On Fresh Air: A founding principle of Enlightenment liberalism

Monday's transcript of Terry Gross' Fresh Air, interviewing Tom Hicks on his new book Churchill And Orwell: The Fight For Freedom, quoted his conclusion: "The fundamental driver of Western civilization is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." (Emphasis added)

Remember the central problem of our current politics—that conservatism in its current form, in Congress, is driven by a rigid ideology and won't listen to the American majority? Instead of a Republican party which constitutes the loyal opposition characteristic of democracy, we have a totalitarian mindset which is "alien to any dialogue":

The tragedy of Marxist teaching is that it is alien to any dialogue. Marxism only conducted a monologue and never listened. It was always right...always claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything, thus proving its totalitarian essence. - Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia, p. 8.

"I alone can fix it," Trump declared in his nomination acceptance speech, "claiming to know everything and to be able to do everything."

"People of goodwill can perceive [reality] ... other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter." The foundation of democracy is our common experience of the world. The foundation of democratic prudence is that all citizens, no matter what their "beliefs," will honor evidence by changing their views when those views are shown not to comport with reality.

This is one of Enlightenment liberalism's most fundamental principles. It is echoed when the Declaration (a representative Enlightenment document) proclaims, "let facts be submitted to a candid world." But it is one of the ways the illiberal left disagrees with democratic principle. A tendency toward radical skepticism is shown in a recent post which noted rejection of the rule of law; privileging narratives on ad hominem rather than factual grounds; and claiming there are no neutral, objective claims about the world. On campus, postmodernism denied the relation between reality and language in Derrida's "There is nothing outside the text." (A scholar joked that a postmodernist is someone who spends the day telling students that language cannot refer to reality, then leaves a message on his wife's answering machine asking if he should pick up a pizza on the way home.)

This is not a separate problem of left politics and right politics, but prior. It stems from the ideological cast both have assumed. Ideology privileges belief over reality and, lacking any true principles, will opportunistically assert either omniscient knowledge—Trump claiming to be able to fix everything above—or deny the possibility of knowledge—Trump recently suggested that “nobody really knows” if climate change exists.

Foundation on cognitive prudence—objective reality exists and tends to make it possible for people of good will to agree and work together—is not just a principle of Enlightenment liberalism. The Enlightenment was the birth of "our universal civilization." Mr. Ricks concludes by arguing that holding that objective reality tops the dogmas of ideology. Right ideology and left ideology have no legitimate claim whatsoever, because ideology is inherently unprincipled:

If there's anything I have to say I learned from this experience of reading and re-reading thousands upon thousands of words by Churchill and Orwell over the last three and half years, it's that. That's my conclusion - that this is the essence of Western society and, at its best, how Western society operates.

And it's - you can really reduce it to a formula. First of all, you need to have principles. You need to stand by those principles and remember them. Second, you need to look at reality to observe facts and not just have opinions and to say, what are the facts of the matter? Third, you need to act upon those facts according to your principles.

Spiritual Wickedness in High Places

Priest to Oedipus, who sits upon the throne of Thebes having killed his father and married his mother:

For, as thou seest thyself, our ship of State, 
Sore buffeted, can no more lift her head, 
Foundered beneath a weltering surge of blood. 
A blight is on our harvest in the ear, 
A blight upon the grazing flocks and herds, 
A blight on wives in travail; and withal 
Armed with his blazing torch the God of Plague 
Hath swooped upon our city emptying 
The house of Cadmus, and the murky realm 
Of Pluto is full fed with groans and tears.

 

Ecclesiastes 12 KJV, freely rendered:

Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.
And the keepers of the house tremble, and the strong men bow themselves, and the workers cease because they are few, and the mourners go about the streets.
And they be afraid of that which is high, and desire fail.

Man goeth to his long home.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit return unto God who gave it.

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, Ctd.

Hypothesis: Every deduction is a concealed induction. (See below)

The previous post, Fundamentals of Liberal Thought, offered a beginning discussion of foundations—of the grounds of reason.

This post attempts elementary notes on the nature of fact and truth, from the Enlightenment liberal perspective. As before, the chief contestant for prevailing concept of truth is the archaic assumption implied by Plato's philosophic idealism. This is that entities have essences, that truth is a knowledge of essences, and thus that truth is absolute. A corollary is that what is true is necessarily so.

