How We Became Superstitious Again: A Genealogical Fable
A note to readers: My recent book with Oxford University Press—We Built Reality—explains how the spread of fraudulent forms of scientific reasoning helped create the political world we now inhabit. This is a world of catastrophic economic crashes; failures to anticipate seismic political shifts; increasingly militarized and racialized police tactics; reductively biologized notions of love; overly-medicalized understandings of happiness and depression; and unending wars in the name of peacekeeping.
For The Genealogies of Modernity Project I have tried something different: to capture in imaginative form some of the deeper historical transformations that brought us this onslaught. In the spirit of the inventor of genealogical inquiry—Friedrich Nietzsche—I offer a short, speculative and semi-fictional account of the past that is meant to capture some of the tectonic disruptions in cultural and political meaning that define our epoch.
**
If you go back far enough in time you will notice the occult held sway over all human societies. There were demigods who handed down fundamental laws and marked strange omens in the river valleys where they founded the first cities. There were shaman who kept secret knowledge of incantations and foraged in the desert for rare and healing elements. There were soothsayers who deciphered the future in the flight pattern of birds. And there were sages who contemplated the music of the spheres, as beneath them heaved and groaned vast numbers of their suffering fellows.
Then one day something extraordinary and unexpected happened. A few priests and sages began perceiving the cosmos differently. They stripped the cosmos naked, so to speak. They exiled the spirits and banished the ghosts. The bare, pinched scaffolding that remained they called “nature.” These new sages also began, quite ingeniously, to subject small parts of this scaffolding to endless, repetitive observation. This meant isolating some small bit of nature and interrogating it patiently with deceptively simple questions, like: What if two stones—one large and another small—are dropped from the village tower? Does one stone always win the race? What if instead it is a perfect tie?
Like their shamanic ancestors, the new sages also ripped open the guts of animals. Only these metaphysical rituals were far lowlier in aim than their predecessors. No gods were evoked in the blood sacrifices and no oblations made. Instead, the new sages were meticulous in their butchery: slicing at the joints, taking notes, making drawings, classifying, and taxonomizing. These new rituals they called “experiments.” And experiments gave them surprising powers. When someone asked—how come the flesh of this animal is warm to the touch? or why does the morning star plunge in May?—they had wondrously clear and reliable answers.
This reliability was the key to their new power as it helped them see more precisely into the dim glass of the future than any prior occultic authorities or divines. Their clairvoyance was so potent that it needed a new title—something more somber than witchcraft or magic and also keener than wisdom or even philosophy. And so gradually the new name of Scientia or science was given to this accomplishment.
Science was that which was known with great certainty through cutting, splitting, and dividing (scindere) into pieces. True, at first only a few sages and scholars knew anything about science. But little by little its renown spread. Even those who were unable to understand its methods could see its works: healing the sick, building great towers, revealing truths hidden in infinitesimal atoms and hulking stars.
Around the time that science’s renown for working latter-day miracles spread, a new dream took hold. What if the powers of science could be turned inward on humans and human societies? What if the ghosts and spirits were not just banished from nature but from the values, creeds, rituals, cultures, and institutions of human life? Perhaps then a science of human personality and the mechanics of regimes would emerge. Perhaps then the experiments and observations of science might bring society under rational control.
Thus were the first “human sciences” born—a complex web of theories that endeavored to uncover a science of human behavior. These would-be sciences became legion. They attempted to unlock the cycles of wealth and poverty, war and peace, popularity and power, erotic desire and happiness. Some posited that humans were predictably driven by one key motive—like the rational maximization of preferences or the survival of their genes. Others insisted that human motives were beside the point, as behavior was determined by location within structures or an environment. Categories of race, biological sex, party identification, and economics became a new zodiac. The human sciences claimed to predict everything from individual happiness and sociability to the vicissitudes of the market and worldwide revolution.
But these sciences of man were never content merely describing the world. They set out from the beginning to change it. For instance, advocates of one popular science insisted they could predictably check individuals against one another like the counterposing pressures of a tensional bridge. This bridge, they said, would carry more weight than any bridge ever created. Individuals working against each other, with no desire to build anything but their own lives, as if by magic would collectively raise the bridge of society and the global market. Faction would check faction, interest would check interest. Markets and democratic institutions would raise up all citizens and the bridge would bear the name “United States of America.”
Partisans of a rival science scoffed at such blueprints. Instead, they said society was not static like a bridge at all. Rather, it was an everchanging, evolving organism that went through radically different phases as it passed from infancy to maturity. Like a chrysalis, the old society would burst and be discarded, and a new society would materialize from inside with a radically different form. This radical transformation of society was not merely a science but also a political cause that gathered people around a new slogan: “Freedom from the chrysalis!” Science would bring the world a new society—one in which evil had been designed out of existence. This new society would be called the “Soviet Union.”
Along with such massive political experiments, there were many other human sciences that escaped notice. With each passing year new experiments were conducted and new theories articulated and used to redesign every imaginable feature of social and political life—from governments and families to prisons and schools. There were sciences of policing and of who to date, of foreign policy and of individual satisfaction. No problem was too large or too small for the human sciences to tackle. All problems were resolvable through ratiocination.
Yet as the sciences of man multiplied—and their many hypotheses came into conflict—an enormous confusion spread through society. Some of the sciences seemed to emerge and spread like wildfire only to be gone the next year. Others became the official sciences of a given state or empire. But when that state or empire collapsed its sciences disappeared with it. Many people wondered how sciences could appear or disappear completely dependent on the existence of politics. Was not science more fundamental than politics? This seemed backwards.
This is partly how the crisis of science culminated. Many who had dimly appreciated the miracles of science in their lives no longer understood what was meant by the word “science” anymore. There seemed to be sciences of too many conflicting things. Paradoxically, the more ubiquitous science became, the less credible its claims appeared. At that moment there formed a great face-off between two rivals. On one side were those who said one could live by science alone. On the other gathered those who turned their backs on science, which they maintained was a great deception. Often these two antagonists seemed to be fighting one another, but at other times—when they argued in the public square—they instead appeared to be almost like lovers interlocked in a heated dispute. “Long live science!” the first group would shout. And the second group would answer: “Science is death and lies!”
In this way science lost her undisputed fame and a great calamity loomed darkly over the entire globe. Everyone thought they knew what superstition was, but they also maintained that they alone were free of its grip. Their opponents were the superstitious ones. At the same time, long eradicated diseases and novel viruses ravaged the vulnerable and the poor like wolves stalking a tribe. Every summer the heat spells were hotter, and in the winter the storms would hide on far horizons, only to suddenly burst forth with unprecedented rage and fury. Everywhere the play of opposites was heightened—drought and flood, swelters and freezes, death and life. Some said science had created these problems, while others said it was the only solution. Millions waited for a new, unknown magic to save the world from a final tragedy. The occultic had returned, but no one knew how to see it anymore.
Jason Blakely is Associate Professor of Political Science at Pepperdine University and a Nova Forum Senior Fellow at USC. Among other publications, he has written for America Magazine and The Atlantic Monthly.
Hannah Höch Modenschau: Fashion Show