CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day as Kennedy. Bad day for us all.
Lewis was an Oxford Don in philosophy and literature, and he wrote insightfully on the pejorative term Scientism.
He could be a patron of Junk Science.com cause we disapprove of Scientism too.
Scientism, like any ism, is an extreme devotion to science and you might say the religios and ideological practices that develop in excess around the positive and good aspects of properly practiced science.
We reject Scientism as an ideology when it leads to fallacies such as consensus science, tunnel vision, outcomes based science–in other words Scientism is what Richard Feynman condemned in his lecture to CalTech graduates on Cargo Cult Science.
As Joseph Schumpeter commented (others have had the same idea) “The first casualty of ideology is the truth.”
Ike warned us of the government research complex, CS Lewis warns of a devotion to science and the trappings and social veneers of science to the disadvantage of rationality, proportion and honest skeptical scientific inquiry.
In a general sense, CS Lewis spoke eloquently of the importance of courage and virtue and he declaimed that our societies in the West were producing “men without chests” (no virtue) in his book Abolition of Man.
Being a science skeptic, dissenter, dissident, takes courage and virtue, even in comfortable and relatively violence free, tyranny free America. Political Correctness is a problematic thing but citizens can still dissent or disagree and not be imprisoned or shot or diagnosed with a mental illness and institutionalized indefinitely. Imagine what happened to the opponents of Stalin’s favorite junk scientist Lysenko.
CS Lewis wrote approvingly of the common elements of culture and moral philosophy that are apparent when considering the great Western and Eastern traditions. Stoicism as a philosophy shares many elements with Buddhism and Taoism. Stoics adhere to social values but reject the need for approval, knowing that it can be trap. A Stoic Philosopher of sorts, James Stockdale USN Vice Admiral (ret.), now dead, wrote In his memoirs of VietNam captivity, that the most vulnerable of the prisoners at the Hanoi Hilton, where he was the Commanding Officer, the ones most likely to break with their fellow prisoners, or fail and fall under the whip hand or abuse of the captor jailors, were the socially successful and socially conscious optimists who were relatively successful in their former lives in social structures.
The point is that when you feel you are a lone voice, consider that a compliment to yourself because it may be a measure of independent thought.
Fortitude is the foundation for the other virtues and a virtuous life.
JunkScience.com is a web site for Stoics.
http://www.ask.com/wiki/Scientism?o=2800&qsrc=999&ad=doubleDown&an=apn&ap=ask.com
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kareanderson/2012/09/28/five-reasons-why-stoicism-matters-today/
Science became commercialized and after that it’s fate was sealed. The few skeptics still remaining here and there are either of independent means or autodidact
True science is the natural habitat of skeptics. It is the skeptic that is not satisfied with the current status-quo or the consensus. Einstein was not satisfied with the current understanding of the physical world and even though his theories undermined Newton, his hero, he pursued the truth alone against the majority of physicists at the time.
C.S. Lewis warned us as did Huxley of putting too much faith in Scientists, who are human after all.
An excellent post. I’ve one bit to suggest
It isn’t the “science” that skeptics contest
It’s government/media propped-up consensus
Just do the real science, and that will convince us.
===|==============/ Keith DeHavelle