Twice a month, The duty challenges enthusiasts of philosophy and the history of ideas to decipher a topical issue based on the theses of a prominent thinker.
We find it hard to understand why the scientific data on the effectiveness of vaccines in curbing the spread of viruses is rejected by so many people, even in the ranks of health professionals. This proliferation of alternative truths, sometimes endorsed right up to the White House, has something to intrigue and alarm us.
To try to see things more clearly, Robert M. Pirsig offers us an avenue that deserves to be explored. In his philosophical and autobiographical novel (Treatise on Zen and the maintenance of motorcycles, 1974), it is science itself that he targets: “By multiplying facts, data, hypotheses, science leads humanity to multiple, indeterminate and relative truths. It is at the origin of social chaos, of the indeterminacy of thoughts and values, in short, of a situation that rational knowledge was supposed to have to eliminate. »
It is undoubtedly excessive to hold science solely responsible for these excesses that are alternative truths. On the other hand, it will be agreed that, for several decades, a very large number of studies of scientific status have been produced to prove the harmlessness of tobacco and numerous drugs and chemical products, or to demonstrate that greenhouse gases would be without consequences on the climate. One cannot deny the fact that science has often been put at the service of money in order to contribute to “the indeterminacy of thoughts and values”.
If money could lead to the private appropriation of knowledge, it is not the only culprit. For example, many scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, have sided with climate skeptics for more ideological than financial reasons. Ideologies also exist and none of them have ever been able to be fought by rational arguments or scientific data.
Among the excesses of science, one could also examine the endless list of disciplines that present themselves as sciences. The appetite for this prestigious label even allowed the development of a religion called Scientology. All this suggests that science would have little by little deviated from its own field to serve as a guarantee for truths of another nature.
What we call “science” is also a set of social institutions (universities, laboratories, periodicals, granting agencies, etc.), a terrain where reason must come to terms with human passions and the myths that fuel them. We saw it in the nineteenthand century in opposition to the theories of evolution and the XXand century, in resistance to human-induced theories of climate change.
Like all other truths, those of science can only be established after having been sanctioned by a social process, that of consensus. The scientific method begins with assumptions and can only result in theories, not truths. These truths of science are not inscribed in reality and simply discovered as one discovers a continent. Pirsig takes the example of the law of gravitation, which is a purely mental and social creation, like words or numbers, even if “it seems quite natural to us to think [qu’elle] existed before Newton”, whereas it could be replaced by a new theory without the reality having changed.
As for the alternative truths, they are untruths, but they are of the same nature as those which the majority sanctions.
The West, science and reason
The West is the only civilization that has chosen reason as the pivot of its identity, while consecrating science as the embodiment of rational thought.
Reason designates first of all a mental faculty of a human brain, that which allows it to produce knowledge. In Western culture, reason simultaneously refers to an abstract entity conceived as the foundation of socially sanctioned truths and as the bedrock of our collective identity, constructed in opposition to myth and religion.
It is necessarily a cultural construction, but in this context, the Western individual can easily convince himself that his reason, which also generates his conviction of “being right”, merges with this reason enthroned at the heart of their collective identity. We can see in it a form of fusion of the individual with his culture, like all humans, and this, despite the individualism consecrated as one of the two founding axes of our identity, the other being materialism.
These two pillars served as the foundation for our new institutions. Individualism gave birth to democracy, economic liberalism and human rights. As for materialism, it was embodied in technological development and unlimited economic growth. These two principles have permeated even our conception of human existence, that of individuals thought of as material entities, as long as they are biologically alive.
Like all others, Western culture was built in a relationship of opposition between an Us and an Other, but the West’s option was to define itself in opposition to all other cultures. As all human cultures are entities of a social and mental nature, never individual and material, the West’s option made its culture an anticulture.
If the West has chosen to define itself in this way, it is above all because it also wanted to be a transculture with universalist pretensions, i.e. a formula capable of ensuring the management of a set of multicultural empires in the process of globalization under its governs. Its individualist/materialist formula allowed it to simply ignore this cultural diversity and content itself with managing individuals and material relations, such as trade or the production of goods. And this, after trying to convert the peoples of the colonies to his religion and realizing that he could never convert India or China.
The spirit of alternative truths
Pirsig says he wanted to hunt down what he called “the Spirit of rationality”. We could also look for the spirit of alternative truths, even if we claim to no longer believe in spirits.
The new element of alternative truths is first of all the fact that they concern tangible facts rather than other types of truths. As for the consensus essential to their genesis, it is reduced to the minimum, that of a virtual community. Moreover, it is only about the label affixed to the new truth, not about its particular content. For example, antivaccines are brought together from a panoply of very diverse personal motivations.
Consequently, the existence of “alternative truths” remains above all of an individual nature, unlike those of science. What is shared between the members of virtual communities is first of all their decision to place themselves in a position of dissidence and rebellion. This is especially the case for medical professionals who oppose bureaucratic directives because their own reason is too often denied. More broadly, this reaction inspires all “alternatives” and brings them together within a vast potential community, a bit like that of atheists.
For them, the main thing is the assertion of the supremacy of their free will. The “alternatives” are the culmination of a drift in individualism which upsets the balance between this socially centrifugal value and the centripetal effect generated by science. Religion has long also played this role of social cement, but it has gradually been confined to the truths of smaller communities. It is now the reign of science that is beginning to be challenged.
It is probably no coincidence that one of the most widespread alternative truths concerns the roundness of the Earth. However, this truth is precisely the one that swung the power of the Church towards that of the new institutions of science, after Galileo was condemned for heresy by an ecclesiastical tribunal in 1633.
By opting for this workhorse, those who are called flat earthers have chosen to carry out a frontal attack which directly targets the Spirit of science: reason.
The rebellion of the “alternatives” chooses irrational targets, but it is not without reason, because reason and science will never be enough to form a society and ensure its conduct. If a human brain is endowed with reason, its fuel remains emotion, co-programmed by the language of values. In short, not only Logosbut a mixture of Logos and of mythos.
That’s what Pirsig was looking for, a kind of Zen reintroduced even into the art of motorcycle maintenance, a bit of unscientific truth.
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