Liberalism's concept of truth is closely related to the perspective of empirical science: Truth is probabilistic. If a fact arrived at by induction is falsifiable—Karl Popper's famous proposition—it cannot be absolute.

Let's try a couple of definitions derived from the premise that truth is empirical and probabilistic:

1. Truth is a function of the current state of our knowledge; and
2. A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

(1) fits the Newton/Einstein case. At one time Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was considered the ultimate revelation of the laws of nature. 'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light,' exclaimed Alexander Pope. But a glitch was discovered:

A long-standing problem in the study of the Solar System was that the orbit of Mercury did not behave as required by Newton's equations.

The work of Albert Einstein revealed what had happened. Newton's conclusions were based on  observations of non-relativistic phenomena, and worked satisfactorily under those conditions. The Principia was a brilliant analysis of the knowledge of its time. Newton's formulae are still widely used in a wide number of practical cases, where velocity is not even close to the speed of light, and the sort of powerful close-to-a-star gravity well experienced by Mercury is not a factor. In such non-relativistic conditions, Newton's math is far simpler.

Newton's treatment of the regularities of nature is a subset of Einstein's treatment of the regularities of nature. Einstein's propositions and equations apply under a much wider set of conditions. (There was a debate in the USENET discussion group rec.arts.books, where humanities professors could not understand scientists' argument, that to say that Newton was "wrong" and Einstein was "right" is simplistic. Degrees of confidence does not fit an outlook derived essentially from Plato.)

It could be said that Plato's philosophical idealism was an attempt to solve the problem of induction* by deriving all knowledge from deduction, thereby achieving metaphysical certitude. (His model may have been theoretical mathematics, which some mathematicians see as a great structure of a priori truths existing before and outside of the "reality" we think we experience. The idea or Form is a similar a priori construction which is immaterial, eternal, perfect, unchanging, and imperceptible to the senses.)

The scientific/liberal response is that there are no absolutes, and metaphysical certitude is a will-o-the-wisp. The Forms, after all, are off in some invisible Platonic heaven (which only the Philosopher can see). By contrast, "The moderns [liberals] built on low but solid ground" (Leo Strauss quoted by Allan Bloom). Induction can give results which are certain for all practical purposes. Did you ever run across a street dodging cars? In doing so, you wagered your life on where moving cars would be (an ephemeral truth if there ever was one) when you went.

Hypothesis: Plato's effort was doomed from the start for the reason that it is impossible to start from deduction because every deduction is a concealed induction. A familiar universal principle, i.e. deduction, from theoretical mathematics such as "2 plus 2 equals 4" becomes, in applied mathematics,** an induction, such as "2 oranges plus 2 oranges equals 4 oranges." This induction is falsifiable. All it would require is a case where a grocery clerk put 2 oranges in a sack, then another 2 oranges, and the sack, upon inspection, contained any other quantity than 4 oranges.***

"2 plus 2 equals 4" is not necessarily true; if it were, it would be a prophecy about the future which we mortals are not permitted to make. (Nevertheless, most of us do not anticipate a disjuncture between integer mathematics and household purchases.)

For a more wide-ranging discussion of liberal modernity's objection to Plato, see Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?



(*) The problem of induction is that it consists of conclusions derived from observation of physical reality (which Plato calls the realm of "appearances") and, according to Plato, produces "opinion" rather than "knowledge." A future observation could contradict those on which the induction is based—that is the problem.

(**) One can say that Plato engaged in equivocation, acting as if applied mathematics possessed the immutability of theoretical mathematics. (Equivocation: When a key term is used in two different senses in the same passage without acknowledgement. An example of legitimate equivocation (because the reader is aware of it) is Pascal's The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing.)

(***) Perhaps this would be an example of definition (2) above: A truth is that conclusion, from the best available evidence that, when acted on, tends to produce the expected results.

Fundamentals of Liberal Thought

As stated in The Liberal Founding, modern liberalism's immediate antecedent was the scientific revolution of the latter half of the seventeenth century. When Barack Obama remarked, back when he was a senator, We need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology, he was articulating what modern liberalism owes to the scientific outlook.

This is in fundamental conflict with another great influence on our thought, Plato's rejection of empiricism. As Carl Sagan wrote in Cosmos, "Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them."

