Abstract

An arbitrarily based indifference if not hostility to those with good ideas underlines our pervasive stupidity in social relations. By contrast, the basis for our undeniable successes in matters technical becomes all the more obvious. If we could but apply scientific objectivity to the social domain we might undercut our proclivity for individual and collective maladaptive behavior. This is well worth considering, if indeed our faith in science is justified and if the application of scientific analysis to human behavior would lead to a reduction in stupidity. Science, in the form of the social sciences, has already proved successful in helping people learn about themselves and their interactions with their institutions. It has also proved useless in providing any sort of ethic to direct the application of knowledge gained to any clear-cut, long-range benefit to humanity. Science is especially good in the narrow, immediate sense of gathering information about a specific problem or set of conditions, and the more specific the context, the better. How those data and possible solutions to problems relate to society in general is another problem in itself and beyond the scope of true science. All science can legitimately contribute to the application of knowledge to problem solving is projections of likely future results and sometimes sample test case studies of how things went in the past. As previously noted, one of the major shifts in our mental world in the past few hundred years is that we tend more and more to believe in human institutions with a fervor previously reserved for presumed supernatural forces. Thus, although the influence of established churches may have waned during this period, religious belief is still as powerful as ever as a factor shaping human behavior. All the horrors and cruelties which used to be the province of the devoutly sectarian (as evidenced by their witch hunts and inquisitions) have been extended and expanded upon by the devotees of secular (i.e., political, economic and cultural) in situations. It is expecting too much of science, which in its pure form is morally neutral, to combat such forms of socially induced subjectivity. Scientists can be objective and may make us more knowledgeable, but they will not make us better.