Failed amulets: when fear creates false gods.

Thanks to Dr. Jeffrey Funk who made a provocative post today regarding an editorial about the retreat form science that has been occuring in the aftermath of the pandemic. It provided a great intro to what I've been writing about this for the newsletter. We are starting a four week hiatus at Singular XQ to plan our next season and to plan for the new year. So I’m using this time to work on some longer pieces. We will be returning to our short form newsletter soon. Stay tuned. This will also appear on our newsletter on Ghost. Please check it out through our website at www.singularxq.org which is under construction.

Ever ancient, ever new: scientism, it’s what’s for breakfast.

Dr. Funk wrote about how the dogmatism of science is making it hard for opposing views to be aired. This is not a new thing, scientific dogmatism, or "scientism". It's a very old thing going back to the ancient Greeks and evidence of it in the flourishing cultures of Egypt and Africa from whom the Greeks borrowed heavily. It simply resurfaces with force in moments of crisis.

Popular figures like Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson (whom I enjoy with a voluptuous grain of salt) are poster children for this logical fallacy where they position themselves as pure reason and religion as the dogmatic irrational force, when their belief in science in some ways resembles what they call out in the non-reasonable believers of religion.

Eugenics, racism, and religion, oh my.

Nor is the rejection of science, a grand retreat from science and a distrust of the scientific establishment unique in history. As our friend Pete Dietert points out in Dr. Funk's comments, social media with it’s gladiator style thumbs up thumbs down does make it worse. However, it is a self-similar pattern with the early 20th century. In the aftermath of the flu pandemic, there was a surge of anti-science groups and it was followed by a resurgence of the worst kinds of pseudoscience like eugenics, a burst of racism, and also increased numbers of people joining alternative religions like Christian Science. It's the evidence of a society enduring a mass trauma and recovering. I wrote about mass trauma for my master's degree studies and how it affected cultural performances and will share some of the research at a later date. In short, when there is mass death and the threat of death in large swaths of the population cultural identity undergoes a kind of anxiety, where the search for "authentic originals" becomes a kind of cultural obsession. The authentic TRUTH. Authentic masculinity/feminity. Authentic cultural identity. Nostalgia and a desire for simpler times (that perhaps never existed).

Hey JP, but what about the accelerating change of tech innovation? What about that? Huh? Isn’t that different? So radically NEW?

There was also a burst of technological advance around this time (just like there was around the Black Death and the Renaissance). After the flu was: telecoms (first transatlantic phone call), penicillin, silent films, internal combustion engine, the enclosed car, electrical manufacturing. What's the actionable insight here? That's a longer conversation, but soften your gaze and appreciate that none of these forecast a paticular kind of social doom. Forecasting doom is what individuals do when the uncertainty of the future is so uncomfortable it’s more comfortable to believe in the certainty of disaster.

Around of all of that legitimate innovation, also remember there was Charles Ponzi, Piltdown Man, goat testicle transplants, radium water cures, and Abrams fake electronic diagnosis machine. You dig my crazy mouth music here, right? It’s mixed in. Together.

You can believe that science is a good and still acknolwedge It's healthy to question the role of science and to expose some of its shortcomings. It's healthy to purge some pathologies of thought that rise to the surface like an infection. I think of it like a Herxheimer reaction. It's when symptoms of infection worsen because of bacterial die off. Change creates a comical exaggeration of that which is about to die. Think of the figures looming large in the media and technology and the names of their innovations, right now and you'll see what I'm saying. Change is good. And even if it isn't. Unavoidable. But it usually comes with some struggle and pain.

Be a little uncomfortable at times. It’s ok.

It’s comforting to remember that in the past cycle two big things suffered a public execution on display in real time. The unassailability of science and the validity of the internet created "Q prophecies.” I know it’s uncomfortable for those of us who believe in higher learning and the quest for knowledge to compare the Q prophecies to science. But all of us erect false gods inside our preferred domains and bow down to them, myself included. (I have a tendency to be romantic about higher learning, science, and art. And Tolkien and early Star Wars.) It doesn’t invalidate the higher domain, but the absurd deposition of them allows us to step back and relax a little and realize all of us are uncertain about all things and we search for degrees of certainty. That’s it. We never get there, entirely. It doesn’t de-validate the quest.

The Q prophecies are a false god in the legitimate fight against government corruption and a de-evolution of power down to the lowest levels of power. States rights and more libertarian ideas of governance, fiscal conservatism—none of them irrational ideas by themselves and deserve a place in our dialectical style of government. Scientism is false god that claims science is somehow not governed by the same human foibles and fiefdoms, and thought control that all human organizations are subject to. The art of science and mathematics (yes they are arts in the most literal sense) is still valuable and noble and signs of our humanness. You might lean one way or the other in these debates. I know I do. I know where I feel more comfortable.

But the moment I fail to acknowledge that comfort—that desire for it—and claim certainty, I become something I claim to fight.

The suppression of thought.

I think we are about to see another technological false god crumble as well—but these gods, as myth tell us have many lives and incarnations. Don’t they? :)