machinery, or simplified as the most intelligent animals (highest primates). All human characteristics, including mind or soul, are taken as explicable in terms of body (neuron networks, DNA makeup, biochemistry or physiology, or mere physics and chemistry). There is a philosophical reductionism at work, i.e. the higher is explained in terms of the lower, mind in terms of brain, human social behaviour in terms of physics and chemistry, or ant colonies (E.O. Wilson). Humans are appreciated mainly for their instrumental value: earning capacity, socio-political usefulness and their excellencies of giftedness. We saw this mentality lived out in the old Soviet Union, but often it exhibits itself in how people are treated in the West as well.

We briefly note here the distinct lack of wisdom in viewing humans as mere animals. This is the kind of reductionism that leads to alienation, human rights abuse, cynicism, even nihilism, as we see in the oppression by malevolent elites or dictators, or abusive employers of immigrants. The movie The Way Back depicts such brutish conditions of Stalin’s Siberian labour camps–the Gulags about which Solzhenitsyn wrote.[3] Scientism is easily exploited by a political ideology that is disconnected from the moral good; it carries the potential to be used in the most destructive ways on humans and the rest of creation, promoting a nihilistic anti-humanism.[4]

Truth is submitted to power if we withdraw love from social and political reality in the name of science. This is fallacious. Philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas clarifies that there is still a tremendous failure, a crisis in late modernity (amidst its radical individualism) to take responsibility for the Other. Such responsibility is basic to our ethical relations and our civility. It should not be a surprise that we have a crisis of identity if we look to the beasts, our evolutionary ancestors or the machine to find our truest and best selves. Scientism in this sense is the Grinch that stole our full meaning; it has made a caricature of human existence, and put an unnecessary glass ceiling on what it means to flourish as a human race. To paraphrase a famous quote from French scientist Blaise Pascal, “Faith/life has its reasons that scientific reason knows not of.” There is so much more to what it means to be human than that which science can study or demonstrate.

All philosophy is a participation in humanity’s common struggle to attain truth and wisdom. We know well that there can be no freedom without the quest for truth. All forms of terror and oppression involve manipulation, falsehood and deception. This post series is grappling with language deflation re: the nature of being human, and it is searching for fresh, engaging metaphors, in order to map better the plenitude of life. If scientism, as described thus far, is problematic and even destructive in its human and cultural consequences, what constitutes a more positive trajectory, a more holistic outlook? What is possible as a more integrated stance with respect to the wonders of science and the mysteries of the self and the fullest human imagination? What is science’s place in late modernity amidst beauty, goodness and other forms of truth or knowledge? We would like to make suggestions to move the conversation forward in our next post. Perhaps there is something to learn from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

~Gord Carkner