Science is the contemporary tyrant of secular knowledge
The “grip of culture” leads to orthodoxy; and orthodoxy brooks no dissent
As The Grip of Culture [1] makes plain, human beings are acculturated into their social environment, acquiring beliefs concordant with that environment. Those beliefs may be mistaken, wrong; but that is usually recognized, if at all, only by mavericks and outsiders [2].
In historic times, orthodoxy was created and enforced by political authorities or religious authorities, who were sometimes one and the same. Deviations from orthodoxy were religious heresy or political treason or lèse-majesté, suppressed and punished severely and often very cruelly.
In much (but not all) of the world, political tyranny has been replaced by liberal democracy; and in much (but not all) of the world, religious orthodoxy has been superseded by “science”: systematic, pragmatic, evidence-based truth-seeking.
The history of modern science reveals that scientists typically did not get things quite right the first time but achieved improvements and corrections as time went by. Scientists who noted flaws and errors earlier than their colleagues were quite typically disbelieved, sometimes ignored, sometimes actually suppressed or even mistreated: Scientific Orthodoxy, the mainstream consensus, has been dogmatic [3] from its very beginning; but that orthodoxy was not enforceable until it became entrenched in and empowered by institutions — professional associations, peer-reviewed journals, funding agencies, and others as well.
Progressively since World War II, “science” has become more and more institutionalized. It has become a protégé of government, and its institutions have acquired considerable authority thereby. Those institutions now assist in enforcing a scientific orthodoxy that brooks no dissent and punishes deviance quite severely.
The scientific orthodoxy is doubtfully correct about the facts in a number of instances, and demonstrably wrong in quite a few cases. It takes time, however, and sometimes a very long time, for errors to be consensually recognized, let alone corrected.
One widely recognized such error during the 20th century was the belief --- “eugenics” --- that the quality of the human population could be improved by preventing the reproduction of people judged to be genetically inferior. On that basis, tens of thousands of Americans [4] were involuntarily and forcibly sterilized as late as 1980 [5]. That practice petered out without any formal, public, “official” acknowledgment of the error of presuming the heritability of behavioral traits and talents.
It is not unreasonable to expect that some beliefs held by contemporary scientific orthodoxy are seriously flawed or even completely wrong. Unfortunately it also seems reasonable to expect that the institutions of science will not formally and publicly acknowledge error, so that mistaken beliefs and practices are more likely to peter out gradually than to be quickly stopped.
In the meantime, individuals who discern flaws in contemporary orthodox beliefs may be mistreated quite severely, typically by actions that can amount to excommunication from the scientific community --- receiving no research funding or resources, receiving no invitations to seminars or meetings, losing access to graduate students, being unable to publish in prestigious journals. Even the most highly acclaimed scientists — say, winners of Nobel Prizes — become ignored or denigrated if they venture opinions unacceptable to the prevailing orthodoxy.
è Linus Pauling, arguably the outstanding chemist of the 20th century, winner of the Nobel Prize for Science and another Nobel Prize for Peace for his campaign to stop the testing nuclear bombs in the atmosphere, became widely dismissed as a crank for advocating the health benefits of higher doses of vitamin C than in the official list of recommended daily supplements. He was even called “wacko” and “suffering from senile dementia” [6].
è Martin Fleischmann was one of the world's foremost electrochemists, a Fellow of the Royal Society, but became denigrated after announcing evidence for low-temperature nuclear reactions [7].
è John Bockris, one of the most prolifically research-funded and publishing electrochemists, University Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, was threatened with demotion when he took Fleischmann's data seriously [7].
è Hannes Alfvén had a Nobel Prize for his work on plasma in space, but his ideas about cosmology where ignored or dismissed[7].
è Jacques Benveniste was a distinguished leader of a French National Laboratory but fell into disgrace after publishing evidence suggesting that homeopathic phenomena might have some reality [7].
è Harold Hillman was a distinguished electron-microscopist who was ousted from his laboratory for suggesting that certain apparent structures were artifacts [7].
è Paul McLean had been a trailblazer in neuroscience, but his (now-accepted) model of the “triune brain” was disdained by his peers [7];
è Peter Duesberg, a leading microbiologist elected at an unusually early age to the National Academy Of Sciences, recipient of a much desired 7-year Distinguished Investigator Grant, became persona non grata after pointing out that HIV could not be the cause of AIDS; he was even called a scientific psychopath and accused of intellectual dishonesty [8].
è Kary Mullis, Nobel Prize winner for inventing the PCR technique now universally used in all studies of DNA or RNA, was dismissed as an “AIDS denialist” when he pointed out that it had never been proven that HIV caused AIDS or how it could do so [9].
