What you write is true, but these facts should be seen as imposing practical limitations on science. Sometimes, scientific inquiry will stumble onto ideologically charged questions, and the less aware the scientists are of the ideological implications, the greater the chance that their work will be sound. If the ideological implications are clear, the partisan opinions impassioned, and the consequences for practical power politics undeniable, we can’t realistically expect that the results will not be influenced by these considerations, whether consciously or not. And if the scientific work is specifically motivated by the fact that the question is interesting for reasons of ideology or policy, the confidence we can have in its quality is very low indeed.
For all practical purposes, this imposes limitations on the efficacy of institutional science of the sort we have today, and this must be recognized by anyone whose interest is finding truth rather than ideological ammunition. There are already many research areas where the ideological influences are so strong that their output can be trusted only after a very careful examination, and there are those whose output is almost pure bullshit, yet nevertheless gets to be adorned with the most prestigious academic affiliations. Therefore, it seems pretty clear to me that in the present situation, science is already excessively engaged in ideologically sensitive areas, and encouraging further such engagement will result only in additional corruption of science, not bringing clarity and rigor to the discussions of these areas.
Take your example of vaccination. In a situation where researchers consider it a moral imperative to dispel the crackpot conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific claims about vaccination, I have very little confidence that their research will provide an accurate picture of the risks and negative consequences of vaccination if their magnitude actually is non-negligible, for fear of providing ammunition to the anti-vaccination side. Now, in this case, it does seem like the situation is simple enough that all evidence overwhelmingly points to the pro-vaccination side, and assuming agreement on the facts, there is no significant additional disagreement on values and preferences, so there isn’t much concern overall. But often neither is the case, and insisting that science should be involved in the controversies more heavily will ultimately just corrupt and debase science, not bring any clarity to the situation.
That’s fair, insofar as science doesn’t give you correct answers when it isn’t working properly. When science isn’t working properly, the results of science are no better, or barely better, than random.
A few questions:
One, are you saying that scientists should strive to be ignorant of the existence of widely discussed ideological and moral issues? Is this one of the cases where less knowledge is better than more knowledge?
Two, what is an ideology? (Of course, I know how to use the word in a sentence, but you use it so often on LW that I wonder if you have a precise definition.) For example, would you describe yourself as having any ideology?
Three, of the possible means one could use to achieve one’s desires, would you say that writing biased scientific papers is an immoral means? What about persuasive essays?
A few questions: One, are you saying that scientists should strive to be ignorant of the existence of widely discussed ideological and moral issues? Is this one of the cases where less knowledge is better than more knowledge?
Well, first, it depends on what they’re working on. Many things are remote enough from any conceivable issues of ideology and power politics that this is not a problem; for example, Albert Einsten’s very silly ideology didn’t seem to interfere with his physics. However, topics that have bearing on such issues would indeed be best done by space aliens who’d feel complete disconnect from all human concerns. This seems to me like an entirely obvious corollary of the general principle that in the interest of objectivity, a judge should have no personal stakes in the case he presides over.
If scientists could somehow remain ignorant of the ideological implications of their work, this would indeed have a positive effect on their objectivity. But of course that this is impossible in practice, so it would make no sense to strive for it. This is a deep problem without a solution in sight. (Except for palliative measures like increasing public awareness that in ideologically sensitive areas, one should be skeptical even towards work with highly prestigious affiliations.)
Two, what is an ideology? (Of course, I know how to use the word in a sentence, but you use it so often on LW that I wonder if you have a precise definition.) For example, would you describe yourself as having any ideology?
My favorite characterization was given by James Burnham: “An ‘ideology’ is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called ‘rationalization’ in the sphere of individual psychology. [...] It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events—though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories.” (From The Managerial Revolution.)
Taken in the broadest possible sense, therefore, every person has an ideology, which encompasses all their beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are not a matter of exact scientific or practical knowledge, and which are at least partly concerned with the public matters of social order (with the implications this has on the practical relations of power and status, although these are rarely stated and discussed openly and explicitly).
In a more narrow sense, however, ideology refers to such beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are held with an extraordinary level of commitment and passion, which pushes one towards constant conflict—verbal, propagandistic, political, perhaps even physical—with those who don’t share the same ideological affiliation, and which renders one fatally biased and incapable of rational argument in ideologically charged matters. (In particular, when I call someone an “ideologue,” I refer to such people, especially those who are at the forefront of developing and propagandizing their favored ideological systems.)
Whether I belong to this latter category, well, you be the judge.
Three, of the possible means one could use to achieve one’s desires, would you say that writing biased scientific papers is an immoral means? What about persuasive essays?
That depends on your value judgment: how bad is it when someone contributes to the corruption of science? Science is not a natural and resilient mode of human intellectual work. It is something that critically depends on the quality of the institutions pursuing it, and these institutions are easy to corrupt, but almost impossible to fix. That our culture has them at all is, by all historical standards, a lucky accident.
Of course, one biased paper won’t cause much harm by itself, but only in the same sense that perfect forgery of a moderate amount of money harms nobody in particular very much. (On the other hand, I would say that even a single prominent biased career can cause a great deal of damage.) In both cases, if this activity is permitted and becomes widespread, the consequences will be disastrous.
