Once again, the "Bright" progressives' "Science-based" policies have collided with the complexity of the human condition.
A hundred years later it became the controlling idea behind technocratic progressivism, which holds that the "Human sciences" can understand the human world accurately enough to manipulate and improve it as much as the hard sciences' and the technologies they create did the material world.
As philosopher Thomas Nagel writes, "The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental - consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose." That is, all the qualities that define human beings and set them apart from the natural world.
The "Human sciences" like psychology, Pinker's field, presume to explain the mind and behavior with scientific propositions by assuming a totalizing materialism.
Our current knowledge of global climate, a complex system of intricate feedback loops we do not yet understand, cannot justify the radical, and exorbitantly expensive, policies for eliminating the carbon-based energy on which modern economies and human well-being depend.
In other words, the progressive idea that objective, scientifically established facts can be used to craft policy is a chimera when it comes to human beings and their political, personal, and social identities, motivations, and behavior.
Practical wisdom, tradition, faith, philosophy, and the historical record of human folly and failure are much better guides than science, much less scientism.
A hundred years later it became the controlling idea behind technocratic progressivism, which holds that the "Human sciences" can understand the human world accurately enough to manipulate and improve it as much as the hard sciences' and the technologies they create did the material world.
As philosopher Thomas Nagel writes, "The scientific revolution of the 17th century, which has given rise to such extraordinary progress in the understanding of nature, depended on a crucial limiting step at the start: It depended on subtracting from the physical world as an object of study everything mental - consciousness, meaning, intention or purpose." That is, all the qualities that define human beings and set them apart from the natural world.
The "Human sciences" like psychology, Pinker's field, presume to explain the mind and behavior with scientific propositions by assuming a totalizing materialism.
Our current knowledge of global climate, a complex system of intricate feedback loops we do not yet understand, cannot justify the radical, and exorbitantly expensive, policies for eliminating the carbon-based energy on which modern economies and human well-being depend.
In other words, the progressive idea that objective, scientifically established facts can be used to craft policy is a chimera when it comes to human beings and their political, personal, and social identities, motivations, and behavior.
Practical wisdom, tradition, faith, philosophy, and the historical record of human folly and failure are much better guides than science, much less scientism.
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