"Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts. None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism.... Perhaps if there had been less certitude and more second-guessing in Clinton’s campaign, she’d be president. Perhaps if there were less certitude about our climate future, more Americans would be interested in having a reasoned conversation about it."
From Bret Stephens's first NYT column,
"Climate of Complete Certainty."
The commenters are trashing him for comparing the deficiencies of the Clinton campaign's use of data analytics with the science of climatology and for not seeing why action is sometimes needed even when you don't have absolute certainty about what's going to happen in the future.
But Stephens is trying to get people to understand how to talk with each other. I'm giving this my new
"separatism" tag — invented in
the previous post after something the film director John Waters said: "You know, I'm not a separatist, I'm friends with some people who voted for Trump, not many."
ADDED: Is "scientism" an annoying word? I noticed MadAsHell in the comments complaining about it — along with "traduces," "censoriously," "overweening," and "certitude." It's funny, where one's tipping point is, when you get that thesaurus-y feeling. I definitely get it at "traduces," but swallow "censoriously," "overweening," and "certitude" easily.
"Scientism," though, is a weird word. Why do we need it in addition to "science"? What's the work of the "-ism"? It makes "science" into an insult, like you're being too science-y, to the point where it's not even science at all, but a religion with the trappings of science. I looked up the word in the OED, and that got me into this George Bernard Shaw opus,
"Back to Methuselah (A Metabiological Pentateuch)":
Let the Churches ask themselves why there is no revolt against the dogmas of mathematics though there is one against the dogmas of religion. It is not that the mathematical dogmas are more comprehensible. The law of inverse squares is as incomprehensible to the common man as the Athanasian creed. It is not that science is free from legends, witchcraft, miracles, biographic boostings of quacks as heroes and saints, and of barren scoundrels as explorers and discoverers. On the contrary, the iconography and hagiology of Scientism are as copious as they are mostly squalid. But no student of science has yet been taught that specific gravity consists in the belief that Archimedes jumped out of his bath and ran naked through the streets of Syracuse shouting Eureka, Eureka, or that the law of inverse squares must be discarded if anyone can prove that Newton was never in an orchard in his life. When some unusually conscientious or enterprising bacteriologist reads the pamphlets of Jenner, and discovers that they might have been written by an ignorant but curious and observant nurserymaid, and could not possibly have been written by any person with a scientifically trained mind, he does not feel that the whole edifice of science has collapsed and crumbled, and that there is no such thing as smallpox. It may come to that yet; for hygiene, as it forces its way into our schools, is being taught as falsely as religion is taught there; but in mathematics and physics the faith is still kept pure, and you may take the law and leave the legends without suspicion of heresy. Accordingly, the tower of the mathematician stands unshaken whilst the temple of the priest rocks to its foundation.
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