Which is to say that liberalism will not substitute belief or ideology for evidence and reason where evidence and reason apply. This gave the Founders a rhetorical problem: How to speak of the ground of liberal principles? Reason works from foundations. A syllogism works from two premises, both held to be warranted. But what is a foundation founded on?

The Declaration of Independence, for example, begins

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

"Self-evident?" "Endowed by their Creator?"

Human beings must operate on working assumptions which at the most basic level do not have an antecedent (which would be a more basic level). These values are what, as the Founders wrote, we "hold." Their ground, if any, is not their precedent but their consequences. All that we can ask is that a value be well chosen.

That every person is to start out enjoying equality rather than subservience, and that a universal moral obligation exists to honor each person's right to life, freedom, and autonomy, for example, is not the only choice that could be made. In recent memory a nation declared that the world-historical mission of a master race (its own) should be the paradigm.

One can encounter a relativist argument that, absent proof concerning which is better, the choice is arbitrary, and therefore indefensible.

Liberals answer that they hold with what Fritz Stern* (who had seen the master race concept in action), called "the institutional defense of decency." And hold fast.



(*) as cited in The Liberal Founding

First Quarter 2013 Wrap

The year began with the lengthy Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture, which noted the fashionable nonsense peddled by many humanities academics. It accused today's humanities departments of

• Anti-intellectualism: Countenancing the notion that power can impose its own truth (cf. Nietzsche et al.)
• Anti-intellectualism: Failure to enforce a global prohibition on all argument by fallacy, including ad hominem
• Anti-intellectualism: Rejection of Kant's observation that a good will is the one indispensable intellectual quality, as all the others can be subverted to anti-intellectual and unethical ends
• Anti-intellectualism: Lack of comprehension that the intellectual realm defines an implied ethical order (cf. the cynicism of German idealism). As Benda cried, “humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world.”

Two articles on "passing" defended the right to personal independence, the first of which noted, as differences between liberalism and the assumptions of the left:

It's a free country, and this means that Barry Goldwater gets to be an Episcopalian and Madeleine Albright gets to live as a gentile (when a media discussion arose concerning the fact that Albright is of Jewish descent, someone remarked, "She doesn't want to know from Jewish"). People of African-American descent who don't look black are free to just live as a person and need not deal every day with the identity issues which would arise if they did not pass as white. ...

Privacy is a freedom of enormous value. Privacy means that one is free from being arbitrarily identified with some group, supposed to be in dire plight. It means that one is free from being saddled by others, or by what John Stuart Mill called "social tyranny," with an involuntary obligation to alleviate that plight. As Jim Sleeper observed in Liberal Racism, the assumption that each person of color is to be treated as a "racial delegate" is just wrong. ...

A signature difference between liberal and left is that liberal does not care about identity. As mentioned in these pages before, liberalism is public and civil. One's subculture, race, gender, religion or irreligion, esthetic taste, etc., may be freely enjoyed or ignored under the aegis of the liberal society, but are not otherwise of public concern. "We live . . . free," as Pericles said.

Theoretical Mathematics vs Empirical Mathematics developed a proposition from MetaIntellectual Analysis, above:

Absent convincing evidence to the contrary, it is best to consider every deduction a concealed induction. The general principles of the theoretical approach (and of what was once called Theory) were arrived at by experience. They can in principle be falsified by a future experience. ...

The "problem of induction" is that what is demonstrated by experience can never provide metaphysical certitude. It can be certain for all practical purposes. We can even bet our lives on it (and we do, every day). But that perfect knowledge we would like to have is not attainable. ...

The error of Plato's abstract theory of reality is that it assumes that the real can start with deduction, escaping the provisional nature of the physical. This is an elemental intellectual error.

Executive Power and Imminent Threat argued that administration drone policy looked suspiciously like outmoded notions of the Benevolent Despot:

Non-imminent imminence, extra-judicial capital punishment by the chief executive of people who have not been charged with a crime, are part of a lack of transparency concealing arbitrary exercise of power solely on the basis of the presumed decency, trustworthiness, and inerrant ability to detect guilt, of the person in power. ...
This is not a new theory. It was in vogue for centuries before the rise of modern liberal democracies, before the American colonies rose up against similar presumption of the English King. It is the theory of the Benevolent Despot—the fond hope that a wise and good absolute ruler might be the best form of government of all. ...
It should not be difficult to see what is wrong with this. The question is whether this is a free country. The question is whether we are a free people, with our freedom protected by the indispensable concomitant of freedom, the rule of law.   

