The term “junk science” has gained unprecedented currency in recent years as flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate denialists and young earth creationists march triumphantly into mainstream discourse. The so-called science that states autism is a parasite and can be driven out by force-feeding bleach to your kids or that which states fossils can be formed on the surface of the ground in less than a decade is distinct from merely false claims or false conclusions. It is a body of pseudo-knowledge with its own journals, experiments, training, museums and twisted logics. In this way, it bears some resemblance to abandoned and rejected scientific theories of the past, like Galenic humoral medicine with its prescribed bleedings.
One of the reasons that liberals and progressives who wish to accelerate climate change typically embrace climate nihilism over denialism is their discomfort with junk science. Despite its battered state, liberalism’s allegiance to actual science has actually increased in recent years as liberals and progressives have backed away from the more vulgar representations of the postmodern critique, now that it is being used by characters like Rick Santorum to deny climate change.
For this reason, it is generally but mistakenly thought that progressives do not embrace junk science but this is an error. Progressives, and liberals generally, do embrace junk science, just not in the hard sciences. The liberal commitment to anthropological and sociological junk science is every bit as deep as that of those outside the collapsing liberal consensus. There are many reasons for this but the first and by far the most important is that liberalism is necessarily premised on junk science.
The foundation of liberalism is social contract theory, a theory explicitly based on the best cutting-edge anthropology of pre-literate human civilizations seventeenth century Europe could produce. Social contract theory was developed by Thomas Hobbes as part of a multi-part internally consistent argument advanced in Leviathan. The foundation of this argument, as declared by Hobbes himself, was a theory about what early humans were like and how the first human societies emerged. Because there was not yet a theory of evolution, a discipline of primatology or such thing as anthropological fieldwork, no one can fault Hobbes for his methods or the theory he generated using them. Here is what Hobbes thought primitive humans were like.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man. For war consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting, but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time is to be considered in the nature of war, as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather lieth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war consisteth not in actual fighting, but in the known disposition thereto during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is peace.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hobbes believed that human beings’ original and natural state was a pre-social “state of nature” upon which blank slate society had to be constructed.
John Locke, who further elaborated liberalism offered his own theory of human beings’ natural state, on which his social contract theory was also premised, offers a sunnier vision of human beings’ natural state:
O understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.
A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the lord and master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of his will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the third father of social contract theory offers yet a more optimistic and sunny vision of the natural human state:
The most ancient of all societies, and the only one that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the obedience they owed to the father, and the father, released from the care he owed his children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then maintained only by convention.
This common liberty results from the nature of man. His first law is to provide for his own preservation, his first cares are those which he owes to himself; and, as soon as he reaches years of discretion, he is the sole judge of the proper means of preserving himself, and consequently becomes his own master. The family then may be called the first model of political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only for their own advantage. The whole difference is that, in the family, the love of the father for his children repays him for the care he takes of them, while, in the State, the pleasure of commanding takes the place of the love which the chief cannot have for the peoples under him.
In this way, we see that liberalism is premised on a set of non-identical but equally scientifically false descriptions of the origins of society, descriptions that are unanimous in these crucial errors:
- that human beings begin in a pre-social state, that social bonds among humans began only after we became human beings and only after such faculties as speech and tool-making developed;
- that there exists no natural centripetal attraction among human beings, that we have no natural desire to be in accord or compliance with the other human beings around us and will only seek to group-up when it is rational and profitable to do so; and
- that private property existed prior to any social order recognizing it.
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Today, the human sciences tell us that this is all hogwash, that Aristotle, 2400 years ago, had a better sense of pre-literate societies than the founders of liberalism did. And since the last of these texts was published in 1762, no major discovery in the human sciences has produced the slightest revision in liberal ideology, even though the past 256 years have yielded enormous advances in understandings of how human beings form societies in both the past and present.
Like biblical literalists who happily accept the material gains produced by the Darwin-Mendel synthesis even though it requires a recognition of evolutionary genetics, liberals are perfectly happy to recognize discoveries in anthropology, primatology, sociology, psychology, neurology and psychiatry, just as long as those discoveries are understood to exist in a separate domain of human truth that does not impinge on the theories of truth.
A similar situation existed in the Middle Ages when it came to astronomy. It was “known” that the sun, moon, each planet and the “plane of fixed stars” were each contained in a crystalline sphere made of an indestructible, transparent substance known as the Quintessence and that each body could only move in circular motions. But it was obvious, long before Copernicus offered a heliocentric universe, that this did not account for the movements people saw in the heavens. So, universities split astronomy into two disciplines: Physical Astronomy, which contained the crystalline spheres and Mathematical Astronomy, which made accurate calculations of astronomical events. While Mathematical Astronomy was used day-to-day, it was not considered “true.” That was the sole domain of Physical Astronomy.
In the same way, when it comes to making academic inquiries into how human beings make choices, behave in groups, agree to do things, construct their priorities or try to hold onto inanimate objects, liberals are happy to concede the predictive power of the human sciences. Unless these things impinge on law, politics or economics; these domains must be understood only using debunked seventeenth and eighteenth-century junk science.
Worse yet, like the discipline of Physical Astronomy, liberal social junk science has continued to function as a parallel line of intellectual inquiry walled-off from the mainstream of the human sciences. In this vein, we see a particularly hamfisted and uncritical reading of the largely discredited work of psychologist Abraham Maslow taught in nearly every business school, decades after its marginalization within the field of psychology.
Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” presumes that people will/should meet their material needs before meeting any social needs. First, individuals must sort out their food, housing, clothes and a steady stream of income before they can/should get involved in making art, socializing, having fun, etc. This, of course, presumes that human beings were born into industrial consumer societies with low unemployment rates and high demand for non-coerced labour. The reality, whether one is living in a primitive hominid group or in a modern city based on the “gig economy,” one’s best guarantee of safety is a social network that can work together to stay employed, housed, fed and clothed. While this has been recognized in peer reviewed anthropology for a half a century, in the fields of knowledge that determine the actions of the state, this information cannot depose the junk science of liberalism.
How is this junk science held in place, then? It is held in place through an intellectual sleight of hand older than liberalism, itself, one we find just as evident in Aristotelian theories of law, politics and economy. Note that in the paragraph above my use of “will/should” and “can/should”—this is the main way junk social science functions. It offers models that are supposed to be concurrently a description of how the world operates and how it should operate; consequently, whenever these models fail to predict or explain events, it is not because of a flaw in the model but instead because of a flaw in reality.
You know this routine: every time there is an election in which voters do not vote based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in which they “vote against their economic interests,” by which commentators mean that they do not choose the party/platform that gives them the most materially the most affordably, it is the fault of the voters, not the model of personal advantage maximization that has once against failed to predict events. In this way, junk science that fails to predict or explain events, again and again, is excused by what social scientists call “blaming the world.”
In fact what has happened is typically wholly explicable through normal social science. But this explanation cannot function as the primary explanation in our discourse because if it did, we might question not just the premising of electoral politics on falsehoods but the premising of our economic and legal relations on it too, perhaps questioning the justice and reasonableness of such things as contracts, consent and consumer choice.
More disquieting yet, it might bring into question the bedrock on which all of these things rest: the Hobbesian falsehood of the autonomous, aware, pre-social self.
