Paul Feyerabend and the dangers of a ‘scientific’ clerisy

The separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution.
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Science in a Free Society

  The only principle that does not inhibit progress is: anything goes.
— Paul Karl Feyerabend, Against Method

Here is an (incomplete) list of stuff that “science” can help you with only incompletely (if at all): the mysteries of love and the rhythms of the human heart; the relationship of the soul to the body; the nature of human trust; the peculiar fact of the subjective point of view (and its irreducibility to the vulgar contingencies of the human body); why things are funny; whether what I see as red you do not see as blue; why music reaches into your deeper self and makes you cry.

And most importantly: the ethics, methodology and scope of science itself.

“Science” seems to have acquired a habit of both setting and marking its own homework. Over the last 22 months it’s got away with it. The teacher and the student seem to have merged. Let’s separate them.

Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994, pictured above) was one of those crazy geniuses who spots what the rest of us don’t. Feyerabend’s career path was opera singer to physicist to philosopher of science. He was a student and colleague and subsequent critic of Karl Popper. He was intellectually mischievous and, in his writings, combined anecdote and deeply difficult analysis.

Popper had attempted to codify the scientific method by arguing that science progresses (or retreats) by the development of theories which are susceptible to potential falsification. Feyerabend, on the other hand, was always alert to the fact that to assume a single “method” in science is to ignore the complexities and playfulness of the universe, not to mention the history of science itself.

To assume that a uniform method applies to science would, when you think about it, generate some sympathy for the Church in its interrogation of that problematic guy called Galileo, which was, by the orthodoxy of the day, entitled to clip his wings.

Why should any such methodology exist? And even if it does, why assume that the limited powers of the human intellect are sufficient to discriminate between the clear randomness of the cosmos and the relative stability of our accommodation with it?

As soon as you assume that there is such a thing as “the scientific method” you limit your scope of intellectual curiosity. Is archaeology a science? How to test its findings? If you decide that you can’t then, surely, you rule out the idea of consistency between how we live now and how we did 4,000 years ago. But that assumes a fluidity in the nature of the human mind for which there is no evidence.  

What government slide could settle that?

And this is what the SAGE types and their MSM Pavlovian apologists have got wrong since March 2020. It isn’t just that there is no such thing as the “the science”; it’s that there isn’t even such a thing as the “scientific method”.

It’s because “science” has such a command on the ambitions of the human mind that we need to heed Feyerabend’s warning. Since 2020 an institutionalised version of its vanilla types has been allowed to integrate themselves into the heart of government and into the minds of the UK polity. A version of the discussion has been promoted and reputable dissidents have been silenced and besmirched.  

This is what Feyerabend spotted: that there is nothing “neutral” about science because it’s also a human activity with all the moral failures that entails. To insist that there is such a thing as “the science” is a twee expression of the deeper point that there isn’t even any acknowledgment of what science is. Why?

Because the history of science shows that it progresses through accident, contingency and a disregard for the settled rules which came before. Science progresses through a playful recognition that something we used to think worked actually doesn’t. It requires a humility which is unavailable when it becomes institutionalised.  

I suspect when the entrails of the last 22 months are autopsied, we’ll come to see that.

And, to be fair to him, he sort of spotted this. Feyerabend made his international reputation via his Against Method. In his (brilliant) memoir, Killing Time, he regretted the publicity it brought him: “ My private life became a mess…. I often wish I never published that f*ckin* book.”  

Can you imagine any of the SAGE Clerisy writing that?  

Me neither.

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