COVID-19 & The Reign of Scientism

Statue of a Nurse in Riga, Latvia

“In order to properly understand the universe, people should reject irrational and supernatural explanations of the world and accept a social and intellectual apparatus, science, as the only begetter of truth.”—Richard Lewontin, New York Review of Books, 1997

I recently asked a friend of mine whether he believed he had a soul. He answered no, and explained that there is no scientific evidence to support the existence of the soul. I was struck by the confidence with which he dismissed the idea. I then thought that there must be a way to describe that particular way of thinking, that absolute belief in science. 

It is the type of belief which wants a monopoly of truth for itself—that the scientific method alone is to be the arbiter of what is true and of what exists: to be the sole form of epistemology. It is a belief otherwise known as Scientism, and whose adherents, for lack of a better word, may be called scientoids. 
It should be said that scientoids are not the same as scientists, just as the friend I was talking to was not involved in the discipline of science itself. Likewise, not all scientists are believers in Scientism; some acknowledge the theoretical limitations of their profession. To overcome Scientism then, one must see that it has an implicit faith. It presumes certain dogmas without explanation, and that certain sentiments drive its development without acknowledgement. With religious fervour it has internalised the maxims that truth is good, knowledge is power, and law is eternal. But by its own method, Scientism cannot explain why these associations ought to be so.

“We see that science also rests on a faith. The question whether truth is needed must not only have been affirmed in advance, but affirmed to such a degree that the principle, the faith, the conviction finds expression: ‘Nothing is needed more than truth.’”—Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The conversation with my scientoid friend continued, and he went on to proclaim that the concept of a soul was a useful one, but not a real one. That it was a concept created by religion, preached to the faithful, and developed as a means of societal control. The clergy who espoused the idea of the soul to the laity had no evidence for it themselves, and did so solely to amass their own prestige and power. The soul was there to act as a form of collateral, should an individual act against their religious authority. Naturally, people were more concerned with the fate of their eternal souls than that of their mortal bodies, and so the concept succeeded in affecting behaviour.

At the level of physical observation, one is not able to refute the soulless conclusion of Scientism. The ideological question, then, is whether to limit what may exist to what may be observed. If one’s soul were to exist, it would arguably exist at the origin of one’s perspective. It would always be behind that which is observed, and never the object in focus. By its very definition, the soul opposes observation.
To avoid this paradox of the soul’s unobservability, Scientism must deny its existence out of hand. By consequence, the scientoid conceives of a world where the ‘souls’ in it are only to be explained away. Although, if one denies one’s own soul, does one necessarily deny the existence of one’s own mind as well? The mind is similar to the soul in that it is invisible and non-corporeal, and so by the condition of observability, it should not exist either.

When the question was put to my friend of whether his own mind exists, he doubled down. He claimed that not only does his soul not exist, neither does his own mind, and that it is only his brain which exists. He then proceeded to explain that his mind is generated by his brain. That his mind exists as a byproduct of his brain’s activity, of neurochemical reactions and biological processes.
Sensing his belief in materialism, I asked him if he believed his partner had a soul, who happened to be beside him at the time. Sensing the consequences, he affirmed that she had no soul, but was quick to reassure her that he still loved her. Yet how can love exist if the soul and the mind do not exist either? He responded that love is a physical fact, not a spiritual one, and that love is a state brought about through the production of oxytocin. Not the most romantic of propositions. His partner too was taken aback, and asked whether it is him who loved her, or was it just the oxytocin telling him that he was in love?

The argument which ensued pointed to a deep problem in Scientism. Namely, that people believe in various emotions, dreams and ideals, and they abide by these ephemera as the source of meaning in their own lives. Yet scientism pits itself against the common notions of heart, mind and spirit. It seeks to either crudely conform them to a materialist explanation, or else discard them completely, both impoverishing the use of language. 
It begs the question, then, of how a reductionist, materialistic conception of life became such the dominant ideology in Western society? How did the cradle of Christianity, which believed that love is the foundation of the world, undergo such a revolution in thinking and of belief?

"If there is no God, everything is permitted."—Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

With the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic, and all the recent events of viruses, variants and vaccines, the reigning response of the West has been one rooted in Scientism. The solution to the present crisis lies in trusting the scientific experts, championing our frontline workers, and placing our faith in the global pharmaceutical industry. 

