Glenn Ellmers: "Both Kheriaty and Desmet want to defend genuine, modern science, which is objective, modest, and reasonable, from scientism, which isn’t. But we may wonder if this is a distinction without a difference, and whether the inclination to reductionist materialism (as well as technological utopianism) was present from the beginning of the modern project"
If philosophy means learning how to die, then courage could also be the last virtue, morally and perhaps even historically.
Glenn Ellmers:
If Niccolò Machiavelli was, as Leo Strauss argued, the founder of the modern world, one could say that the one who perpetuated this new political order by giving it a religion was Francis Bacon. The religion Bacon preached, of course, was science. Both Kheriaty and Desmet want to defend genuine, modern science, which is objective, modest, and reasonable, from scientism, which isn’t. But we may wonder if this is a distinction without a difference, and whether the inclination to reductionist materialism (as well as technological utopianism) was present from the beginning of the modern project.
Bacon’s approach to science is premised on the need to interrogate and “vex” nature to uncover her secrets. He suggests in The Advancement of Learning that with diligent effort future scientists might “become the instruments and dispensers” of “prolonging and renewing the life of man.” Bacon explains his general method in Sylva Sylvarum: when perceiving some unseen action at work, we must look for the “pneumaticals” found “in all tangible bodies,” and must not be distracted by what the classical philosophers vaguely called “virtues and qualities.” True causes, Bacon insists, are “infinitely material in nature. For spirits are nothing else but a natural body.” Then, with an astounding string of technical words which perfectly capture the direction and tone of his enterprise, he declares that the invisible pneumatics
are in all tangible bodies whatsoever, more or less; and they are never (almost) at rest: and from them, and their motions, principally proceed arefaction, colliquation, concoction, maturation, putrefaction, vivification, and most of the effects of nature.
Can we not see here the spirit of Harari’s transhumanism, and the WEF’s goal of expedited evolution? In The Great Instauration, Bacon announces a goal that today would earn him a grant from the Gates Foundation: “I am laboring to lay the foundation not of any sect or doctrine, but of human utility and power.”
Consider in this light a statement Kheriaty quotes by the Australian Medical Indemnity Protection Society, which issues the malpractice insurance necessary for an Australian medical license: “Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging…. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging” (emphasis added). As Kheriaty notes, “evidence-based material” means peer-reviewed research—which used to be the standard for legitimate science. But the pandemic revealed that the spirit of Lysenko and Bacon is alive and well: power or authority, not nature, determines scientific truth. To practice medicine in Australia post-COVID means pledging obedience to “public health messaging”—that is, to the diktats of the establishment bureaucracy. [https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/pandemic-pandemonium/]
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