No Going Back: The Promise and Peril of Scientific Progress
Between Worship and Denial Lies A 'Middle Way' For Thinking About Science
Like opening Pandora’s Box, scientific understanding unleashed a tidal wave of disruptive forces that would go on to reshape our material reality. While propelling us to new heights of prosperity and potential, these advancements left a cascade of mounting externalities in their wake. The stakes of these mounting costs? Catastrophe, if humanity continues to kick the can down the road until it's too late to change course.
If scientific advancement has courted unforeseen existential risks, then why pursue it? Because its gifts have been an existential boon for mankind. The cumulative scope of scientific progress goes far beyond the laboratory - of the 8 billion people in the world today, as much as 75% wouldn't be alive without the agricultural and medical advances that modern science has unlocked. In four centuries the average global life expectancy has more than doubled - ballooning from an estimated 30-35 to 73 - owing to sharp decreases in infant mortality and drastic improvements in disease prevention and treatment. A host of deadly, debilitating illnesses that have been the scourge of mankind since the dawn of civilization - from smallpox to polio to malaria - have been eradicated or significantly controlled thanks to scientific medicine. The global literacy rate skyrocketed from a paltry 10% to a remarkable 86% in the last four centuries, thanks to a confluence of scientific advancements in printing technology, public health, and education.
In sum: the cumulative impact of these developments extends far beyond any single breakthrough or invention. Contrary to its bastardized image as a technological Santa Claus, peddled by commercial interests who would reduce it to mere gadget-making, science has been the catalyst for an unprecedented transformation of daily life on a global scale. As the Grinch discovered with Christmas, perhaps science means just a little bit more.
With such profound achievements, it's a legacy that advocates for science proudly defend - and rightly so. This is especially important at a time when science is under sustained assault by bad actors with a vested interest in undermining its hard-won credibility. At the same time, the mere existence of bad-faith criticism shouldn't prevent nuanced examinations of science's strengths and limitations. Allowing these politically motivated attacks to create a chilling effect where all critical examination of science is viewed with suspicion is to cede the narrative to those who don’t deserve a seat at the table.
The takeaway? Critical examination - when mindful and informed - serves a vital purpose. Far from undermining science, this honest self-reflection is necessary if it’s to play a constructive role in humanity’s search for meaning. While it might be objected that science can't tell us what to value - as Hume observed, we can't derive an 'ought' from an 'is' - its ability to ground our ideas in verifiable realities makes it an essential voice in these discussions. This grounding role points to how we should understand science - not as a mere accumulation of facts and theories that mirror a fixed, perspectiveless Reality, but as an activity that must be interpreted and integrated with other forms of human understanding. At its core, the story of science is the story of humanity.
This human story, however, isn't a simple tale of progress. From the American Revolution to works of fiction such as Star Wars, the folk-image of revolutions often leans towards romantic oversimplification. In the real world however, revolutions tend to be messy, complicated affairs with mixed outcomes - and scientific revolutions are no exception to this. Case in point: the same principles that electrified our cities can also be used to burn them to the ground. The advancements which brought us our global, interconnected society have also given autocrats the ability to consolidate power and resources on a scale that would have been envied by ancient God-emperors. The very technologies that turbocharged our productive capacity also enable pervasive surveillance, hyper-targeted propaganda that exploits precise psychological vulnerabilities, and an industrial-scale dehumanization of labor - creating new levers of power far beyond what was possible in previous eras. In other words, science has given institutions more effective tools to monitor, influence, and control - not just variables in an experiment, but living, thinking human beings as well.
An entrenched elite, whose short-term interests are at odds with our civilization’s long-term survival, have channeled considerable resources into stonewalling efforts to address mounting technological externalities. Centuries of fossil fuel dependence have created a crushing ecological debt that will be paid one way or another - either through selective changes to how we organize our society, or through a cataclysmic change that’s forced on us. Meanwhile, the advent of artificial intelligence threatens to amplify these power imbalances even further - giving those with a vested interest in resisting change more powerful tools to maintain their grip on our collective future.
So how do we respond to these challenges? While it might be tempting to retreat to the comforting myth of a romanticized past, the stark reality is that science has become too deeply woven into the fabric of modern life to simply abandon. In spite of protracted hostility from vested interests who are working to undermine its credibility, science remains the voice of authority in our culture - evidenced by how even propaganda that denies climate change comes cloaked in faux-scientific arguments. Whether we're grappling with the Meaning Crisis or confronting existential threats, we must do so in dialogue with science's authority and credibility. Since the genie can’t be put back in the bottle, the only path forward lies in understanding both the power and limitations of scientific thinking.
Given its unparalleled success in demystifying problems that have bedeviled our best and brightest for thousands of years, it can be quite tempting to see science as a literal mirror of Reality. As if the scientific method is the key to a universal cipher with ready-made answers for all aspects of our existence. This presupposes that Reality itself is a problem to be solved - which leaves aside the possibility that existence is also a mystery to be experienced. But this isn't a lament that science has ‘unweaved the rainbow’ by demystifying natural phenomena. Quite the contrary - we’d be fools to throw away the explanatory power of science out of nostalgic longing for a simpler world. With this in mind, there’s little doubt that science has a central role to play in our search for meaning - its importance in keeping our ideas grounded in verifiable realities is beyond doubt. Instead, the more interesting question is whether there are important aspects of ourselves that can’t be fully captured by its models. If so, how do we synthesize scientific models with other methodologies that deal more directly with our lived perspective within Reality - and what might that dialogue look like?
As we approach the finish line for this chapter, our target becomes clear: the perceived significance of our scientific models. Even as these models allow us to develop increasingly precise approximations of Reality, we should be extraordinarily careful about confusing the model for the manifestation. Without epistemological rigor it becomes all too easy to confuse our abstractions about Reality for Reality itself. In our conclusion, we’ll see how the extraordinary success of science has perpetuated a type of Scientific Realism, which makes sweeping metaphysical claims that go well beyond what these methods can actually justify.