THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE.

"The science" and "Our democracy" have become incantations, more akin to the phrases invoked to denounce heretics than to concepts suggesting room for active contestation.  That's not going to end well.

Findings that fall into the wrong hands must be renounced. Offensive knowledge is to be buried. Truth is contingent on the identity of the person who finds it. The ascendant strain of thought today amounts to an attack on reason, rationality, and empiricism. An organized, well-funded, fiercely defended Disenlightenment is unfolding, and some of its most engaged proponents are explicit about their desire to demolish a 300-year tradition: In Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, the authors note that “unlike traditional civil rights discourse, which stresses incrementalism and step-by-step progress, critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, Enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Undoing the Enlightenment is an astonishingly bold undertaking that runs so contrary to centuries of progress in learning that it requires the frenzy of a guilt-wracked cult to sustain it. The Disenlightenment is fueled by a religious ecstasy that shares some characteristics with the Reformation (notably a dizzying rebirth of iconoclasm with no clear goal except the orgiastic thrill of destruction), while its reason-denying and reactionary elements recall the Romantic movement.

There's plenty of that sort of supposedly principled unreason floating around, all of which can be summarized as "If a thing is hard to prove, therefore, we should skip the proof and simply assume it."  That's called faith, dear reader.  These times, however, are times in which more than a little healthy skepticism is desirable.  Our New Priests would rather denounce the heretics and excommunicate the dissenters.

The simple, elite explanation for all our problems during the pandemic has been that the public failed to trust the experts and didn’t “follow the science.” This, they argue, is the result of tolerating too much skepticism, which is an ordinary feature of scientific debate. Instead, elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity).

This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. Reversals of conventional wisdom are, for better or worse, inevitable in science.

Yes, and in an era when the political class and the boffins aren't performing so well, "The Science" or "Our Democracy" don't have much force.

Central to the elite claim is that they “follow the science,” a mantra that falsely suggests all science is settled, and implies that science alone should decide complex public policy tradeoffs. When we drive out uncertainty and debate, and falsely or prematurely declare consensus or that a decision is “settled,” we make it more likely that the mistaken policy will be widely adopted in its most extreme form. We also make it far less likely that research will be done to evaluate whether a given policy decision was correct.

That's not how any of this works.  Sometimes, it gets funny.  There's a yard sign going up around here that reads "Follow the science.  Unmask our kids."  Despite Illinois being supposedly in the grip of J.B. Pritzker and the Combine, there is dissidence, and calling out the credentialed mavericks is the right thing to do.

So the “believe the science” chorus gives the credentialed mavericks no notice unless it’s to defame them. Apparently, under the believers’ model of science, truth comes down from a secular Mount Sinai (Mount Science?) thanks to a set of anointed scientists, and those declarations are not to be questioned. The dissenters can be ignored because they are outside the elect. How did the elect achieve its exalted station? Often, but not always, it was through the political process: for example, appointment to a government agency or the awarding of prestigious grants. It may be that a scientist simply has won the adoration of the progressive intelligentsia because his or her views align easily with a particular policy agenda.

But that’s not science; it’s religion, or at least it’s the stereotype of religion that the “science believers” oppose in the name of enlightenment. What it yields is dogma and, in effect, accusations of heresy.

In real science no elect and no Mount Science exists. Real science is a rough-and-tumble process of hypothesizing, public testing, attempted replication, theory formation, dissent and rebuttal, refutation (perhaps), revision (perhaps), and confirmation (perhaps).

That's how real democracy works, as well, but it's apparently easier to rile up followers than to look for areas of agreement these days.

Public policy is about moral judgment, trade-offs, and the justifiable use of coercion. Natural scientists are neither uniquely knowledgeable about those matters nor uniquely capable of making the right decisions for everyone. When medical scientists advised a lockdown of economic activity because of the pandemic, they were not speaking as scientists but as moralists (in scientists’ clothing). What are their special qualifications for that role? How could those scientists possibly have taken into account all of the serious consequences of a lockdown–psychological, domestic, social, economic, etc.–for the diverse individual human beings who would be subject to the policy? What qualifies natural scientists to decide that people who need screening for cancer or heart disease must wait indefinitely while people with an officially designated disease need not? (Politicians issue the formal prohibitions, but their scientific advisers provide apparent credibility.)