Ideological feminism is the direct heir of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. From the former it takes the theory of class conflict, merely substituting “gender” for “class” and “patriarchy” for “bourgeoisie.” From the latter it takes the notion of nation or even race, focusing ultimately on the innate biological differences between women and men. The worldview of ideological feminism, like that of both Marxism and National Socialism—our analogies are between ways of thinking, not between specific ideas—is profoundly dualistic. In effect, “we” (women) are good, “they” (men) are evil. Or, to use the prevalent lingo, “we” are victims, “they” are oppressors.
Most of their criticism is aimed at feminism, but if you think about their description of ideology, it’s not difficult to see the same problems in any political movement. Here are the features they relate to ideologies:
Dualism (see above)
Essentialism (“calling attention to the unique qualities of women”)
Hierarchy (“alleging directly or indirectly that women are superior to men”)
Collectivism (“asserting that the rights of individual men are less important than the communal goals of women”)
Utopianism (“establishing an ideal social order within history”)
Selective cynicism (“directing systematic suspicion only toward men”)
Revolutionism (“adopting a political program that goes beyond reform”)
Consequentialism (“asserting the beliefs that ends can justify means”)
Quasi-religiousity (“creating what amounts to a secular religion”)
I would be interested to know how these features relate to your experiences with ideologies.
I recommend these books to anyone who is interested in biases, group psychology, and ideologies; their books give excellent philosophical discussions of these subjects that go beyond the particular examples of feminism and misandry. They also attempt a philosophical exploration of what “political correctness” is, and what’s wrong with it, and they examine deconstructionism.
I haven’t read the books by Nathanson & Young, but looking at their tables of contents, I can say that I am well familiar with these topics. However, it’s important to immediately note that the notion of ideology that you (and presumably N&Y) have in mind is narrower than what I was writing about. This might sound like nitpicking about meanings of words, and clearly neither usage can claim to be exclusively correct, but it is important to be clear about this to avoid confusion.
Ideology in the broader sense also includes the well-established and uncontroversial views and attitudes that enable social cohesion in any human society. (This follows the usage in Burnham’s text I cited; for example, in that same text, shortly after the cited passage, Burnham goes on to discuss individualism and belief in property rights as key elements of the established ideologies of capitalist societies.) In contrast, your meaning is narrower, covering a specific sort of more or less radical ideologies that have played a prominent role in modern history, which all display the traits you listed to at least some extent.
One book you might find interesting, which discusses ideology in this latter sense, is Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology by the LSE political theorist Kenneth Minogue. I only skimmed through a few parts of the book, but I would recommend it based on what I’ve seen. Minogue is upfront about his own position (i.e. ideology, in Burnham’s sense, but not his), which might be described as intellectual and moderate libertarianism; in my opinion, this is the kind of topic where authors of this sort usually shine at their brightest. You can find an excerpt presenting the basic ideas from the book here.
I’ll check out these books by Nathanson & Young in more detail, and perhaps post some more comments later.
So, I guess you’d say that true statements of scientific fact are different in kind from statements of wishes, dreams, beliefs, attitudes and so on. And, additionally, that it’s in the interest of human beings to have true statements of scientific fact, which are not contaminated with wishes, dreams, beliefs, and attitudes, or falsified by bias or forgery.
Hmm. That seems plausible but I’m not certain of it. It’s close enough, of course, that I don’t intend to practice or condone scientific fraud in real life.
And ideology is, for you, basically about conflict and incapacity to be rational. By that definition, you’re probably not an ideologue. I’m probably not either, but I know I have points where I cannot continue a rational discussion (in particular, if someone makes an unkind personal remark.)
But sometimes a person can care more about one of the things he or she values than about being patient and tolerant with everyone. Sometimes, some value takes precedence over peacemaking and discussion. Then conflict will happen, and rational discussion will not. I can think of situations where I would sympathize with the “ideologue” in that case. I am not sure that it’s a good person who believes that nothing is more important than rational inquiry and the absence of conflict.
Would I patiently entertain the notion that, say, it might be better for society for someone to kill my sister? (Imagine that there was some argument in favor of it.) Would I strive to be evenhanded about it? Or would I be in “conflict … perhaps even physical” and “fatally biased” and “incapable of rational argument”?
I agree with all this. In all sorts of human conflicts, even if all the relevant questions of fact and logic have been addressed to the maximum extent achievable by rational inquiry, there is still the inevitable clash of power and interest, which can be resolved only by finding a modus vivendi, or with the victory of one side, which then gets to impose its will on the other.
Among the available tactics in various types of conflicts, it is ultimately a judgment of value and taste which ones you’ll see as legitimate, and which ones depraved. This is especially true when it comes to propaganda aimed at securing the coherence of one’s own side in a conflict, and swaying the neutrals (and potential converts from the enemy camp) in one’s favor. It so happens that I have a particularly strong loathing for propaganda based on claims that one side’s pretensions to power are somehow supported by “science.” I see this as the most debased sort of ideological warfare, the propagandistic equivalent of a war crime, especially if the effort is successful in attracting people with official institutional scientific affiliations to actively join and drag their own “science” into it. (It is also my factual belief that this phenomenon tends to make ideological conflicts more intense, more destructive, and less likely to end in a tolerable compromise, but let’s not get sidetracked there.)
