Physicist Albert Einstein was asked: "why is it that when the mind of man has stretched so far as to discover the structure of the atom we have been unable to devise the political means to keep the atom from destroying us?” He replied: “That is simple, my friend. It is because politics is more difficult than physics.”
I keep trying to tell people who assert "the science" over and over and over and over again that their search for scientific resolutions of political and ethical questions is a dead-end - it leads to bad science and rotten politics and ethics.
There is a relation to be established between the two, which in pre-modern times was understood in terms of contemplation and action. The two are not antithetical but neither are they identical. You have to respect the active and the contemplative in their own terms. And you have to respect the distinction between the physical and the moral universe (and not dismiss the latter as merely 'made-up,' a non-rational realm without a reality of its own). Establishing the proper relation doesn't entail the one eating up the other - asserting science and the knowledge of the physical universe against ethics and politics and vice versa. That collision of the two essential aspects of reality will doom us all.
I'm glad Einstein answered the question in one line - that's all it merits. One day, people will get round to treating politics and ethics with the reverence they treat science. I think they mistake knowledge for certainty and run scared of the fact that each person has their own inner 'yes' and 'no.' That's what makes politics and ethics far, far tougher than physics and whatever neuro-nonsense is all the rage. Some people want to remove that "no" from people by presenting them with a fact and logic you can only say "yes" to. They think that that is "freedom as the appreciation of necessity," missing entirely the nature of that "appreciation" which is the necessary mediation between the two. But, of course, those who take their stand on "the science" claim that there is no such thing as "free will." We are back down to drives and their manipulation. Still, though, there remain an awful lot of people out there who are still asserting their right to say "no." They are wrong, comes the response. They may well be. They may not be. I've caught the people citing "the science" out a few times now. And, as I say, science doesn't resolve questions of value, meaning, and significance. I've seen the response to that objective - the universe is valueless, the only meaning to the game of life is to stay in the game, and human beings are insignificant in the wider scheme of things. And you think you are going to devise any kind of viable politics and ethics on the basis of that disenchanting science? More likely we will have a revanchism in the form of any number of totalitarian fundamentalisms trying to make the point, in the loudest terms, that human beings matter.
There are people who disdain politics, because basically they dislike the existence of people who won't agree. That's politics. Politics is disagreement and dissensus. There was once a commitment to the mediation which ensured the reconciliation of the One and the Many. But no more. The One is no longer negotiated. Instead there is an attempt to impose it by way of false certainties, the reified voice of Nature. Such people secede from society, in order to be able to better organise the world and order people from their Empyrean heights. They think that physics trumps politics, and repeat that point over and again as if it is persuasive. It is precisely the opposite. It is a blank and brute statement of 'necessity.' As in saying that we are shaved chimpanzees clinging to a meaningless rock that came from nowhere and is going nowhere. Or that one day we all die. It's what we do whilst me are clinging on that is of value and significance to us that matters.
There are people who, concerned to establish some overriding truth about the physical nature of the universe, turn what Martin Buber called the "I-Thou" relations between persons into "I-It" relations, for the reason that the 'It' is far easier to know, predict, and order/serve than are human beings. In the name of an indifferent Nature that is 'boss,' those who speak with the reified voice of Nature seek to 'boss' people. And the irony is that none of it resolves the fundamental problems of politics and ethics - problems which are problems of I-Thou-It relations - merely evades them.
That's not an argument against science. Only those who are in the grip of 'scientism,' the vice of the age, could take it that way. It is an argument for the worth and dignity of politics and ethics as something more than sophist power struggles and incommensurate value judgements, as a field of practical reason which is irreducible to explanations of the physical world.
On the scourge of scientism, this is a fine article on Wittgenstein's forgotten lesson: Wittgenstein's philosophy is at odds with the scientism which dominates our times.
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