Science and Scientism

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Science and Scientism

• Science empirical, quantitative, mechanical,
  self-correcting, falsifiable.
• Scientism (or scientolatry)
• Science alone gives truth and this truth is
  absolute
• Matter is the primary reality (materialism)
• Behavior is determined by impersonal forces
• All values are merely social conventions
• The coming ideal society is guaranteed

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Brave New World

• Aldous Huxley, 1932
• Revisited, 1958
• Our visit, 2010

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Brave New World (1932)Aldous Huxleywww.huxley.ne
t

• A satirical piece of fiction, not scientific
  prophecy.
• Serves as a symbol for the false promise of
  universal happiness.
• How can a future where everyone is happy become a
  dystopia?
• Huxley exploits the anxieties about both
  Communism and Fordism.
• Insipid happiness from Pavlovian-style
  conditioning and eugenics.
• Happiness from mass-produced goods, "the
  feelies", and soma?
• Soma an opiate for the masses? Prozac-like
  psychic tranquillizer?
• BNW is a benevolent dictatorship a totalitarian
  welfare-state.
• Is a version of BNW in our future through
  improved pharmacotherapy and genetic
  engineering?
• By abolishing pain and suffering, does BNW also
  eliminate the emotional peaks and valleys of
  life?

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•       In 1931, when Brave New World was being
  written, I was convinced that there was still
  plenty of time. The completely organized society,
  the scientific caste system, the abolition of
  free will by methodical conditioning, the
  servitude made acceptable by regular doses of
  chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies
  drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching
  -- these things were coming all right, but not in
  my time, not even in the time of my
  grandchildren perhaps in the sixth or seventh
  century A.F. (After Ford).
•         Twenty-seven years later 1958 I feel a
  good deal less optimistic than I did when I was
  writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in
  1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought
  they would.
• The nightmare of total organization has emerged
  from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting
  us, just around the next corner.

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•         In the Brave New World of my fantasy
  eugenics and dysgenics were practiced
  systematically
• Eugenics Betas, Alphas and Alpha Pluses.
• Dysgenics almost subhuman Gammas, Deltas, and
  Epsilons
• Indoctrination, drugs (soma), and recreational sex

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• John the Savage (the Noble Savage)
• Henry Ford (Our Ford)
• Sigmund Freud
• H.G. Wells
• Ivan Pavlov
• Shakespeare
• Thomas Malthus
• George Bernard Shaw

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• Demography and Environmental Degradation
• Propaganda, Mass Marketing, Brainwashing
• Ideology, Demonization
• Chemical Persuasion, soma, not whisky, tobacco,
  heroin, cocaine, pot, LSD
• Subliminal Persuasion
• Sexual revolution and the post-nuclear family
• Education of facts and values promoting freedom.

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1984by George Orwell (1949)

• A dystopian novel setting forth Orwells fears of
  an intrusively bureaucratized state of the
  future.
• On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the
  poster with the enormous face gazed from the
  wall. It was one of those pictures which are so
  contrived that the eyes follow you about when you
  move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption
  beneath it ran.
• "If you want a picture of the future, imagine a
  boot stamping on a human face--for ever.
• Oceania Inner Party (1), Outer Party (18), The
  Proles
• Winston Smith works in the Records Department of
  the Ministry of Truth rewriting and altering
  records, including newspaper stories.
• Keeps an illegal diary and opposes the Party, but
  pointless to resist.
• "War is Peace", "Ignorance is Strength, "Freedom
  is Slavery."
• Animal Farm (1945), a modern beast-fable
  attacking Stalinism.

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•         George Orwell's 1984 (published in 1949)
  was a magnified projection into the future of a
  present that contained Stalinism and an immediate
  past that had witnessed the flowering of Nazism.
  The brutal future dictatorship of 1984 depicts a
  society controlled almost exclusively by
  punishment and the fear of punishment.
• In the imaginary world of Huxleys fable,
  punishment is infrequent and generally mild. The
  nearly perfect control exercised by the
  government is achieved by systematic
  reinforcement of desirable behavior, by many
  kinds of nearly non-violent manipulation, both
  physical and psychological, and by genetic
  standardization.

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•       In the Brave New World of my fable, the
  problem of human numbers in their relation to
  natural resources had been effectively solved.
• In the real contemporary world, the population
  problem has not been solved. On the contrary it
  is becoming graver and more formidable with every
  passing year. It is against this grim biological
  background that all the political, economic,
  cultural and psychological dramas of our time are
  being played outThe problem of rapidly
  increasing numbers in relation to natural
  resources, to social stability and to the
  well-being of individuals -- this is now the
  central problem of humankind.

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World Population

• 250 million 1 CE
• 500 million 1600 CE
• 2 billion 1931
• 2.8 billion 1958
• 6.6 billion 2010
• death control is achieved very easily by
  medical care and sanitation, birth control is
  achieved with great difficulty because of
  fecundity and religious sentiments.

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• Harrison Brown, The Next Hundred Years (1957)
  How is humankind coping with the problem of
  rapidly increasing numbers? Not very
  successfully.
• Huxleys 1958 prediction
• It is a pretty safe bet that, twenty years from
  now 1978, all the world's over-populated and
  underdeveloped countries will be under some form
  of totalitarian rule probably by the Communist
  party NOT

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Huxley again

•         It is in social science, in the realm of
  politics and economics, that the Will to Order
  becomes really dangerous when poorly conceived
  social theories are implemented by the state.

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•         Brave New World presents a fanciful and
  somewhat ribald picture of a society, in which
  the attempt to recreate human beings in the
  likeness of termites has been pushed almost to
  the limits of the possible.
• Relates to actual (scientistic) practices of
  Eugenics, Social Engineering, and Sociobiology

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• Eugenics
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vXzXgVYsgPto
• Film, literature, and the new world order
• http//www.youtube.com/watch?vkLTS5cv45Cs