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understanding science deniers [1]
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Date: 2022-12-30
Why are so many people these days denying science? Is “anti-science” or “science denial” (and their cousins “alternative facts,” “anti-vaccine,” and “climate-change denial”) rational perspectives? Are they just crazy irrational? Or are they, as is my view, non-rational in a way that can be described and understood rationally, in a way that increases our ability to actually address the resulting ignorance?
Science is, if nothing less, thoroughly rational. It is the hallmark of a historically new stage of human development that seems to have emerged some time around the 17th century, a new stage that for the first time in human history managed to incorporate and transcend the previous stages of human cultural and social development, stages that were characterized by ethnocentrism, violence, mythology, superstition, and magical thinking.
This is not to say that every human being on the planet was suddenly “rational.” It is to say that when “rational” emerged as a dependable stage of collective human development, it was a new thing that could provide a stable platform for further development of humanity as a whole. The emergence of “rational” also presented every human being born with one more developmental task in their personal life.
Humanity, on the whole, did not stop with “rational.” We have pushed along to at least two further stages and there is no evidence that we will not continue our development, assuming we do not destroy ourselves first (but that’s another issue altogether). But first, some very basic developmental theory.
It appears to be the case that every individual human being is born at the beginning of a long developmental journey. Recent research suggests that our development is along multiple lines. These lines have sometimes been called “multiple intelligences.” The researchers named are not the only ones by far.
The primary lines include:
+ cognitive (Jean Piaget, Robert Kegan, Clare Graves)
+ relational/interpersonal (Harry Stack Sullivan)
+ psychosexual (Sigmund Freud, Karen Horney, Bronispaw Malinowski, Erik Erikson)
+ emotional (Daniel Goleman)
+ physical (just about any book for new parents)
+ moral/ethical (Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan)
+ spiritual (James Fowler, Mary Wilcox, Deepak Chopra, M. Scott Peck)
The above list is certainly not exhaustive, but it’s a place to start if you want to know more (if that’s the case I would first refer you to Ken Wilber’s books Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and The Religion of Tomorrow). The researchers in those fields argue with each other on many points (things like how many stages there are, what they should be called, etc.). There are, however, some orienting generalities emerge on which there is general agreement:
1. Human beings develop incrementally by stage. The “cognitive” line is necessary but not sufficient for the other lines. It generally takes a person 3 to 5 years to grow through one stage. There are no guarantees.
2. One stage must be mastered at a basic level of adequacy before it can provide a stable platform for further development. Stages cannot be skipped. There can be gaps or inadequate development.
3. Development does not proceed evenly across the multiple lines.
4. No given stage of development, in any of the lines, has a referent for the next stage. No stage of development can “see” the next stage. It can, however, appropriate or hijack the language of those next stages.
5. A person’s entire understanding of reality, of their experience, is interpreted through the framework provided by their current stage of development. Another way of saying this is that their understanding is constrained by and limited by their current developmental stage.
6. If a person continues to develop, their developmental “center of gravity” moves in fits and starts into the next stage, where the person learns to master the developmental tasks of that stage. If enough serious stressors disrupt their development, a person will usually regress to the “last known good” configuration.
7. It also appears that humanity as a whole (that is, collectively, including culture and social systems/structures) has been subject to the same kind of stage development. Instead of a 3-5 year-per-stage time frame, however, the collective development of humanity has been grinding along for thousands of years.
Now, if we list these stages in a generalized form, we get something like the following sequence:
1. Primordial
2. Egocentric/magical thinking
3. Ethnocentric/mythic thinking
4. Rational/scientific inquiry
5. Multicultural pluralism/postmodern relativism
6. Integral
7. And on it goes.
Collectively, the world overall is hovering around multicultural pluralism/postmodern relativism. That is not to say there are not formidable pockets of regressive ethnocentrism, or outright failure to develop.
More orienting generalities:
+ Each stage has its place in the grand scheme. One is not “better” in a dominator hierarchy way. In fact, each stage is absolutely necessary for the next.
+ The more developed stages incorporate and transcend the earlier ones.
+ Healthy development in the earlier, foundational stages is crucial for healthy later stages.
