The Turning?

 

We have been living through a strange three years or so. Things have been going from mad to worse. Old ways may persist for some time out of sheer inertia, but it feels as though something fundamental has changed. We are floating off the edge of a cliff, and sooner or later, like Wil E. Coyote, we are going to look down. 

People no longer believe the authorities. They no longer trust the experts. The superstructure of our civilization is rotting away.

Is political revolution coming? In the developed world, I doubt it. Democracy is a good shock absorber. We are likely to see populists come to power: Trump, Poilievre, and the like.

But the disillusionment goes deeper than politics. What we might be seeing, it seems to me, is the death of the great god Science. It took a hit back in the Sixties; people struggled to see the benefits of nuclear holocaust and Mutually Assured Destruction. But the way science has become politicized during the pandemic, and to support extreme demands on the general public in the name of “climate change,” may be a real tipping point. On top of this, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the “peer review” process has not been working, and that many of the tenets of current science are based on irreproducible experimental results. In the end, we discover, there is nothing magical about science, and scientists are not holy men incapable of deceit.

This should come as a crisis of faith to many. Folks in the West have increasingly worshipped Science as their god since the Victorian era. Like all healthy religions, science—or scientism—was not seen as a religion, of course, but simply as “the truth.” So was Catholicism, in the Middle Ages. This has always been a harmful idolatry, harmful to science as much as to humanity; because Science is a lousy, limited religion.

Many intellectuals have been aware there was something wrong here for some time; first existentialism, later postmodernism, have expressed an awareness that science has failed to give us real meaning or knowledge. But they have failed, because they have had no ground of truth or meaning to replace it with. Marxism is no substitute, since Marxism itself is built on the myth of science.

The only visible option is that nagging thing we call religion.

One can hope it is the Christian message.