The Management Ethos

The pseudoscientific notion that humans are machines or computing robots has led to the spread of a manipulative way of being in both personal life and politics. This manipulative ethic is a “management ethos.” On the personal level, modern people increasingly try to gain control of their lives using a panoply of supposedly scientifically validated self-help methods and techniques. This chapter examines the influence of scientism on practices such as dating and efforts to enhance personal charisma. Many of these methods unwittingly turn courtship into a form of mass consumer shopping, replacing alternative ways of perceiving one’s deepest attachments. In political life, there has been a tremendous spread of technocratic forms of authority. Technocracy is a form of rule that replaces democratic rule by ordinary people with government by experts. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s popular book Nudge is criticized as an example of technocracy and the management ethos usurping democratic life.

Sciences of Zero Tolerance

The Black Lives Matter movement has been partly inspired by the ability of citizens to capture on video shocking abuses of police authority against black men and disseminate them on the Internet. What few people realize is that the policing tactics of “zero tolerance” captured in these viral videos were inaugurated by popular claims to a social science of crime. This chapter delves into the scientism surrounding the zero-tolerance and law-and-order movement. Readers are introduced to the work of James Q. Wilson, Richard Herrnstein, and others. Tactics such as broken windows policing and racial profiling are shown to be part of a wider culture of scientism. Perceiving social and political reality in racial terms is also linked to pseudoscience.

Our Free-Market Scientists

The 2008 economic recession is a primary example of popular social scientific authority helping manufacture a crisis. In the run-up to the recession a dominant, a vulgarized form of economic “science” taught millions of Americans that free-market policy was simply the objective, rational, and neutral way to build an economy. This chapter traces the rise of this popular form of economic authority and the way it pervaded political discourse through figures such as Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Steven Levitt. One of the key metaphors of this scientistic approach to economy was that markets functioned like spontaneous equilibrium machines. This chapter critically scrutinizes the school choice or voucher movement as a case study for the overextension of free-market economic authority in the restructuring of democratic life. The result has been increased inequality.

Empire of Light

False claims to scientific authority were used to advance the American and British war on terror. In popular rhetoric, President George W. Bush borrowed (and distorted) one of the most influential theses of political science, the claim that democracies do not fight with one another. Bush also named prominent political scientists, including Francis Fukuyama—who claimed history had reached its culmination in liberal democracies—to prominent advisory positions in government. In addition, other prominent social scientists, such as Samuel Huntington, provided alternative social scientific justifications for the war on terror and later nationalistic public policy that relied on creating permanent outsider identities for Muslims and Latinos. Scientism helped American and British citizens imagine that their use of military violence was fully rational and objectively justified as the war on terror turned into the rise of ultranationalism.

Republic Inc.

Popular claims to a science of economics have had an enormous impact on reshaping the nature of democracy in Europe and the United States. This chapter uncovers how a popular vision of human beings as egoistic preference maximizers (known to philosophers as homo economicus) played a major role in this transformation. Drawing on the authority and technical sophistication of economic rational choice theory, this popular discourse gave birth to a “market polis” in which all human relations are reimagined as transactional. The result has been the presentation of an egoistic form of citizenship, deficient in social solidarity, as if it were simply a fundamentally scientific view of political life. This has contributed to the move away from earlier notions of the public good (both in the New Deal and the founding of the republic) as well as backsliding toward increasingly authoritarian and antidemocratic forms of politics.

Conclusion

Social science should be read not only as an empirical description of the world but as a way of creating the cultures that we inhabit. This is difficult for modern people to comprehend because of the spread of scientism in modern society. This defective way of relating to the world was powerfully diagnosed by Martin Heidegger and his critique of technology. However, the tendency of modern social scientific theory to turn into its opposite (superstition and scientism) was earlier anticipated by Mary Shelley in her brilliant story about Victor Frankenstein. Shelley’s short novel is an essential allegory for understanding our own predicament. Hermeneutics points the way to a more humanistic and interpretively sensitive way of relating to the world.

Genes and Machines

The notion that human beings are simply sophisticated robots or computing machines has spread widely across society in the last several decades. This claim has a basis in a popular theory of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence advanced by academics and bestselling authors such as Steven Pinker. Anxiety about a robot takeover of society is increasingly debated in the public square by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. But this view has also affected how modern people think of their experiences of depression (leading to the overprescription of antidepressants) and even their sense of political identity. Many people today believe their identities are completely determined by a machine-like coding in their genes. This can lead to both private and public forms of despair over the human ability to substantively change the world.