è Halton Arp was an experimental astronomer who was denied further instrument time after publishing photographs that bring into question the Doppler effect as the only cause of spectral redshifts [10].
I had come across these instances because I had made my particular scholarly focus the study of scientific disagreements and controversies. There are undoubtedly any number of further instances of mistreatment of dissenters from the mainstream consensus, even when the dissenters turn out later to have been more correct than the mainstream.
Through my research, I came to believe that quite a few generally accepted beliefs are doubtfully correct, and that a number of them are demonstrably wrong.
Within the purview of the physical sciences, I think the “Big-Bang” theory in cosmology is doubtfully correct; and that the presently dismissed” steady-state” theory long favored by Fred Hoyle and others is more likely to be correct. In any case, it seems a remarkable display of human hubris to imagine that we can come to know everything about the universe, including its origin; the notion of something coming from nothing, as the Big Bang postulates, is to me literally incomprehensible. It seems a little less incomprehensible to believe that we exist in an environment that always has existed.
Also a matter of physical science is the current theory, in fact current dogma, that human activities are producing climate change [11].
About matters of human society and biology, there is inevitably less definitive evidence available than in the physical sciences, in part because one should not experiment with human beings, and because the available evidence is always of a statistical or probabilistic sort.
For those reasons, large numbers of informed and expert individuals have found fault with many aspects of modern medical practice [12]. Among those criticisms, I believe to be valid the view that cholesterol is not the cause of cardiovascular disease [13], and that statins are definitely harmful while doubtfully beneficial [14], and that HPV vaccines cause harm without offering any benefit at all [15].
But what shocked me most, and continues to frustrate me, is the evidence that seems to show quite conclusively that HIV is not the cause of AIDS [16].
That is how I came to the view that science in contemporary society is tyrannical, serving to support the enforcement of practices based on beliefs that may be false.
Admittedly, one reads occasionally of the designation of some tyrants as “benevolent”; but I think it a grave mistake to count on the benevolence of any human or institutional tyrant.
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[1] Andy A. West, The Grip of Culture: The Social Psychology of Climate Change Catastrophism, Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2023; the book is also offered at no charge as a pdf at https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2023/07/West-Catastrophe-Culture6by9-v28.pdf; it is discussed at https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/why-what-we-believe-is-often-wrong
[2] https://henryhbauer.substack.com/p/why-what-we-believe-is-often-wrong
[3] Henry H. Bauer, Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How dominant theories monopolize research and stifle the search for truth, McFarland, 2012
[4] and unknown numbers elsewhere, for instance in Nazi Germany
[5] Philip R. Reilly, “Eugenics and Involuntary Sterilization: 1907–2015”, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, 16 (2015): 351-68; doi:10.1146/annurev-genom-090314-024930;
Cera R. Lawrence, Oregon State Board of Eugenics, 3 May 2012; https://hpsrepository.asu.edu/handle/10776/5663
Adam Cohen, Imbeciles : The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck, Penguin, 2016
[6] [3], pp. 36, 51
[7] [3], p.37
[8] [3], p. 52; see also “Peter's Principles” by Jeanne Lenzer, Discover, June 2008
[9] Most recently in “How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism” by Anna Merlan, MIT Technology Review, 7 August 2024; https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/07/1095762/covid-conspiracies-hiv-aids-denial-public-health/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
[10] Halton Arp, Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, Interstellar Media (Berkeley, CA),1987; Seeing Red: Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science, Apeiron, 1998.
[11] [3], pp. 18-26;
Steven Koonin, Unsettled (Updated and Expanded Edition): What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters, BenBella Books, 2024;
https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=global+warming
[12] Henry H. Bauer, “What’s Wrong with Present-Day Medicine” (last updated 29 October 2020) https://mega.nz/file/gWoCWTgK#1gwxo995AyYAcMTuwpvP40aaB3DuA5cvYjK11k3KKSU
[13] See Ravsnkov and particularly Kendrick in [12]
[14] https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=statin
[15] https://scimedskeptic.wordpress.com/?s=hpv
[16] “The case against HIV”, http://thecaseagainsthiv.net;
Henry H. Bauer, The Origin, Persistence and Failings of HIV/AIDS Theory, McFarland, 2007;
Henry H. Bauer, “Confession of an ‘AIDS Denialist’ (How I became a crank because we’re being lied to about HIV/AIDS)” https://mega.nz/file/wegVGAqL#0kJGxh0KWMhW3OsZJUFonh6c7cetmCQAhJ-0b1B1aAo
Agreed!
Science in the grip of governments and corporations serves the interests of money and power, not truth. It has become a menace to society. Eugenics was wrong not because it was unscientific (we apply eugenic standards to animal breeding successfully) but because human beings are not animals and cannot be ethically sterilized at the whim of the state for any reason, eugenic or otherwise.