Dostoevsky already spoke about the dominant force of our days, which everyone worships, and its name is semi-science. Dostoevsky nowhere specifies exactly what he means, but clarification is not necessary. The birth of semi-science is in the twilight, where the luxury of striving for truth ends and the craft of gaining benefits begins. At the time when Russia was dominated by the Bolsheviks, science was seen solely as an industrial force, a source of benefits necessary for peace and for war. In fact, the ‘free West’ of those years looked at it in the same way. In a word, in the 20th century, both the ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ worlds, when speaking of science, meant precisely a semi-science: a service force that had no independent morality, much less a worldview. The worldview ended with the 19th century, an epoch of great inner freedom with certain external restrictions.
This may need clarification. Most believe that only the 20th century emancipated man definitively; the crown of the last liberator of nations is contested between socialism and liberalism, one in the East, the other in the West… The old order demanded respect for a certain hierarchy of values and persons, but left a great deal of room for personal, mental independence. In short, the freedom of the individual was restricted, but independence was protected. In contrast, the recent era has given the individual ‘freedom’, more or less imaginary, taking away even the shadow of independence. This has affected upbringing, education, mental development…
No, even otherwise it should be said. The modern age certainly did not and could not give the individual any universal ‘freedom’. All it could do was to abolish a number of former prohibitions, or, moreover, to declare the reprehensible praiseworthy. One cannot give ‘freedom in general’, but one can give freedom not to go to church; freedom to blaspheme; freedom to preach atheism; freedom to destroy the accepted forms of social life… up to a certain limit, of course. The individual was given the freedom to harm the individual, i. e. himself or his neighbour, but not the state.
It would seem, why should a man of science care about social upheavals and newly granted ‘freedoms’? As it turned out, they concern him in the most direct way. One of the main conquests of modern times has been the removal of Christianity from public and private life, even in those external and superficial forms which have been inherent in it in the last two centuries. Gone was Christianity — gone was the moral ground beneath our feet. Suddenly, almost overnight, everything became possible; at least, everything that Cæsar or the all-powerful state wanted. ‘Personal peculiarity’, those petty ‘whims’ in defence of which J. S. Mill had hoped, paled in comparison with the ‘peculiarity’ and ‘whims’ of the state, which had at last freed itself from the ‘prejudice’ of its divine origin, and found that only its powers set a limit to its possibilities. Assyria and Babylon were resurrected and went out to battle; this is the only way to describe the transformations experienced by the states of modern times. The man of science became the most faithful servant and the most necessary ally of the new empires. The ancient alliance of the state with the Church was dissolved; Science took its place, and the first thing demanded of it was the sword.
Science had to serve. And since higher education, as it spreads, produces a diminishing number of creators and an increasing number of executors, there was no shortage of servants. It is not in the interest of any school of science, as I said above, to educate independent-minded critics. As science and thought diverge further and further, more and more scientists are engaged in pursuits that do not require mental independence or mental effort at all. Theirs is the realm of semi-science, or in other words, mental craft.
What I say sounds deadly offensive to some people, but I see the fact and point it out, without wishing to offend anyone. A professional has come here, too, and under his hands science has become a craft from creativity. Professional science does not seek answers to the Great Questions, most often (for dark, purely psychological reasons) believing these questions to be either solved, or not worthy of attention, or non-existent; instead, it serves the tasks set by earthly rulers.
I have not mentioned the great questions for nothing. Ever since the scientist parted with any broad worldview — and this happened simultaneously with his liberation from Christian morality — he has naturally lost his taste for everything that does not fit into the laboratory. However, this loss of taste for metaphysics somehow strangely coexists (strangely but naturally — remember what I said about the death of philosophy as a school of conscientious thought) with the craving for arbitrary, broad and rather fantastic constructions supposedly justified by experimental data. I am speaking, of course, of the metaphysical theories of Marx, Darwin, and Freud, these three pillars of modern not even metaphysics (because metaphysics is usually pursued by philosophically sophisticated minds), but mythology. One cannot call these constructions metaphysics because one cannot extract from them, if one wants to, anything that would guide one in this world; Marxism or Freudianism cannot be sources of any ethics, although a Marxist or Freudian in his life may adhere (so to speak, by smuggling) to the rules of Christian morality… Real metaphysics is the teaching not only of what happens to the world when we cannot peek at it, but also of the meaning of these accidents, which include our life and death.
The mythology that guides the man of semi-science shows us the majestic ghosts of Evolution, Natural Selection, Libido and Class Struggle, but the actions of these ghosts have no meaning, the drama has no content, the spectators swarm among the ghostly scenery like gnats on a summer day. ‘Scientifically based morality’ is an absurdity, because science — in its modern form — first of all asserts that the world is not based on anything. What has no foundation in its beginning is groundless to the end. Having thus dealt with the notion of morality, the man of science (or, as we have agreed to say, semi-science) has, however, in the interests of everyday life, to adhere to certain rules — usually derived from long-discarded Christian morality, with one exception: his duties towards the state are not governed by any higher rules. Everything is allowed here. Does a scientist become a bad scientist from having his conscience silenced? Alas, no; but if his intellectual conscience, i. e. his moderation in unprovable assertions, is weakened in him, he slips from science to semi-science, and does not stop his movement until he reaches the region of the darkest superstition: the region of pseudoscience.
Pseudoscience is usually seen as a dark shadow cast by scientific knowledge; as the mud into which those incapable of scientific thinking slip; as a monkey imitating the movements of science. All this is partly true, but it leaves aside the main point: pseudoscience is not produced by malicious or fallen individuals; it is the child of science and society in the deplorable state in which we find them. This society is characterised, as I have already said, by the elimination of religious life (while religious need is something that cannot be eliminated); by the loss of common morality, including the morality of conscientious thought — for which it pays the price with a state of extreme credulity, especially in relation to subjects that have the stigma of being ‘proven by science’.
These days, said Gilbert K. Chesterton. ‘scientists are beginning to capitalise the word “Truth”‘. Chesterton is right: this is the price to pay for the heightened attention of a society left without independent sources of truths (as religion and philosophy once were). Even a humble and dedicated science… well, I don’t know of one. They say there once was one before. In short, even people engaged in such an important and complicated business as modern physics do not forget to remind us of ‘Truth’ — not physical, but metaphysical, that is, such as that which excludes God, soul and the meaning of life, and even conscience. These, by the way, are the same people who promise us the realm of ‘scientifically based morality’ — without seeing in it any contradiction… If these people cannot resist temptation, what can we say about the weaker ones. Some of these weaker ones are openly drawn to faith, but fear even the thought about God. Others are drawn to witchcraft, and adorn their incantations with scholarly words. Pseudoscience is not a ‘jack-in-the-box”, nor is it a malicious intrigue, but only a visible sign that society is unable to live by rational thought, by science alone — not because society’s mental capacity is so unenviable, but because science is not all-encompassing, does not cover all things, and does not fulfil all human needs.
Timofey Sherudilo.
From the book Knowledge and Creativity: Essays on Culture.
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