"Be proud, do not apologize" noted dissenters to politicized Islam such as Ibn Warraq, who declared:

A democracy cannot survive long without freedom of expression, the freedom to argue, to dissent, even to insult and offend. It is a freedom sorely lacking in the Islamic world, and without it Islam will remain unassailed in its dogmatic, fanatical, medieval fortress; ossified, totalitarian and intolerant. Without this fundamental freedom, Islam will continue to stifle thought, human rights, individuality; originality and truth. ... Do not apologize. This raises another more general problem: the inability of the West to defend itself intellectually and culturally. Be proud, do not apologize. ... The west is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the west that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of enquiry, expression and conscience. ... By defending our values, we are teaching the Islamic world a valuable lesson, we are helping them by submitting their cherished traditions to Enlightenment values. [Original link no longer functional: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398853,00.html]

Wafa Sultan drew attention to a barbarism which cannot be excused under the rubric of "faith":

We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. The Muslims have turned three Buddha statues into rubble. We have not seen a single Buddhist burn down a Mosque, kill a Muslim, or burn down an embassy. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people, and destroying embassies.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values? expanded on another theme of MetaIntellectual Analysis, citing an intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews:

The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds.

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, in the spirit of John Adams' "Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition," discussed some of the signs and wonders of science, including Euler's intriguing equation, e^(πι) = -1, and rejected the claim of runaway scientism that science disproves free will, noting "science is [not] an a priori discipline."

A reprise of the discussion of movement conservatism cruelty argued:

And this is the cruelty of such a mind-set: expanding affordable health care to most Americans, alleviating unnecessary suffering from treatable illness and reducing premature death, is not a factor. Where decent people see a benefit to what Washington called "the public good," these miserable Social Darwinist elitists see only a cynical bribe of the poor. 

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will? argues that there is a Platonist source for this anti-humanist position:

The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science. ...

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

In The Peculiar Claim That Conservatism Simply Is a certain kind of high-flown anti-intellectualism reminded the Dissenter:

Frederick C. Crews parodied this position in 1970 (when aficionados of the Youth Movement began showing up in university classrooms):

Though it is only a short step from this state of mind to the virgin anti-intellectualism of our freshmen who regard all discourse as a profanation of selfhood, we believe our lack of curiosity to be more sophisticated and high-principled. - from "Do Literary Studies Have an Ideology?"

(See The First Six Months' Wrap for earlier posts.)

“What You Can Touch Is Mere Appearance”: Does Science Refute Free Will?

In The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom there was, among other things, a discussion of "the recurrent claim that science 'proves' that free will is an illusion." In an article in The Weekly Standard, "The Heretic," Andrew Ferguson reviews Thomas Nagel's analysis of the same issue in his recent book Mind and Cosmos. "Contemporary philosophers," Ferguson writes,

have a name for the way you and I see the world, a world filled with other people, with colors and sounds, sights and sensations, ... Philosophers call this common view the “manifest image.” Daniel Dennett pointed out at the conference that modern science, at least since the revelations of Darwin, has been piling up proof that the manifest image is not really accurate in any scientific sense. Rather science—this vast interlocking combine of genetics, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, particle physics—tells us that the components of the manifest image are illusory.

What this means, Ferguson continues, is that as geneticist Francis Crick wrote, “ ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.”

Does this sound familiar? In a previous post we cited a liberal philosopher of science:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

Plato's Realm Of Forms states, "this material world ... can only present appearances, which lead us to form opinions, rather than knowledge." The “manifest image” doctrine relegates human experience—including free will and, as we shall see, ethics—to the realm of illusion. It is the anti-science of Plato—his rejection of the material world of human experience and of scientific experiment—masquerading as science.

