Social Science

Sailing down the Mekong in a very slow boat, I met a young Australian. Cheerful and idealistic as young Australians are inclined to be, and also probably a little drunk, he told me about his life so far. He was having trouble settling into a career. Twice, he had tried to qualify to become a teacher, in two different fields, but he couldn’t take it. “The corruption was too much for me,” he explained. “I mean the whole system was too corrupt.”

He did not elaborate. I presume that to his mind what he meant was obvious enough that it did not need saying.

Nor did I dare ask him. If I claimed I did not understand, I feared, I would appear to him a part of that corruption. I am, after all, a teacher of sorts myself, though at a different level and in a different country.

But I guess I do know what he means.

It is not that teachers are individually corrupt. The issue is, as he says, systemic—the good people shake their heads and try their best to work around it. It is as Vaclav Havel said of the communists at the fall of the Berlin Wall: it is not fair to blame or punish the communist functionaries for what communism has done. Most communist functionaries I have met, just as most teachers I have met, are honourable people trying to do their best. In a bad system, everyone must make unpleasant choices.

The problem, rather, is that teaching, which is properly a vocation, indeed one of the charisms of the Holy Spirit, decided instead a generation or so ago to become a “profession.” Making the same mistake as journalism at about the same time.

Ever since, note, both teaching and journalism have been in moral decline. A vocation is something you do out of a sense of mission and a love of your fellow man. A profession is something you do, ultimately, out of self-interest. A society whose teachers and journalists are out for their own self-interests is a society in trouble.

Both teaching and journalism made the further mistake of basing their certification process on the social sciences. This may not have been an error, exactly; it may have been done cynically. But the result is the same. The social sciences simply do not work. They have produced essentially no new knowledge since their creation by Marx more than a century and a half ago. Worse, they can be directly credited with most of the worst horrors of that same period: Nazism, social Darwinism, eugenics, Freudian psychology and the obsession with sex it produced, behaviourism, Marxism, Stalinism, feminism, the Khmer Rouge, the ennui of the modern suburb, the ugliness of the international style, and on and on.

If the social sciences worked, here is the evidence we would expect to see: the prisons would be emptying over time. Mental illness would be declining over time. Divorces would be declining over time. The general avowed level of human happiness would be rising over time.

Instead, we see the reverse: the prison populations are growing, the rate of mental illness is expanding geometrically, divorce is leveling off after a period of great growth; and the suicide rate is going up.

The evidence seems clear. Not only does social science not work. It does harm.

At any given moment, mind, there is one theorem somewhere that many are prepared herald as the “first finding of social science that is neither trivial nor wrong.” The idea of the unconscious; of repressed memories; of language universals; of comparative advantage. Note that all of these but the last have now been generally disproved. I still feel the last may prove correct—but a product of logical inference from first principles, not of social science.

It is time to throw in the towel.

For, I submit, social science never will work. It is based on a logical error as fundamental as the classic one about “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” Indeed, it is really the same error.

“Social science” is the notion that we can take the tools of empirical science, designed to study the natural world, and apply them to human beings, or more precisely, human minds. This is no more reasonable on the face of it than supposing that we can drill a hole with a hammer. This is not what the tool is for. But it is also wrong on several other specific grounds:

First, it is fundamentally immoral to conduct controlled experiments on other human beings. This makes all social science morally objectionable.

Second, it is fundamentally impossible to conduct controlled experiments on other human beings. They are by nature too complex to ever reasonably ensure that you have controlled for all other variables.

Third, you face an insurmountable observer paradox: science itself, let alone the individual scientific paper or experiment, is a much less complex system than the human mind. This is necessarily so, since it is a product of the human mind. Therefore, it is wildly unlikely if not exactly impossible that the one could comprehend the other. For analogy, it is as if someone set out to swallow himself whole using chopsticks. Or it is as if someone carved or cast for himself a statue out of some precious metal, and then set it up on a pedestal and worshipped it as his creator.

Fourth, social science obliges one to think of other human beings not as equals, but as objects. This violates the Golden Rule and categorical imperative, something which Kant has shown is not just immoral, but logically incoherent. (For teaching, it also makes for appalling training for what should be a vocation to one’s fellow man.)

Fifth, empirical experiments are based on sense observations: rather than applying universal rules, one is relying on what can be directly observed. Yet the human soul or mind is in the realm of the unobservable, in sensory terms. It cannot be seen, smelled, tasted, heard, or touched. By its nature, it cannot be directly studied by this method.

Sixth, scientific procedure requires objectivity—that is, one observes not oneself as a conscious entity, but objects. This is exactly upside down for the human mind, because our own mind is the only one we can actually directly observe in any sense. We know the minds of others, with the possible exception of God, only indirectly.

All social science should be eradicated by any enlightened society. It is by its nature opposed to human equality, and so a danger to any society founded on the doctrine of human equality or the rights of man. It is by its nature anti-democratic, and so a danger to democracy. It is also necessarily anti-religious, and so a danger to any society’s spiritual and moral health, as well as to the spiritual and moral health of its individual members. These features may be more or less concealed or denied by individual social science movements; but in the long run they are always so. The logic demands it sooner or later