Yet, while the intensity of my dislike is a matter of my own values and tastes, the question of whether such corruption of science has taken place in some particular instance is still an objective question of fact and logic, because it is a special (even if difficult) case of the objective question of discerning valid science from invalid. Therefore, people can be objectively and demonstrably wrong in seeing themselves on the side of science and truth against superstition and falsity, where they are in fact just engaged in a pure contest for power, whether in their own interest or as someone else’s useful idiots.
Now that I’ve written all this, you might perhaps understand better my antipathy towards these “let science help us resolve moral questions!” proposals. People behind them, whether consciously or not, strive to recruit and debase science into a propaganda weapon in an ongoing struggle for power, not to resolve and end this struggle by reducing it to a rational argument. The latter is impossible even in principle, since the ultimate question is who gets to impose his values and preferences on others.
I do understand better now, and I think the world probably needs people like you who are vigilant about keeping science unbiased—it would be a much worse world, from my perspective, if we ceased to have science at all.
I also appreciate your courtesy over the past few days. I sometimes have trouble accepting and listening to skeptical perspectives; I’m learning to accept that ideas with a skeptical/critical/realist tone can be very valuable, but it does run against the grain for me, and I think I didn’t handle myself very well. At any other web forum, this would have been a feud between us. So I appreciate your patience and your explanations.
If you’re inclined to write about it, I would be interested in reading more about what your personal values/tastes are. This would help me place your comments in context.
You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics. But since you’re curious, I will try to provide a cursory outline of my views that are relevant in this context.
About a century ago—and perhaps even earlier—one could notice two trends in the public perception of science, caused by its immense practical success in providing all sorts of world-changing technological marvels. First, this success had given great prestige to scientists; second, it had opened hopes that in the future science should be able provide us with foolproof guidance in many areas of human concern that had theretofore been outside the realm of scientific investigation. The trouble with these trends was that around this time, dreams and hopes fueled by them started to seriously drift away from reality, and as might be expected, a host of pseudo-scientific bullshit-artists, as well as political and bureaucratic players with ready use for their services, quickly arose to exploit the opportunities opened by this situation.
This has led to a gradually worsening situation that I described in an earlier LW comment:
The trouble nowadays is not that governments are not listening to scientists (in the sense of people officially and publicly recognized as such), but that the increased prominence of science in public affairs has subjected the very notion of “science” to a severe case of Goodhart’s law. In other words, the fact that if something officially passes for “science,” governments listen to it and are willing to pay for it has led to an awful debasement of the very concept of science in modern times.
Once governments started listening to scientists, it was only a matter of time before talented charlatans and bullshit-artists would figure out that they can sell their ideas to governments by presenting them in the form of plausible-looking pseudoscience. It seems to me that many areas have been completely overtaken by this sort of thing, and the fact that their output is being labeled as “scientific” and used to drive government policy is a major problem that poses frightful threats for the future.
This, in my view, is one of the worst problems with the entire modern system of government, and by far the greatest source of dangerous falsity and nonsense in today’s world. I find it tragicomic when I see people worrying about supposedly dangerous anti-scientific trends like creationism or postmodernism, without realizing that these are entirely marginal phenomena compared to the corruption that happens within even the most prestigious academic institutions due to the fatal entanglement of science with ideology and power politics, to which they are completely oblivious, and in which they might even be blindly taking part. Just the thought of the disasters that our governments might wreak on us by pushing policies guided by this pseudo-scientific input should be enough to make one shiver—especially when we consider that these processes typically operate on bureaucratic auto-pilot, completely outside of the scope of politics that gets public attention.
Whether or not you agree with this, I hope it clarifies the reasons why I have such strong interest in topics of this sort.
Actually, my question was broader in intent—I was expressing curiosity about your personal values/tastes in general rather than about the matter at hand in particular. But from the way you took my question I imagine that the matter at hand figures in prominently :-).
Concerning
You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics.
I understand that doing so would require a lot of time and energy, I wouldn’t want to divert your attention from things that are more important to you, but will express interest in reading a carefully argued, well-referenced top-level posting from you on a relatively uncontroversial topic expressing some small fraction of your views on science and government so that I can have a more detailed idea of what you’re talking about.
Most of what you’ve said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction. Of course, this may be rooted in a personality difference rather than an epistemological difference, but you’ve piqued my curiosity and I wonder whether there might be something that I’m missing.
At present: I think that various sectors of science have in fact become debased by politicization. This may have made the situation in certain kinds of science worse than it has been in the past, but I don’t think that this has made the political situation worse than it has been in the past. As far as I know, there have always been issues of people putting manipulative spin on the truth for political advantage and I suspect that manipulative appeals to the authority of science are no more problematic than other sorts of manipulative appeals to authority were hundreds of years ago.
Incidentally, I was drawn toward math in high school by the fact that the the truth seemed to me to be much more highly valued there than in most other subjects. I soon came to appreciate Beauty in Mathematics but a large part of my initial attraction was simply grounded in the fact that exposure to a subject grounded in reason was so refreshing relative to most of what I had seen before (both in and out of school). I perceived an almost spiritual purity attached to justifying each step systematically.
Most of what you’ve said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction.