The contradiction requires a certain amount of double talk:

["Cognitive scientist" and "philosopher of mind"] Daniel Dennett ... [cautioned that] we run a risk when we let this cat, or robot, out of the bag. If we repeatedly tell folks that their sense of free will or belief in objective morality is essentially an illusion, such knowledge has the potential to undermine civilization itself, Dennett believes. Civil order requires the general acceptance of personal responsibility, which is closely linked to the notion of free will. Better, said Dennett, if the public were told that “for general purposes” the self and free will and objective morality do indeed exist—that colors and sounds exist, too—“just not in the way they think.” They “exist in a special way,” which is to say, ultimately, not at all.

The idea of the "noble lie" has characterized elite intelligentsia esotericism ever since Plato: the people's naive belief in a moral order is to be encouraged on consequentialist grounds, says a brighter class of people who are too sophisticated to believe in such outmoded notions. (As always, the retreat to consequentialism suggests a weakness in the principle it shies away from.)

Ferguson adds:

The neo-Darwinian materialist account offers a picture of the world that is unrecognizable to us—a world without color or sound, and also a world without free will or consciousness or good and evil or selves or, when it comes to that, selflessness. “It flies in the face of common sense,” [Nagel] says. Materialism is an explanation for a world we don’t live in.

It leads to a reductio ad absurdum:

[Nagel's] working assumption is, in today’s intellectual climate, radical: If the materialist, neo-Darwinian orthodoxy contradicts common sense, then this is a mark against the orthodoxy, not against common sense. When a chain of reasoning leads us to deny the obvious, we should double-check the chain of reasoning before we give up on the obvious.

One of the things which make science wonderful is that science does not have the concept of heresy. A scientist may advance a hypothesis which is new and unorthodox if he or she can back it up. Reproducible experiment has moved our science well beyond Newtonian science, for example. But as Ferguson notes, materialism "is a premise of science, not a finding."

The Dissenter previously argued, "Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality—and behavior—is deterministic." Ferguson makes a related argument:

Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result.
But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion. 

It is not surprising that these proudly immoralist materialists don't walk the talk:

Fortunately, materialism is never translated into life as it’s lived. As colleagues and friends, husbands and mothers, wives and fathers, sons and daughters, materialists never put their money where their mouth is. Nobody thinks his daughter is just molecules in motion and nothing but; nobody thinks the Holocaust was evil, but only in a relative, provisional sense. A materialist who lived his life according to his professed convictions—understanding himself to have no moral agency at all, seeing his friends and enemies and family as genetically determined robots—wouldn’t just be a materialist: He’d be a psychopath.

And finally there's that problem of the missing reproducible experiment. Is there an experiment which proves that free will (and by implication the possibility of choosing to do good rather than evil) is an illusion? What would such an experiment look like?

The Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom

The title of this post is from 1st Corinthians 1:22, by Saul of Tarsus, known to Christendom as St. Paul. It is an acute observation by Paul, who was both Jew and Greek (and who, as a Roman citizen, could "appeal to Caesar"), of the difference between the third world outlook of his birth religion and the European rationalism of the Hellenistic Near East in which Christianity emerged. (Why the scriptures of the new religion are written in Greek when its founder spoke a third world language is a topic for another article.)

However the subject today is the wonders (i.e., signs) and wisdom of science.

Irene Klotz remarked on a little-noted side effect of the recent apparent discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC): It could portend, in what hopefully will be the far future, the "collapse of the vacuum."

“If you use all the physics that we know now and you do what you think is a straightforward calculation, it’s bad news,” said [Joseph] Lykken, who also serves on the LHC science team. ...
“This calculation tells you that many tens of billions of years from now there’ll be a catastrophe,” Lykken said.
“Essentially, the universe wants to be in different state and so eventually it will realize that. A little bubble of what you might think of an as alternative universe will appear somewhere and then it will expand out and destroy us. So that’ll be very dramatic, but you and I will not be around to witness it,” Lykken told reporters before a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston this week. 