+ “Integral” is the first “meta-stage” capable of understanding all of the previous stages. Another way of saying this is that until “integral,” the stages are all at war with each other.
So now let’s look at science denial, alternative facts, climate-change denial, and vaccine resistance.
These are all pre-rational perspectives, centered in either the ethnocentric/mythic or egocentric/magical-thinking stages of development. They are pre-rational, as distinct from crazy-irrational. They look crazy, from a rational perspective, because they are non-rational. Evidence for their non-rationality is that they seem to be impervious to reason.
These pre-rational perspectives have emerged with force just now because humanity is at a crossroads, the stressors on culture and social structures are enormous, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket. We’re in a time of radical change, in a period characterized by what sociologists call “social disorganization.” Many persons, many groups, have regressed to a “last known good” configuration which, unfortunately, is below the “rational” stage.
Science denial, alternative facts, climate-change denial, vaccine resistance, all these have hijacked the language of rationality and of multicultural relativism (that is what all conspiracy theories do). Pre-rational does not understand “alternative facts” in the same way as rational or multicultural relativism does. Each stage experiences reality only as constrained by and limited by that stage. We cannot assume shared meaning just because we’re using the same words.
Someone operating out of a pre-rational perspective cannot “see” the reasonableness of rational. There is not yet a referent for “rational” even though the language of rational, and the language of multicultural relativism, is easily appropriated at pre-rational stages. At any given moment in time, all human beings in the world are somewhere in the developmental sequence. Most, unfortunately, will be at pre-rational stages if only because we all start at the beginning and it takes us a long time to grow up. We cannot assume a person’s, or a group’s, developmental center of gravity from their rhetoric, we must pay attention to their behaviors.
And here is what, for me, is one of the real kickers: to someone operating out of ethnocentric/mythic, science is also just another competing mythology. “Reason” is not a further-developed stage, it is simply one more competing mythology because mythology is how ethnocentric works. That’s why “facts” can be “alternative.” They are not alternative scientific facts, they are the “facts” of alternative mythologies, and you’re either a true believer or an infidel.
And here is another real kicker: to someone operating out of egocentric/magic, both the “reasoning” of science and the “social pressures” to do something rational, like get vaccinated and wear a mask in public during a pandemic, are experienced as unfair oppression of personal “nobody tells me what to do” freedom. From egocentric point of view, reason is not a further developmental stage, it’s just one more oppressor, one more constraint, a gigantic killer of all that is good and magical in the world. Pre-rational egocentric selfishness gets expressed, in hijacked language, as a “revolutionary liberation movement.” Back in the days of protests against the Vietnam War, Lawrence Kohlberg interviewed many protestors and found that about 20% were protesting out of a high moral perspective. The other 80% were protesting out of an egocentric “hell no I won’t go (because nobody tells me what to do).” They were all marching in the same protests and chanting the same chants.
Bottom line: we cannot make some of the assumptions we’ve been making. We cannot assume that simply laying out a rational case is going to be convincing to someone operating out of egocentric/magic or ethnocentric/mythic (and that’s most people). We will need to speak their language because that’s the language they have.
And we can be sure that when we, appropriately, tolerantly, multiculturally, open up space for the many voices that have been inappropriately dominated and silenced, and we tell those voices they matter (because they do), we can be sure that every intolerant egocentric and ethnocentric person within earshot is going to rush in and claim that space with carte blanche permissions because, after all, are they not one of those (alternative, oppressed) voices?
It is not only OK, but absolutely necessary to be intolerant of intolerance. Can we sit with that until it no longer feels like a contradiction in terms? And then can we, appropriately, use our hard-won rational and multicultural perspectives to put this childish egocentrism and ethnocentrism where it belongs: you go to your room and sit in the corner and don’t come out until you are ready to be a functional part of this human family. We have a lot of work to do and there is no time to waste.
And then we will need to persist in doing what educators have been doing for hundreds of years.
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Thomas D'Alessio author page
Books:
+ An ABCdium for Irritated Times
+ Integral Quadrants and Moral Quandaries:
an integration of the work of Robert Pirsig and Ken Wilber toward an ecology of morals
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