Well, to fully explain my opinions on the role of institutional science and pseudoscience in modern governments, I would first have to explain my overall view of the modern state, which, come to think of it, I did sketch recently in a reply to an earlier question from you. So I’ll try to build my answer from there (and ask other readers to read that other comment first if they’re confused by this one).
The permanent bureaucracies that in fact run our modern governments, in almost complete independence from the entire political circus we see on TV, are intimately connected with many other, nominally private or “independent” institutions. These entities are formally not a part of the government bureaucracy, but their structure is, for all practical purposes, not separable from it, due to both formal and informal connections, mutual influences, and membership overlaps. (The workings of this whole system are completely outside the awareness of the typical citizen, who instead imagines something surely imperfect but still essentially similar to what the civics textbooks describe—although they are subject to no secrecy at all and thus hidden in plain sight.) There are all kinds of such institutions, each with its peculiar Siamese-twin connections with some parts of the government: the mainstream media, too-big-to-fail businesses, “non-governmental organizations” (boy, are some people protesting too much!), public sector unions, etc., etc. -- and last but definitely not least, the academia and its purveyors of official science.
Now, in theory, the connection between the bureaucracy and official science is supposed to mean that we have a professional civil service using the best knowledge and expertise to implement the will of the people as legislated by its elected representatives, and our great institutions of scholarship supplying this expertise forged by its tireless seekers for truth and their magnificent institutions such as the peer review. In reality, well, it’s not hard to imagine how this situation can lead to all sorts of perverse incentives that might compromise various elements of this idealized picture, about which I’ve already written in my earlier comments.
To take the most blatant example, just observe the way economic “science” is involved in our government system. The government does lots of things that you may support or oppose in the ultimate analysis, but which would have been clearly recognized a century ago for what they are: wealth transfers, currency debasement, nationalization, patronage, amassing debt, raising and lowering of trade and migration barriers, etc., etc. Yet nowadays, we have a whole profession of pseudoscientists who are weaving webs of abstruse and vapid theory around such things, until neither their essence nor their likely consequences are possible to discuss with any reference to actual reality. The present economic crisis might be only a mild preview of the disasters that may befall us in the not so far future thanks to the utterly irresponsible and reality-ignoring policies that this pseudoscience has been rationalizing and excusing for decades already. It’s far from certain, but far from implausible either.
While this is admittedly an exceptionally bad example (though bad enough by itself!), the same pathologies can be found to a smaller or greater degree in almost any branch of the Kafkaesque bureaucracies that rule over us. In some cases, it’s not easy to discern how bad the corruption really is, as e.g. in the case of climate science, where I’m still not quite sure what to think. But it’s clear that many fields of official science nowadays operate solely for the purposes of their symbiosis with the government, and any actual advances of knowledge that result from them are merely a by-product, and hard to distinguish from the accompanying bullshit. (For example, any field that has “public” in its name is almost certain to be in this category.)
I’m not in a position to assess your comment’s accuracy as I don’t know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you’ve offered me some food for thought.
If I find Carl’s subsequent postings potentially convincing grounds for political involvement I’ll look more closely into the aforementioned topics and may ask you some more questions. Up until now I haven’t had reason to carefully research and think about these things.
I’m not in a position to assess your comment’s accuracy as I don’t know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you’ve offered me some food for thought.
If you’re interested in these topics, as an accompaniment to my fervent philippics, you should check out some more mainstream materials on the issues of administrative rulemaking and the Chevron doctrine. Googling about these topics will uncover some fascinating discussions and examples of the things I’ve been writing about, all from unimpeachable official and respectable sources.
(I’m sticking to the U.S. law and institutions because it’s by far the easiest to find good online materials about them. However, if you live anywhere else in the developed world, you can be pretty sure that you have close local equivalents of all these things I’ve been talking about.)
Oh, and here’s one more fascinating link. Before you click on it, think about the average citizen’s idea of how the laws of the land come into being. And then behold the majesty of this chart: http://www.reginfo.gov/public/reginfo/Regmap/index.jsp
(Though it should be noted that there are still visible vestigial influences of traditions from the old times when the de facto constitution of the U.S. resembled the capital-C one much more closely. Notice how the process is described as rulemaking, and by no means as legislation. It would still be unacceptable to use the latter name for something that doesn’t come directly from the formally designated legislative branch, even if their practical control over the law has long since disappeared in favor of the bureaucracies and courts.)
In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
On the other hand, people became disenchanted with them because of disastrous results—I don’t think there’s any public recognition of the poor quality of science they used.
In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
These political systems, however, are now distant in both time and space, and their faults can be comfortably analyzed from the outside. The really important question is in what ways, and to what degree, our present body of official respectable knowledge and doctrine deviates from reality, which is far more difficult to answer with any degree of accuracy. This is both because for us it’s like water for fish, and because challenging it is apt to provoke accusations of crackpottery (and perhaps even extremism), with all their status-lowering implications.
The vaccination controversy isn’t a particularly good example of damages science takes from discussing morals. Although I agree that the rigour of research and the objectivity of publications suffer from the controversy, it isn’t about morality. The anti-vaccination crackpots don’t claim that vaccination is somehow ethically unjustifiable, they simply claim that it doesn’t work and furthermore causes autism.