What is this collapse? Over a decade ago the following appeared in an article about possible doomsday scenarios:

Collapse of the vacuum In the book Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut popularized the idea of "ice-nine," a form of water that is far more stable than the ordinary kind, so it is solid at room temperature. Unleash a bit of it, and suddenly all water on Earth transforms to ice-nine and freezes solid. Ice-nine was a satirical invention, but an abrupt, disastrous phase transition is a possibility. Very early in the history of the universe, according to a leading cosmological model, empty space was full of energy. This state of affairs, called a false vacuum, was highly precarious. A new, more stable kind of vacuum appeared and, like ice-nine, it quickly took over. This transition unleashed a tremendous amount of energy and caused a brief runaway expansion of the cosmos. It is possible that another, even more stable kind of vacuum exists, however. As the universe expands and cools, tiny bubbles of this new kind of vacuum might appear and spread at nearly the speed of light. The laws of physics would change in their wake, and a blast of energy would dash everything to bits. "It makes for a beautiful story, but it's not very likely," says Piet Hut of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey. He says he worries more about threats that scientists are more certain of--such as rogue black holes. 

The universe may be safe for the time being, but science as the systematic study of the testable may currently be at risk by the mind-set of string theory.

First, string theory has not posed any new predictions which can be tested, which any scientific theory must do. (As Lawrence Krauss wrote, "Science isn't fair. It's testable.") In other words it is, as Karl Popper argued, "falsifiable." There isn't even a formulation of string theory. Lee Smolin writes in The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, "We are left with as many as 10^500 distinct string theories, ... more than all the atoms in the known universe. ... String theory cannot be disproved."

Second, the feedback from reality characteristic of science, exemplified in formulability and testability, is absent from string theory, so that it lacks the objectivity of science. "How do you fight sociology?" asks a chapter of Trouble With Physics. Genuine science would answer, "with the evidence." But string theory has come to resemble cultism more than science. Smolin notes that many times, "someone invariably asks, 'Well, what does Ed [Witten, a pre-eminent theorist] think?'"
 
The need for string theory is itself occasioned by a rift at the very heart of science. In Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, Physicist Lee Smolin described a situation in which "The Holy Grail of modern physics is a theory of the universe that unites two seemingly opposing pillars of modern science: Einstein's theory of general relativity, which deals with large-scale phenomena (planets, solar systems and galaxies), and quantum theory, which deals with the world of the very small (molecules, atoms, electrons)."

As a customer review notes:

Quantum theory radicalizes our assumptions about the relationship between observer and observed but pretty much buys into Newton's ideas of space and time. General relativity changes our notions of space and time but accepts Newton's view of observer and observed. This situation is deemed unacceptable by most physicists . . .

The fundamental worldview of quantum theory and that of general relativity cannot be reconciled. You might say we have a little problem here.

Another hiccup of science practice today is the recurrent claim that science "proves" that free will is an illusion. A post in Andrew Sullivan's blog asks, "Is free will compatible with physics?":

Sean Carroll:

If there were a vast intelligence — since dubbed Laplace’s Demon — that knew the exact state of the universe at any one moment, and knew all the laws of physics, and had arbitrarily large computational capacity, it could both predict the future and reconstruct the past with perfect accuracy. While this is a straightforward consequence of Newton’s theory, ...

Jerry Coyne, also responding to Pigliucci, thinks determinism should change our understanding of morality:

It’s my contention that, in light of the physical determinism of behavior, there’s no substantive difference between someone who kills because they have a brain tumor that makes them aggressive (e.g., Charles Whitman), and someone who kills because a rival is invading their drug business.  We need to reconceive our judicial system in light of what science tells us about how the mind works. And that’s why discussing the bearing of neuroscience and philosophy on free will is far more important than our usual academic discourse.

A year ago, a New Scientist article asserted:

Early last month, a Nobel laureate physicist finished polishing up his theory that a deeper, deterministic reality underlies the apparent uncertainty of quantum mechanics. A week after he announced it, two eminent mathematicians showed that the theory has profound implications beyond physics: abandoning the uncertainty of quantum physics means we must give up the cherished notion that we have free will.

Note how the author psychologizes the position criticized, as if the possibility that free will is valued constituted evidence against it. This fails the test of scientific objectivity.

The problem with these "scientists" is that they are are acting if science is an a priori discipline. It is as if a colleague of Newton's time were to declare, based on his understanding of "known science," that the postulates of quantum mechanics and general relativity are disproved by science. This colleague would have been elevating his understanding of scientific theory above genuine science, where practice--experimental result--trumps theory.

Science seeks those areas of reality which are deterministic. When successful, this approach produces valid predictions. But nothing about this approach proves that all of reality--and behavior--is deterministic. Unless a scientific experiment can be devised which provides a definitive test of free will, science cannot be said to either prove or disprove free will.

