Scientism: America’s State Religion

As our nation finds itself wracked by violence and threatened with regime failure, questions of authority become ever more urgent. We believe authority in a free society rests with the people and their representatives, and we abhor the theft of that authority by “experts” from our bureaucratic ruling classes. We present this essay to help expose and articulate one important way in which authority has been stolen from the people and given over to unelected dictators in the name of “Science.”—Eds.

Edward Feser 8/25/2020

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994) was the enfant terrible of late 20th-century philosophy of science. He delighted in mischief, juxtaposing vast knowledge of science and its history with antics like egging on creationists, playing devil’s advocate for astrology, and calling for the “separation of science and state.”

He has nevertheless secured a place in the canon, because he is brilliant, extremely well-read, and funny—and his views, when correctly understood, are important and challenging. No doubt it helps that he is a man of the Left, despite saying things that were often criticized for giving aid and comfort to the religious Right.

Feyerabend was once labeled “the worst enemy of science” by the prestigious journal Nature. But even a casual reader can see that what Feyerabend actually opposed was scientism, the transformation of science into an ideology and of its practitioners into a secular priesthood.

“I think very highly of science,” he once wrote, “but I think very little of experts.” In his view, scientists too often made of science a “tyranny,” claiming rights over the direction of public policy shared by no other interest group in a democratic society. Through the education system, they impose assent to useful but fallible and limited theoretical abstractions as if they were obligatory dogmas.
Were he alive today, what would the author of “How to Defend Society Against Science” think of recent events? Would he have joined in the shrill denunciation of all skepticism about a lockdown that entailed destroying the jobs and life savings of millions of ordinary working people? Would he have been impressed by the “objectivity” of expert advice that was stridently insisted upon one minute, then suddenly abandoned when doing so became politically expedient? To ask these questions is to answer them.

The main sources for Feyerabend’s views on the proper role of science in a pluralistic democracy are his book Science in a Free Society (1978) and several essays in the third volume of his collected Philosophical Papers. There are three main components to his argument.

First: science as an institution, and liberalism as its house philosophy, have taken over the role that the Church and its theology played in medieval society.

Second: the case for this takeover rests on the purported superiority of the methods and results of science, but crumbles on close inspection.

Third: when consistently applied, the most powerful expression of the liberal idea—John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty—tells against rather than in favor of the hegemony of scientism. Let’s consider these themes in turn.

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