That’s not entirely true. In recent years, at least in North America, HPV vaccines have become a significant ideological issue, mostly for purely moral reasons. (Though the media exposure of this controversy seems to have died down somewhat recently.) I haven’t followed this issue in much detail, however I’ve noticed that it has involved not only moral disputes, but also disputes about factual questions that are in principle amenable to scientific resolution, but the discourse is hopelessly poisoned by ideological passions.
What you write is true about the majority of the historical vaccination controversies, though.
What you write is true, but these facts should be seen as imposing practical limitations on science. Sometimes, scientific inquiry will stumble onto ideologically charged questions, and the less aware the scientists are of the ideological implications, the greater the chance that their work will be sound. If the ideological implications are clear, the partisan opinions impassioned, and the consequences for practical power politics undeniable, we can’t realistically expect that the results will not be influenced by these considerations, whether consciously or not. And if the scientific work is specifically motivated by the fact that the question is interesting for reasons of ideology or policy, the confidence we can have in its quality is very low indeed.
For all practical purposes, this imposes limitations on the efficacy of institutional science of the sort we have today, and this must be recognized by anyone whose interest is finding truth rather than ideological ammunition. There are already many research areas where the ideological influences are so strong that their output can be trusted only after a very careful examination, and there are those whose output is almost pure bullshit, yet nevertheless gets to be adorned with the most prestigious academic affiliations. Therefore, it seems pretty clear to me that in the present situation, science is already excessively engaged in ideologically sensitive areas, and encouraging further such engagement will result only in additional corruption of science, not bringing clarity and rigor to the discussions of these areas.
Take your example of vaccination. In a situation where researchers consider it a moral imperative to dispel the crackpot conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific claims about vaccination, I have very little confidence that their research will provide an accurate picture of the risks and negative consequences of vaccination if their magnitude actually is non-negligible, for fear of providing ammunition to the anti-vaccination side. Now, in this case, it does seem like the situation is simple enough that all evidence overwhelmingly points to the pro-vaccination side, and assuming agreement on the facts, there is no significant additional disagreement on values and preferences, so there isn’t much concern overall. But often neither is the case, and insisting that science should be involved in the controversies more heavily will ultimately just corrupt and debase science, not bring any clarity to the situation.
That’s fair, insofar as science doesn’t give you correct answers when it isn’t working properly. When science isn’t working properly, the results of science are no better, or barely better, than random.
A few questions: One, are you saying that scientists should strive to be ignorant of the existence of widely discussed ideological and moral issues? Is this one of the cases where less knowledge is better than more knowledge?
Two, what is an ideology? (Of course, I know how to use the word in a sentence, but you use it so often on LW that I wonder if you have a precise definition.) For example, would you describe yourself as having any ideology?
Three, of the possible means one could use to achieve one’s desires, would you say that writing biased scientific papers is an immoral means? What about persuasive essays?
SarahC:
Well, first, it depends on what they’re working on. Many things are remote enough from any conceivable issues of ideology and power politics that this is not a problem; for example, Albert Einsten’s very silly ideology didn’t seem to interfere with his physics. However, topics that have bearing on such issues would indeed be best done by space aliens who’d feel complete disconnect from all human concerns. This seems to me like an entirely obvious corollary of the general principle that in the interest of objectivity, a judge should have no personal stakes in the case he presides over.
If scientists could somehow remain ignorant of the ideological implications of their work, this would indeed have a positive effect on their objectivity. But of course that this is impossible in practice, so it would make no sense to strive for it. This is a deep problem without a solution in sight. (Except for palliative measures like increasing public awareness that in ideologically sensitive areas, one should be skeptical even towards work with highly prestigious affiliations.)
My favorite characterization was given by James Burnham: “An ‘ideology’ is similar in the social sphere to what is sometimes called ‘rationalization’ in the sphere of individual psychology. [...] It is the expression of hopes, wishes, fears, ideals, not a hypothesis about events—though ideologies are often thought by those who hold them to be scientific theories.” (From The Managerial Revolution.)
Taken in the broadest possible sense, therefore, every person has an ideology, which encompasses all their beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are not a matter of exact scientific or practical knowledge, and which are at least partly concerned with the public matters of social order (with the implications this has on the practical relations of power and status, although these are rarely stated and discussed openly and explicitly).
In a more narrow sense, however, ideology refers to such beliefs, ideas, and attitudes that are held with an extraordinary level of commitment and passion, which pushes one towards constant conflict—verbal, propagandistic, political, perhaps even physical—with those who don’t share the same ideological affiliation, and which renders one fatally biased and incapable of rational argument in ideologically charged matters. (In particular, when I call someone an “ideologue,” I refer to such people, especially those who are at the forefront of developing and propagandizing their favored ideological systems.)
Whether I belong to this latter category, well, you be the judge.
That depends on your value judgment: how bad is it when someone contributes to the corruption of science? Science is not a natural and resilient mode of human intellectual work. It is something that critically depends on the quality of the institutions pursuing it, and these institutions are easy to corrupt, but almost impossible to fix. That our culture has them at all is, by all historical standards, a lucky accident.
Of course, one biased paper won’t cause much harm by itself, but only in the same sense that perfect forgery of a moderate amount of money harms nobody in particular very much. (On the other hand, I would say that even a single prominent biased career can cause a great deal of damage.) In both cases, if this activity is permitted and becomes widespread, the consequences will be disastrous.
