It’s no surprise to my long-term readers that I am deeply, some say obsessively interested in the doings and findings of science and what science means for us as real-live human beings stumbling through this mortal plane.
My recent attitudes to science have not come to favorable judgments.
This leads some readers to the too-hasty conclusion that I am “anti-science”.
Hardly.
First thing to understand:
If you are relating to science as if it were a religion that one properly “believes in”, or fails to, you’ve misunderstood the thing.
Science is a systematic process of discovery.
It advances ideas and tests them against reality. Ideally it would test ideas against reality, that is, but reality is hard to come by these days. Often enough a hypothesis or model is tested against other slightly older hypotheticals or models that have not so much been “proven” as much as passed the gauntlet of peer review and sniffy senior faculty who already have their own prestige and careers to defend.
The ideal of science is solid. The human realities of science-as-really-done lead to less enthusiastic conclusions.
The irony is that the ignorance, the constant false starts and dead ends, the veil of uncertainty hanging over it all, these are desirable features rather than unwanted bugs.
But human psychology is such that we crave certainty. We want hard truths and absolute statements. If we don’t find them, we’ll create them.
That predicament puts good science at cross purposes with a happy psyche.
Something odd happened over the last 15 years with all this new media screaming into the eyes of the public 24/7.
Science solidified into a religion of idols. It has priests, who hand down the dogma to the congregation. The word of the priests is law as incontestable as if it were handed down in stone tablets from on high. Apostates and heretics to the law are punished with shaming and shunning.
You don’t believe Science? What are you a moron?
It’s worse than that! I don’t trust The Science™ because I know how it works from the inside, right down at the engines that push it along. It isn’t the kind of thing that one would trust in.
The invasion of the idols of science is nowhere more evident in our lives than in the areas of health and medicine.
Since these directly concern how we live, and how well we live, what we think of as “healthy” and “sick”, and thanks to certain recent panics, how we conduct the business of society, you can’t ignore the priests of health and their official edicts.
I’m at the age now where I’d be getting pestered for all the health screenings and all the drugs I’m supposed to be on and all the neurotic obsessions with monitoring “the data” that I’m supposed to have.
All I have to say to that is 2020 was a wake-up call to me as far as how health, fear of mortality, and social control wrap up into a tidy package.
I am not convinced that most of these ever-so-necessary screenings do what they claim or even can do what they claim to do. If the goal is to extend life-span and quality of lived-life, most of your common screens for cancer and such are next to useless.
More disturbing is that some of the screenings and treatments create the illness they claim to prevent or cure.
When you’re working with a living body, there is no dispassionate observation. You’ve got to poke it with needles, dump drugs into the blood, blast it with invisible death-rays, and do things that are frankly horrific and ghastly.
Every scan and test does its own damage to the whole organism.
Years ago I read a book by Gerd Gigerenzer, who has many interesting things to say about how the human mind processes statistics, about how statistics are fed to us. You can present probabilities in ways that make natural sense to us. You can also present the numbers in unintuitive ways that confuse more than they clarify.
Guess which one the news media, and even a shocking number of working doctors and health scientists, go for. (Don’t spend much time on this. You know the answer.)
For one example: Most men over age 65 have prostate cancer. You surprised by that?
Well, it also happens that most men with prostate cancer will not live long enough for it to become evident to them, much less cause problems. They’ll die of something else, even natural causes, before it becomes an issue.
Yet the screenings and treatments for prostate cancer end up 1) creating a lot of damage and 2) doing little if anything to extend life span.
This isn’t just Matt making up things. It’s right there, ironically enough, in the published science itself. I’ve got an article below for you to check out, and I highly recommend that you do.
This is science working at its best, by the way, when it turns its jaundiced eye back on itself and strips away the pride and pretensions of the know-it-alls looking for clout among the priests.
Science, if we can even speak of such a thing, is too vast and complicated for any one mind or even any single discipline to keep track of. One specialist gets so deep into one narrow silo that they don’t see the bigger picture. Often they forget that there is any picture but the one in square in front of their noses.
But then the TV latches on to that guy’s hobby horse and you’ve got you an Expert that you’ve got to believe or else.
As I always hammer home, life is more complicated than our numbers and rules.
We project our numbers and rules over the stuff of nature like a fisherman casting his net over the ocean. You learn something from the exercise of tossing the net, but the knowledge has a lot more to do with the net and the person throwing it than it does with the water.
What we don’t know is always impressively larger than what we do.
You and I are far more ignorant, today, with all our knowledge of physics and cosmology and biology, than a Greek peasant in the 3rd century BC.
He was ignorant. We are stupendously, magnificently lost in in the wonder and terror of our existence.
We really do not understand Life with a capital L. We aren’t even sure of the essentials of what we’re fooling around with. Nature does what she’s gonna do and we dream that we have more control over that than we do.
But we love those certainties. They make us feel good and sleep soundly at night. If we don’t have them, we’ll make them up.
Anyway, here’s the article that got me thinking on this.
It is very much worth your time if you’re caught up in the health-industrial complex, or know someone who is:
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/the-12-screenings-that-manufacture
Matt Perryman