To conclude, a wonder of science (well, mathematics):

e^(πι) = -1

(e to the power of pi-times-i equals minus one) where e is the base of the natural logarithm, π is the ratio of circumference to diameter, and ι is the square root of -1. This formulation shows a profound relationship between fundamental constants of nature.

Footnotes to Plato: Is Your Child's Humanities Professor Scornful of Your Values?

‘The theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy.’ (cited by Alvin Lim, below)

The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. - Plato, Laws 659a-b (also Laws 659a-b)

Whatever quibbles one might want to offer about Lilla's discussion of particular cases, he makes a convincing case that the impact of philosophical Platonism on European history has been overwhelmingly negative. Lilla amply confirms the view of Karl Popper that Plato, speaking in the voice of the fictional Socrates of the Republic, was the first and greatest enemy of the open society. - John Quiggin, reviewing Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics

Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. ... The anti-empirical taint ... survives to this day. ... What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. ... In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. ... The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)*

Book 8 of The Republic: “These and other kindred characteristics are proper to democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequals alike.” - Plato (Cited in The Condition of Equality Today)

The word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and ... this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes ...
Generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)**

In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. — Angela Hobbs***

This is a continuation of some of the arguments in Intellectual Prudence: MetaIntellectual Analysis of Intellectual Subculture. The proposition is that there is a theory, originating symbolically with Plato, that the intellectual has a privileged form of knowledge which l'homme moyen sensuel—the average nonintellectual man—cannot know. Plato taught that the reality experienced by the senses is an appearance generated by invisible Forms (ideas) existing in a sort of Platonic heaven:

“In Parmenides and in Plato, we shall even find the belief that the changing world we live in is an illusion, and that behind it lies a more real world which does not change.” - Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies

The philosopher (the intellectual) sees this underlying reality via a faculty—a form of "insight"—not available to the rest of us:

Alvin Lim: Plato’s argument for the inherent weakness of democracy in its potential to collapse into tyranny is strongly linked to his metaphysics, in particular his Theory of Forms. [4] In Plato’s ideal city the rulers are the Philosopher Rulers who have undergone the education sufficient for them to gain access to the Form of the Good, which allows them to know what justice is and hence to be able to rule the city justly (479e-484e). Since it is only the philosophers who have access to the Form of the Good, non-philosophers lack access to the Form of the Good and hence do not know what justice is. And since non-philosophers do not know what justice is, they cannot rule the city justly. Hence Cross and Woozley cite Adam’s comment that ‘the theory of Ideas is not a democratic philosophy’, [5] and this also explains what Finley describes as ‘Plato’s persistent objection to the role of shoemakers and shopkeepers in political decision making’. Zeitlin notes that in Laws 659a-b, Plato argues that:

Whether it is a matter of art, music or politics, it is only the ‘best men’ who are capable of true judgement. The true judge must not allow himself to be influenced by the gallery nor intimidated by the clamour of the multitude. Nothing must compel him to hand down a verdict that belies his own convictions. It is his duty to teach the multitude and not to learn from them. [6]

[Original link no longer active: web.singnet.com.sg/~chlim/plato.html]

Is there any truth in this? I repeat what I wrote in Analysis of Intellectual Subculture: "Extreme as this may sound, it resonates with my own experience. I attended two humanities classes of a major state university the day after the historic presidential election of 2008, certain that there would be at least some reaction to the opening of the presidency to minorities. After all, isn't diversity a mantra of the academic left? But it was business as usual."

As that long-suffering intellectual critic of intellectualists, Frederick C. Crews, wrote:

["Skeptical Engagements"] By the mid-eighties, many academic humanists had already contracted the bad habit of labeling “right wing” all dissent not only from the overt politicizing of academic life but also from poststructuralist theory, including its component of esoteric Lacanian Freudianism. In the increasingly conformist atmosphere that has ruled the universities from then until now, scorn is routinely heaped on the ordinary liberalism to which I have long subscribed. And anyone who explicitly upholds rationality within the framework of a discipline will now be suspected of following a sinister hidden agenda,
... Those themes are the specific failings of Freudian psychoanalysis; the nature, appeal, and consequences of closed, self-validating doctrines; the resultant indispensability of an empirical (evidence-oriented) point of view; and the dubious effects of literary-critical methods that spurn that point of view. The several themes really come down to just one: the fear of facing the world, including its works of literature, without an intellectual narcotic ready at hand.
To “do theory” these days, as that expression is understood by department chairs who hope to load their ranks with a full panoply of “theorists,” is not to maintain a thesis against likely objections, but rather to strike attitudes that will identify one as a loyal follower of some figure—a Roland Barthes, a Jacques Derrida, a Michel Foucault, a Jacques Lacan, a Fredric Jameson—who has himself made unexamined claims about the nature of capitalism or patriarchy or Western civilization or the collective unconscious or the undecidability of knowledge. Such gurus are treasured, I suspect, less for their specific creeds than for the invigorating Nietzschean scorn they direct at intellectual prudence. The rise of “theory” has resulted in an irrationalist climate in the strictest sense—that is, an atmosphere in which it is considered old-fashioned and gullible to think that differences of judgment can ever be arbitrated on commonly held grounds. (some of this material from www.cybereditions.com/cyextract.pdf)

Notes on starred material:
(*) Ordinary people were to be kept ignorant of the dodecahedron [because it was thought to represent a fifth essence (quintessence) that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies]. p. 151
A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens, but not to waste their time observing them. p. 152
Xenophon's opinion was: "What are called the mechanical arts carry a social stigma and are rightly dishonoured in our cities." [Cf. disdain for the banausic.] As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years. Without experiment, there is no way to choose among contending hypotheses, no way for science to advance. The anti-empirical taint of the Pythagoreans survives to this day. . . . What slaves characteristically perform is manual labor. But scientific experimentation is manual labor, from which the slaveholders [such as Plato] are preferentially distanced; while it is only the slaveholders--politely called "gentlemen" in some societies--who have the leisure to do science. p. 153
In the suppression of disquieting facts, the sense that science should be kept for a small elite, the distaste for experiment, the embrace of mysticism and the easy acceptance of slave societies, they set back the human enterprise. After a long mystical sleep in which the tools of scientific inquiry lay mouldering, the Ionian approach . . . was finally rediscovered. The Western world reawakened. Experiment and open inquiry became once more respectable. . . .
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. p. 155 - Carl Sagan, Cosmos (Emphasis added)

(**) In philosophy [idealism] refers to efforts to account for all objects in nature and experience as representations of the mind and sometimes to assign to such representations a higher order of existence. It is opposed to materialism. Plato conceived a world in which eternal ideas constituted reality, of which the ordinary world of experience is a shadow.
And that was why you could figure it all out: if you could somehow attune yourself to that higher order of existence, you'd automatically know it all. And those who had come closer to achieving such enlightenment were therefore more wise than anyone else, and should be able to wield power over the others.
It's important to emphasize that the word "idealism" is a technical word in philosophy, and that this usage has little to do with the common usage of that term, which refers to dedication to achieving ideal outcomes without making compromises. ...
Of the three sides, [philosophical idealism] as a political force is the oldest. There's continuity going back to the pre-Christian Greeks, and generally [philosophical idealism] has been associated with hierarchized societies ruled by an elite, embrace of dogma, and intolerance of dissent. - Stephen Den Beste (Emphasis added)

(***) Plato's radical conceptions in the Republic of justice, social harmony, education, and freedom are enormously rich and have informed the thought of philosophers as diverse as Rousseau, Hegel, and J. S. Mill; his attitudes to property, the family, and the position of women have also proved highly influential. His ideal, however, has also come in for some fierce criticism. The convenient match claimed between the division of natural talents and the class divisions required by the state has been regarded as entirely without foundation. In making the state more important than its parts, and allowing it to enter every sphere of the individual's life, Plato has been accused of totalitarianism, while charges of paternalism have been laid against the claim that the Philosopher-Rulers alone know what is best for the other classes. Nor are there any legal checks on the Rulers' behaviour. Their methods of rule are also problematic: the analogy drawn between the Producers and the unreasoning appetites raises questions about whether the Producers can really be willingly persuaded or whether they have to be forced, and Plato's language is ambivalent on this point. In any case, the means of persuasion are themselves disturbing, involving both propaganda and extreme censorship of the arts. — Angela Hobbs