Vladimir, have you read Spreading Misandry and Legalizing Misandry by Nathanson & Young? They’ve done some of the best work I’ve read on the subject of ideology. Here is their description of ideological feminism:
Most of their criticism is aimed at feminism, but if you think about their description of ideology, it’s not difficult to see the same problems in any political movement. Here are the features they relate to ideologies:
Dualism (see above)
Essentialism (“calling attention to the unique qualities of women”)
Hierarchy (“alleging directly or indirectly that women are superior to men”)
Collectivism (“asserting that the rights of individual men are less important than the communal goals of women”)
Utopianism (“establishing an ideal social order within history”)
Selective cynicism (“directing systematic suspicion only toward men”)
Revolutionism (“adopting a political program that goes beyond reform”)
Consequentialism (“asserting the beliefs that ends can justify means”)
Quasi-religiousity (“creating what amounts to a secular religion”)
I would be interested to know how these features relate to your experiences with ideologies.
Other notable sections in Spreading Misandry:
Making the World Safe for Ideology
The use of deconstructionism by ideologies
Film Theory and Ideological Feminism
I recommend these books to anyone who is interested in biases, group psychology, and ideologies; their books give excellent philosophical discussions of these subjects that go beyond the particular examples of feminism and misandry. They also attempt a philosophical exploration of what “political correctness” is, and what’s wrong with it, and they examine deconstructionism.
I haven’t read the books by Nathanson & Young, but looking at their tables of contents, I can say that I am well familiar with these topics. However, it’s important to immediately note that the notion of ideology that you (and presumably N&Y) have in mind is narrower than what I was writing about. This might sound like nitpicking about meanings of words, and clearly neither usage can claim to be exclusively correct, but it is important to be clear about this to avoid confusion.
Ideology in the broader sense also includes the well-established and uncontroversial views and attitudes that enable social cohesion in any human society. (This follows the usage in Burnham’s text I cited; for example, in that same text, shortly after the cited passage, Burnham goes on to discuss individualism and belief in property rights as key elements of the established ideologies of capitalist societies.) In contrast, your meaning is narrower, covering a specific sort of more or less radical ideologies that have played a prominent role in modern history, which all display the traits you listed to at least some extent.
One book you might find interesting, which discusses ideology in this latter sense, is Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology by the LSE political theorist Kenneth Minogue. I only skimmed through a few parts of the book, but I would recommend it based on what I’ve seen. Minogue is upfront about his own position (i.e. ideology, in Burnham’s sense, but not his), which might be described as intellectual and moderate libertarianism; in my opinion, this is the kind of topic where authors of this sort usually shine at their brightest. You can find an excerpt presenting the basic ideas from the book here.
I’ll check out these books by Nathanson & Young in more detail, and perhaps post some more comments later.
Thanks for replying.
So, I guess you’d say that true statements of scientific fact are different in kind from statements of wishes, dreams, beliefs, attitudes and so on. And, additionally, that it’s in the interest of human beings to have true statements of scientific fact, which are not contaminated with wishes, dreams, beliefs, and attitudes, or falsified by bias or forgery.
Hmm. That seems plausible but I’m not certain of it. It’s close enough, of course, that I don’t intend to practice or condone scientific fraud in real life.
And ideology is, for you, basically about conflict and incapacity to be rational. By that definition, you’re probably not an ideologue. I’m probably not either, but I know I have points where I cannot continue a rational discussion (in particular, if someone makes an unkind personal remark.)
But sometimes a person can care more about one of the things he or she values than about being patient and tolerant with everyone. Sometimes, some value takes precedence over peacemaking and discussion. Then conflict will happen, and rational discussion will not. I can think of situations where I would sympathize with the “ideologue” in that case. I am not sure that it’s a good person who believes that nothing is more important than rational inquiry and the absence of conflict.
Would I patiently entertain the notion that, say, it might be better for society for someone to kill my sister? (Imagine that there was some argument in favor of it.) Would I strive to be evenhanded about it? Or would I be in “conflict … perhaps even physical” and “fatally biased” and “incapable of rational argument”?
I agree with all this. In all sorts of human conflicts, even if all the relevant questions of fact and logic have been addressed to the maximum extent achievable by rational inquiry, there is still the inevitable clash of power and interest, which can be resolved only by finding a modus vivendi, or with the victory of one side, which then gets to impose its will on the other.
Among the available tactics in various types of conflicts, it is ultimately a judgment of value and taste which ones you’ll see as legitimate, and which ones depraved. This is especially true when it comes to propaganda aimed at securing the coherence of one’s own side in a conflict, and swaying the neutrals (and potential converts from the enemy camp) in one’s favor. It so happens that I have a particularly strong loathing for propaganda based on claims that one side’s pretensions to power are somehow supported by “science.” I see this as the most debased sort of ideological warfare, the propagandistic equivalent of a war crime, especially if the effort is successful in attracting people with official institutional scientific affiliations to actively join and drag their own “science” into it. (It is also my factual belief that this phenomenon tends to make ideological conflicts more intense, more destructive, and less likely to end in a tolerable compromise, but let’s not get sidetracked there.)
