Posted by PF on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 22:40 | #

true science is in fact Barbaric

I take your meaning here to be something like:
Quests for truth pursued to extremity will result in challenging the assumptions in social frameworks.

There are two issues here:
1) what is the meaning of ‘barbaric’?
2) does science have this attribute itself, or is it an attribute of the scientist and the social collective, projected back onto the quest for truth and misrecognized as an essential attribute of the latter?

That’s when it struck me that true science is in fact Barbaric and will always be treated thus by ruling elites of any Polity because Polity depends on faith in a set of—usually unstated—hypotheses in human ecology adopted by religious faith as pragmatic enforcement of elite powers.

Addressing (1): In the example you give, science appears as a disrupting influence from outside, appearing to threaten social order. By a process of analogy, science can thus be said to be ‘barbaric’. Its devotees are being treated like Goths in the late Roman empire.

I am interested in clarifying the use of that word because it is historically so loaded with meaning and evaluation, although it originally meant someone who didnt speak Greek.

Addressing (1 & 2): I personally don’t feel science could properly be called barbaric (i.e. against the social order) because it strikes me as just another evaluation process without the associations/intent/viewpoint implied by that term. I think it is the individual carrying out the truth-search, the man behind the science, which construes and frames the logical contradiction he perceives between his truth search and the collective complacency, frames this contradiction as being science [whereas in truth it was merely the result of scientific evaluation processes], and then names it barbaric. Your conflict with an American Brahmin is not *science*, but you make use of science in this ideological/personality conflict.

Addressing (1 & 2): ‘Barbaric’ is a poor term to designate something as far removed from the realm of human existence as science is. It gives the thing described an attribute which is heavily associated with aspects of human emotionality (violence, foreignness, unruliness, passion, viscerality). Science is surely none of these things.

Possibly a more honest way to say it would be:

When I confront others with my scientific reasoning and use it to support arguments which would result in transformation of social structures, I am cast in a certain role. It pleases me to seek an analogy for this role in the barbaric tribes during the Time of Migration in European history, and their relation to the established Roman Empire. Ideally I would make this an attribute not of myself as I appear in this moment, but of the process of science itself.

Lots of people are engaged presently, I would imagine most scientists, in science that doesn’t overturn or test sufficiently socio-ecologically relevant hypotheses to merit the analogy to barbaric tribes. It is nevertheless ‘true science’. Or do you not see it that way?

Posted by Drifter on Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:43 | #

Experimentation of parallelism in societies is barbaric. There is no requirement between societies to be inclusive or to lend aid after a disaster for example. Awful things can happen to others as we stand by a look on. But, if they’re alert, prepared, adaptive, or resilient, they’ll quickly recover. The inattentive, unprepared, maladaptive, or brittle die off. As it should have always been.

Posted by bombkangaroo on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 01:50 | #

I’m in agreement with the above.
The OP seems to have fallen into the trap, explained in the critique of Palingenesis article, of accepting a pejorative label because it serves to define his position as the opposite of what his opponent thinks of his own position.

I would argue that barbarism is characterised by a lack of civilisation, which is in part the acceptance of that which is rational and empirically evidenced above faith or irrational preference. Whatever the brahmin thinks of his own position, a dedication to seeking the truth is a higher form of civilisation than that to which the brahmin subscribes.

Posted by sirrealpolitik on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 03:16 | #

James,

The Brahmin of your dialectic reminds me of the Science Museum of London’s POV in this row from a few years back:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-488232/Science-museum-bans-DNA-genius-centre-race-row.html

A spokesman for the Science Museum said “the Science Museum feels that Nobel Prize winner James Watson’s recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are as a result cancelling his talk at the museum this Friday.”

The philosophy of science and “doctrine” of experimentation are barbaric in that they are beholden to no such hoity-toity, preconceived notions of “acceptible debate.”

The only “science” the Science Museum and most British cultural institutions practice: they research how best to proselytize race-replacement theology.

I remember being quite furious when this story broke.

Posted by R.E. Prindle on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:14 | #

Are you for real Bowery?

Posted by The Truth on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 05:54 | #

Don’t you know that true Brahmins are dark-skinned like the interracial-pornography obsessed Razib Khan?

Posted by James Bowery on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 17:37 | #

Drifter is getting my drift.

The “body politic” is distinguished from the “body” in scientific terms only by the means via which the “germ-line replicator” hypothesis is stated.  In the case of the body politic, it is the proposition constituting its polity.  In the case of the body, it is the genome.  Life or death of the body politic is not shared by other bodies politic in a meta-polity founded on the philosophy of science, just as life or death is experienced by individual bodies.

