Small books can carry big ideas. Simple but important ones. An obvious example, first published in hardback edition in 1948 with barely 190 pages, is Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. It’s a little work of genius. The title says it all. But just to be clear: Good-sounding bad ideas – like government-owned grocery stores; not that anyone rational would suggest such a thing – can have unhappy results. As Weaver knew firsthand, from living in it, the 20th century was littered with great ideas, their consequences, and too often their casualties. Consider the blessings of Lenin and Pol Pot.
A similar small book, published exactly 60 years later, is especially timely right now. Eric Cohen’s In the Shadow of Progress (2008) is a slim volume, easily overlooked. But it has an outsized measure of wisdom on what it means to be human in an age dominated by science, technology, and the idea – in effect, the cult – of progress. Cohen, founder of the New Atlantis journal and executive director of the Tikvah Fund, has a gift for blending serious content with a pleasing style. So it’s a book that should be read by anyone who wants to understand the animating spirit of our current culture, and its implications.
More on that in a moment. First, some fun facts.
Remember the confident lectures we heard from so many expert sources during the Obama-Trump1-Biden years telling us that “science is real” – as opposed, one would reasonably conclude, to things like religious belief and its concerns? Remember all the urgings to “follow the science,” to not get bogged down in fruitless bioethical bickering on vital research matters? Remember the scientific gravitas and the social bullying it licensed, brought to bear in enforcing the COVID lockdown?
Yes, it was awkward when all those old people died in quarantine. Also when much of the “science” behind the whole lockdown affair unraveled. But hey, mistakes happen, and apologies get lost in the shuffle.
I mention this because our culture’s golden-calf attitude toward science, and the delusions and professional ambitions it engenders, need some adjustment.
On August 5, the Wall Street Journal reported that “a growing tide of fake papers is flooding the scientific record and proliferating faster than current checks can rid them from the system.” An entire industry has grown up over the past two decades involving “businesses or individuals that charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.”
One study found more than 32,000 fake scientific papers from nearly every scientific journal. The rate of fake-paper generation roughly doubled every 18 months between 2016 and 2020. As a result, publishers “have been forced to retract hundreds of papers at once, and in some cases shut down journals.”
Artificial intelligence actually compounds the problem “because large language models [consume] scientific literature without discriminating between legitimate and fraudulent papers.” The pervasive use of search engines and related AI tools then “muddies the waters of science and scientific understanding.” It also leads to a range of other issues.
The same Wall Street Journal later reported that “the very qualities that make [AI] chatbots appealing – they always listen, never judge, and tell you what you want to hear – can also make them dangerous. Especially for autistic people.” It noted that “autistic people, who often have a black and white way of thinking and can fixate on particular topics, are especially vulnerable” to AI-driven conversations that can literally never end.
Finally, an August 7 Journal article referenced “a case where a woman spent tens of thousands of dollars to pursue a project that [a] chatbot told her would save humanity.” People have cut off contact with their family on the advice of chatbots. One chatbot veteran noted that “some people think they’re the messiah, they’re prophets, because they think they’re speaking to God through ChatGPT.” The article observed that “an online trove of archived conversations shows [AI models] sending users down a rabbit hole of theories about physics, aliens, and the apocalypse,” resulting in a kind of AI psychosis fueling “delusional spirals.”
Obviously, AI does have valuable uses; most chatbot users don’t become psychotic, and companies like OpenAI are working hard to fix problems as they’re identified. But that’s not my point. Science is a human endeavor. Humans are flawed creatures who fashion flawed tools and utopias. And the smarter we are, the blinder we can become.
Which brings us back to Eric Cohen and In the Shadow of Progress. “Science is power without wisdom about the uses of power,” Cohen writes. “Science is a means to many ends without wisdom about which ends are most worthy.” The scientist may replace the priest on “the isle of progress,” but for all his skill, he has no special competence in discerning what constitutes the genuine, ultimate good for humankind.
And yet, as Cohen observes, “no idea offends the modern scientific mind more deeply than divine salvation. How weak we must be if we need a God to rescue us from the burdens of living in this world.” Which is why the biologist and media-savvy atheist Richard Dawkins described religious faith as “a virus of the mind” and “[sucking] at the pacifier of faith in immortality.”
Dawkins is a poster child for the dark side of scientific pride, but he’s hardly alone. “From the beginning,” Cohen writes, “science [has been] driven by both democratic pity and aristocratic guile, by the promise to help humanity and the desire to be free from the constraints of the common man, with his many myths and superstitions and taboos.”
Cohen is – at no point – “anti-science.” Rather he is anti-hubris and pro the reality of our spiritual longings and an intellectual modesty and honesty that ennoble human dignity rather than eroding it.
As Cohen’s excellent book suggests, we’re never as smart as we think we are and rarely as wise as we need to be. So a little humility might be in order.