Yet, while the intensity of my dislike is a matter of my own values and tastes, the question of whether such corruption of science has taken place in some particular instance is still an objective question of fact and logic, because it is a special (even if difficult) case of the objective question of discerning valid science from invalid. Therefore, people can be objectively and demonstrably wrong in seeing themselves on the side of science and truth against superstition and falsity, where they are in fact just engaged in a pure contest for power, whether in their own interest or as someone else’s useful idiots.
Now that I’ve written all this, you might perhaps understand better my antipathy towards these “let science help us resolve moral questions!” proposals. People behind them, whether consciously or not, strive to recruit and debase science into a propaganda weapon in an ongoing struggle for power, not to resolve and end this struggle by reducing it to a rational argument. The latter is impossible even in principle, since the ultimate question is who gets to impose his values and preferences on others.
Thanks.
I do understand better now, and I think the world probably needs people like you who are vigilant about keeping science unbiased—it would be a much worse world, from my perspective, if we ceased to have science at all.
I also appreciate your courtesy over the past few days. I sometimes have trouble accepting and listening to skeptical perspectives; I’m learning to accept that ideas with a skeptical/critical/realist tone can be very valuable, but it does run against the grain for me, and I think I didn’t handle myself very well. At any other web forum, this would have been a feud between us. So I appreciate your patience and your explanations.
If you’re inclined to write about it, I would be interested in reading more about what your personal values/tastes are. This would help me place your comments in context.
You probably understand that a full answer to this question would require an enormous amount of space (and time), and that it would involve all kinds of diversions into controversial topics. But since you’re curious, I will try to provide a cursory outline of my views that are relevant in this context.
About a century ago—and perhaps even earlier—one could notice two trends in the public perception of science, caused by its immense practical success in providing all sorts of world-changing technological marvels. First, this success had given great prestige to scientists; second, it had opened hopes that in the future science should be able provide us with foolproof guidance in many areas of human concern that had theretofore been outside the realm of scientific investigation. The trouble with these trends was that around this time, dreams and hopes fueled by them started to seriously drift away from reality, and as might be expected, a host of pseudo-scientific bullshit-artists, as well as political and bureaucratic players with ready use for their services, quickly arose to exploit the opportunities opened by this situation.
This has led to a gradually worsening situation that I described in an earlier LW comment:
This, in my view, is one of the worst problems with the entire modern system of government, and by far the greatest source of dangerous falsity and nonsense in today’s world. I find it tragicomic when I see people worrying about supposedly dangerous anti-scientific trends like creationism or postmodernism, without realizing that these are entirely marginal phenomena compared to the corruption that happens within even the most prestigious academic institutions due to the fatal entanglement of science with ideology and power politics, to which they are completely oblivious, and in which they might even be blindly taking part. Just the thought of the disasters that our governments might wreak on us by pushing policies guided by this pseudo-scientific input should be enough to make one shiver—especially when we consider that these processes typically operate on bureaucratic auto-pilot, completely outside of the scope of politics that gets public attention.
Whether or not you agree with this, I hope it clarifies the reasons why I have such strong interest in topics of this sort.
Thanks for your response.
Actually, my question was broader in intent—I was expressing curiosity about your personal values/tastes in general rather than about the matter at hand in particular. But from the way you took my question I imagine that the matter at hand figures in prominently :-).
Concerning
I understand that doing so would require a lot of time and energy, I wouldn’t want to divert your attention from things that are more important to you, but will express interest in reading a carefully argued, well-referenced top-level posting from you on a relatively uncontroversial topic expressing some small fraction of your views on science and government so that I can have a more detailed idea of what you’re talking about.
Most of what you’ve said so far has been allusive in nature and while I can guess at some of what you might have in mind, I strain to think of examples that would provoke such a strong reaction. Of course, this may be rooted in a personality difference rather than an epistemological difference, but you’ve piqued my curiosity and I wonder whether there might be something that I’m missing.
At present: I think that various sectors of science have in fact become debased by politicization. This may have made the situation in certain kinds of science worse than it has been in the past, but I don’t think that this has made the political situation worse than it has been in the past. As far as I know, there have always been issues of people putting manipulative spin on the truth for political advantage and I suspect that manipulative appeals to the authority of science are no more problematic than other sorts of manipulative appeals to authority were hundreds of years ago.
Incidentally, I was drawn toward math in high school by the fact that the the truth seemed to me to be much more highly valued there than in most other subjects. I soon came to appreciate Beauty in Mathematics but a large part of my initial attraction was simply grounded in the fact that exposure to a subject grounded in reason was so refreshing relative to most of what I had seen before (both in and out of school). I perceived an almost spiritual purity attached to justifying each step systematically.
multifoliaterose:
Well, to fully explain my opinions on the role of institutional science and pseudoscience in modern governments, I would first have to explain my overall view of the modern state, which, come to think of it, I did sketch recently in a reply to an earlier question from you. So I’ll try to build my answer from there (and ask other readers to read that other comment first if they’re confused by this one).