This is “barbaric” in the sense that it does not recognize the “entitlement”, moral or otherwise, to resources “claimed” by other bodies.  It recognizes only replication of results—or perhaps replications _as_ results.

The ultimate extension of this ideal is a polity of extreme individualism, treating each individual as what might be called a “thought” in a “line of thought” of the all-encompassing creative consciousness of nature (“Nature’s God”, to use Thomas Jefferson’s terms). 

This is virtually the definition of otherwise loaded terms like barbaric, heathen and pagan.

PF writes: Lots of people are engaged presently, I would imagine most scientists, in science that doesn’t overturn or test sufficiently socio-ecologically relevant hypotheses to merit the analogy to barbaric tribes. It is nevertheless ‘true science’. Or do you not see it that way?

I see “true” science as seeking relevant truths.  There is no conflict with civil deceptions when one seeks truths consistent with those deceptions—there by rendering such “truth seeking” basically irrelevant to the truth.

PS:  I’m recommending devolution of powers to human ecologies formed by assortative migration under a scientific polity as a process toward pragmatic extreme individualism.  Panmictic migration imposed by irresponsible technological civilization has been profoundly destructive to our natural heritage and must be unwound in a manner reminiscent of repairing any ecology.  Ye are gods.  Behave accordingly.

PPS:  I’m also not proposing to leave central planning to those attracted to centralized power.  Current circumstances don’t let us leave central planning to them if it is possible to guide the situation.  For instance, it may be necessary to promote greater national self determination via reduction of oil imports.  It may also be necessary to confront certain global environmental risks with greater care a than is going to come from the likes of those attracted to further centralizing power.

Posted by PF on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:25 | #

James wrote:

I see “true” science as seeking relevant truths.  There is no conflict with civil deceptions when one seeks truths consistent with those deceptions—there by rendering such “truth seeking” basically irrelevant to the truth.

This is a very interesting conundrum that you mention, James.

It is the problem of relevance. Are things that are more relevant, or perceived to be, therefore more truthful? Is the study of a plant’s molecular mechanisms less truthful than your investigation of socio-ecological organization theory?

This is demoting non-relevant science for not leading to “the truth of oneself”. Ultimately people realize that this is the only truth that matters, to whatever degree of clarity they are able.

Yet the hierarchy you are noticing is not one of truthfulness, which is simply factual accuracy and logical cleanliness/consistency. I think you are pointing to an emotional hierarchy within man - truths more central to oneself are perceived as being higher on this hierarchy, but are not in themselves therefore more truthful. Grasping these truths allows for more powerful experience of life, but they are not therefore more truthful than impertinent truths. A correct knowledge of how to organize social life is, factually, equally true to a correct breakdown of membrane pore properties in a flower.

Socioecological organization schemes tie in with imaginations of “how things could be different” which give emotional value that the study of plant molecular biomechanics cannot. But that is a function of the seeker’s subjective self-relation, another man might be able to derive similar emotional value from plant biomechanics. (Seriously, it is possible! You probably know how the study of mathematical abstractions can be perversely, inexplicably intoxicating and fun.)

Theoretically this might represent a more emotionally honest truth search, but the emotional relationship of the seeker to the subject of inquiry is theoretically irrelevant in all discussions of “outer truth”. Furthermore, “relevance” is decided subjectively of the basis of the seeker’s emotional imaginings of what would be pertinent - socioecological theory is impertinent to me because I do not imagine myself ever organizing a new society from the ground up, so your truth search in this field strikes me as impertinent, but it is not therefore, within its own framework, any less true.

Posted by PF on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 06:45 | #

socioecological theory is impertinent to me because I do not imagine myself ever organizing a new society from the ground up, so your truth search in this field strikes me as impertinent, but it is not therefore, within its own framework, any less true.

Rhetorical baton corrupts user again. Goddamn, does my ‘condescending jerk mode’ have an off switch? PFetic.

Posted by James Bowery on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:36 | #

You are correct that what you call “outer truth” is without intrinsic value.  However once you admit value you admit expected value and then its straight decision theory as to what truths are how relevant.

I think that the folks involved in Brown vs Board of Education—all of us—for example, had enough at stake to call questioning the inferences drawn by the Supreme Court from the sociological studies of children playing with dolls “relevant”, however impertinent those questions might have been.

Posted by Angela on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 13:02 | #

Yeah, I think that’s right. I find the world is stranger than I expected as a child where one naively expected to grow up and find, naturally, logic and truth to be the guiding principles of the ruling classes. How wrong was that? How wrong are they! As for the Judiciary..gotta pay ya dues.