Here’s the relevant distinction: while we ought to favor science, we ought to reject scientism, the mistaken belief that the only questions worth asking are those amenable to the methods of the natural sciences and therefore all questions must either be recast appropriately or dismissed as gibberish.

There is no such thing as a right decision "for everyone," it's all about trading off among conflicting notions of desirable.  Enlightenment methods of thinking understand that; belief systems do not.  But noble lies are not science.

Americans at whom those barbs are aimed are not really rejecting “science” so much as they are rejecting the people who have glued themselves to it as a means by which to accumulate more power.

That rejection is likely to survive the end of the pandemic. Indeed, if this trend continues, it will take a long time for American progressivism to recover from the fallout. In its Wilsonian form, progressivism is a system in which the elected branches attempt to permanently outsource many of the country’s key political decisions to an ostensibly disinterested technocracy. When that technocracy is trusted, as it was for a while in the early 20th century and again in the 1950s and early to mid 1960s, those attempts enjoy a sufficient degree of support. When that technocracy is not trusted, as was the case after the fall of Robert McNamara and during the malaise-ridden 1970s, those attempts create a mighty backlash. In the long run, progressivism will always fail, because it is incompatible with human nature and because it is simply not possible to abolish politics, but it can work for a short while, providing that its technocrats have the discipline to prioritize science as a neutral process over “science” as a deceptive buzzword. Unfortunately for today’s progressives, the technocrats of this era chose precisely the opposite course.

Observers who wonder why so many within our government have been unwilling to let go of their power would do well to consider that the endless series of lockdowns, mask-mandates, and social-distancing rules that we have just lived through has been progressivism in its purest form. Just as war is the health of the state, the arrival of COVID-19 provided the perfect impetus for the rampant safetyism, unchecked authority, hysterical micromanagement, mawkish moral crusading, and interminable federal spending that the sorts of figures who graduate from public-policy and public-health programs spend their lives dreaming about. For the better part of two years now, they’ve had an absolute ball. If history is any guide, they’ll spend the next 20 or 30 picking up the tab.

There's a separate post to be written on the extent of the authority of the administrative state, but not today.  The reality check is also coming for a different set of mawkish moral crusaders.

[Atmospheric scientist Cliff] Mass also says that the accepted tenets of global warming have become a sort of religion. Consider the language used, he says, such as the question of whether one “believes” in anthropogenic climate change. “You don’t believe in gravity,” he says. The religious metaphor also explains why colleagues get so bent out of shape with him, Mass says: “There’s nothing worse than an apostate priest.”

Exactly, and the climate modellers and the contagion modellers have in common their reliance on dubious extrapolations.

The common theme, dear reader, is that the primitive has returned because the Bright People got too skeptical.

Specifically, the West—like Afghanistan—is falling prey to a new form of clericalism. In Middle Ages, the clerical class—what the French called the First Estate — enforced the orthodoxy of the day from the Pope and the Bishops. Today, this discipline is undertaken by university faculties, media outlets, and, most egregiously, social media oligarchs. Once celebrated as forums for debate and open inquiry, our universities function today largely as defenders of orthodoxy.

In this, they are like their medieval and Communist counterparts. In medieval universities, dissenters, like Jews and Muslims, were rare, and barely tolerated. Similar conformity haunts our elite schools, where according to one study the proportion of liberals to conservatives ran as high as 70 to one, and at elite liberal arts schools like Wellesley, Swarthmore, and Williams, the proportion reached 120 to one.

But the similarities don't end there. In addition to living with droughts, famines, ever-colder weather and political unrest, the masses and even the elites in the Middle Ages lived in terror of eternal damnation. More or less everyone believed that the Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent; the period saw a surge of millennialist movements that took it upon themselves to enforce this orthodoxy against dissenters and religious minorities like Jews.

I'd be amused with the observation that the denial of coherent beliefs is itself a coherent belief, but for the consequences being what they are.  "You know you're dealing with encroaching Medievalism when a subject brooks no dissent."  I conclude with what might qualify as a Friday short take.  "The truth will set you free, and most of it can be found in a library."  The 'library" part is salient: your favorite search engine is too vulnerable to manipulation either by its owners or by clickbait.