The permanent bureaucracies that in fact run our modern governments, in almost complete independence from the entire political circus we see on TV, are intimately connected with many other, nominally private or “independent” institutions. These entities are formally not a part of the government bureaucracy, but their structure is, for all practical purposes, not separable from it, due to both formal and informal connections, mutual influences, and membership overlaps. (The workings of this whole system are completely outside the awareness of the typical citizen, who instead imagines something surely imperfect but still essentially similar to what the civics textbooks describe—although they are subject to no secrecy at all and thus hidden in plain sight.) There are all kinds of such institutions, each with its peculiar Siamese-twin connections with some parts of the government: the mainstream media, too-big-to-fail businesses, “non-governmental organizations” (boy, are some people protesting too much!), public sector unions, etc., etc. -- and last but definitely not least, the academia and its purveyors of official science.
Now, in theory, the connection between the bureaucracy and official science is supposed to mean that we have a professional civil service using the best knowledge and expertise to implement the will of the people as legislated by its elected representatives, and our great institutions of scholarship supplying this expertise forged by its tireless seekers for truth and their magnificent institutions such as the peer review. In reality, well, it’s not hard to imagine how this situation can lead to all sorts of perverse incentives that might compromise various elements of this idealized picture, about which I’ve already written in my earlier comments.
To take the most blatant example, just observe the way economic “science” is involved in our government system. The government does lots of things that you may support or oppose in the ultimate analysis, but which would have been clearly recognized a century ago for what they are: wealth transfers, currency debasement, nationalization, patronage, amassing debt, raising and lowering of trade and migration barriers, etc., etc. Yet nowadays, we have a whole profession of pseudoscientists who are weaving webs of abstruse and vapid theory around such things, until neither their essence nor their likely consequences are possible to discuss with any reference to actual reality. The present economic crisis might be only a mild preview of the disasters that may befall us in the not so far future thanks to the utterly irresponsible and reality-ignoring policies that this pseudoscience has been rationalizing and excusing for decades already. It’s far from certain, but far from implausible either.
While this is admittedly an exceptionally bad example (though bad enough by itself!), the same pathologies can be found to a smaller or greater degree in almost any branch of the Kafkaesque bureaucracies that rule over us. In some cases, it’s not easy to discern how bad the corruption really is, as e.g. in the case of climate science, where I’m still not quite sure what to think. But it’s clear that many fields of official science nowadays operate solely for the purposes of their symbiosis with the government, and any actual advances of knowledge that result from them are merely a by-product, and hard to distinguish from the accompanying bullshit. (For example, any field that has “public” in its name is almost certain to be in this category.)
Thanks for writing this; upvoted.
I’m not in a position to assess your comment’s accuracy as I don’t know very much about either of the workings of the government or the state of the field of macroeconomics, but you’ve offered me some food for thought.
If I find Carl’s subsequent postings potentially convincing grounds for political involvement I’ll look more closely into the aforementioned topics and may ask you some more questions. Up until now I haven’t had reason to carefully research and think about these things.
multifoliaterose:
If you’re interested in these topics, as an accompaniment to my fervent philippics, you should check out some more mainstream materials on the issues of administrative rulemaking and the Chevron doctrine. Googling about these topics will uncover some fascinating discussions and examples of the things I’ve been writing about, all from unimpeachable official and respectable sources.
(I’m sticking to the U.S. law and institutions because it’s by far the easiest to find good online materials about them. However, if you live anywhere else in the developed world, you can be pretty sure that you have close local equivalents of all these things I’ve been talking about.)
Thank you for the references. I live in the U.S. so these should be relevant.
Oh, and here’s one more fascinating link. Before you click on it, think about the average citizen’s idea of how the laws of the land come into being. And then behold the majesty of this chart:
http://www.reginfo.gov/public/reginfo/Regmap/index.jsp
(Though it should be noted that there are still visible vestigial influences of traditions from the old times when the de facto constitution of the U.S. resembled the capital-C one much more closely. Notice how the process is described as rulemaking, and by no means as legislation. It would still be unacceptable to use the latter name for something that doesn’t come directly from the formally designated legislative branch, even if their practical control over the law has long since disappeared in favor of the bureaucracies and courts.)
In some ways, things have gotten better, not worse. Both communism and Nazism claimed scientific backing. I don’t see anything like that on the horizon.
On the other hand, people became disenchanted with them because of disastrous results—I don’t think there’s any public recognition of the poor quality of science they used.
NancyLebovitz:
These political systems, however, are now distant in both time and space, and their faults can be comfortably analyzed from the outside. The really important question is in what ways, and to what degree, our present body of official respectable knowledge and doctrine deviates from reality, which is far more difficult to answer with any degree of accuracy. This is both because for us it’s like water for fish, and because challenging it is apt to provoke accusations of crackpottery (and perhaps even extremism), with all their status-lowering implications.
The vaccination controversy isn’t a particularly good example of damages science takes from discussing morals. Although I agree that the rigour of research and the objectivity of publications suffer from the controversy, it isn’t about morality. The anti-vaccination crackpots don’t claim that vaccination is somehow ethically unjustifiable, they simply claim that it doesn’t work and furthermore causes autism.
That’s not entirely true. In recent years, at least in North America, HPV vaccines have become a significant ideological issue, mostly for purely moral reasons. (Though the media exposure of this controversy seems to have died down somewhat recently.) I haven’t followed this issue in much detail, however I’ve noticed that it has involved not only moral disputes, but also disputes about factual questions that are in principle amenable to scientific resolution, but the discourse is hopelessly poisoned by ideological passions.
What you write is true about the majority of the historical vaccination controversies, though.
I haven’t known that, thanks.