Over the past eighteen months, a new theological aesthetic has arisen—an anti-image of Christianity in the form of Covid mania. It is a religion replete with its lab-coated priests, its anti-vax heretics, its hand-sanitising holy water, and its veiling mask. Everyday at six o’clock, people repeat the prayer: “stay home, save lives”, and bear witness to the daily Covid numbers just as one would listen to the knells of the Angelus. The Covid commandments given from on high were thou shalt not visit friends nor family, thou shalt not leave a two kilometre radius, thou shalt not go to mass, thou shalt stay two metres apart, thou shalt not protest unless it is BLM, etc. The apocalypse has well and truly arrived, and the four unlikely horsemen of our salvation are Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.

Since the partial lifting of lockdown, it appears that Western populations have been all too eager to resume their pre-pandemic lifestyles. Most did not take a vaccine for reasons of health, but to resume their prior normality of drinking, dining, holidaying, concert-going, shopping, etc. It appears as though not much soul-searching has been done after all the time spent indoors. Was there any meaning to be found or created in the absence of all the noise that otherwise occupies our lives? Were the days, weeks, and months spent free from the daily grind simply redirected into the pale glow of the telescreen, into a Stygian abyss of infotainment?

We have simply gone back to consuming and producing, labouring and spending, albeit with masks on and more Zoom meetings planned. The capitalist elite has succeeded in scoring bank-breaking profits, further financialising society, and bringing vast swathes of economic activity under technological control. The Left has failed to respond to the oligarchal overreach with anything creative or competent. Rather, they applaud from the sidelines the same opulent galas only now with edgier costumes. Their response to lockdown has been that “real lockdown has not yet been tried”. But since its partial lifting, the ‘zero-covid’ rhetoric has been quietly dropped. The Right, on the other hand, is without any institutional power to push back against the economic smash and grab, and still recovering from the hazy jadedness incurred by the fallout of the disastrous Trump presidency.

For those in Ireland who find themselves at odds with totalitarian Liberalism and the direction of society under Scientism, the future seems portentous. The battle against Covid mania has been well and truly lost, and the regime has achieved all of its policy objectives, chief among them being the implementation of a digital passport mandate for all citizens to function in daily life. All that remains under the current Covid agenda is vaccines for babies, seasonal booster shots, and a mop-up job against the remaining ragtag of anti-pandemic dissidents. Such dissidents are invariably of an older generation—the boomers who still believe in the memes of individual liberties and inalienable rights, despite having them demonstrably and continuously revoked.

The youth of today are decidedly less hopeful of what life under an indefinite pandemic will be like. To add insult to injury, they have been propagandised since birth that the earth will be perpetually destroyed by climate change in about 10 years, and every couple of decades the alarmists’ goalposts silently slip further down the timeline. Any day now we will all undergo mass starvation and have to climate migrate to the last smart city above water. The solutions offered against climate change are much the same as that of the pandemic: scientific technique, deference to expertise, and centralised governance being our only saviour.

Climate propaganda has already been effective in stoking anti-natalism in the West, and now many young couples are afraid to have families because they think their children will somehow die a horrific death on a sun-scorched earth. This ostensibly genuine fear also doubles as an excuse for those who prefer living a life of contracepted fornication, or those who are otherwise unable to afford the cost of owning a family home. As the debt from the pandemic mounts and the cracks appear in the economic system, taxation and spending cuts will come under the pretence of protecting the environment and the climate, as seen with the cut in cattle herd grants and carbon taxes on transportation. The youth will bear the brunt of the financial burden once again, and one wonders if they are still capable of any form of revolt?
Their vitality and disaffection are increasingly being redirected into video games, drug abuse and sexual deviancy rather than political agitation. The evaporation of Catholicism amongst the youth has been replaced with a vapid consumer-hedonist mindset. The average youth lives for the next Premier League match, the next Love Island episode, the next Netflix binge, the next Playstation console, the next Pumpkin Spice latté, the next trip to Majorca, etc. 

The need to have a digital passport in order to return to social life was the impetus for many to take the vaccine, not for reasons of health. Why else would many take an experimental vaccine with no longevity studies, and which offers only partial immunity against a virus with a 99.95% survival rate? 
The rush to take this vaccine suggests a very sad state of human affairs. Many simply could not bear the solitary silence of lockdown any longer. The fear of being labelled a far-right anti-mask granny-killer meant that most would not protest against it. Ultimately, the population cracked under the pressure of social isolation, and were willing to allow the worst precedents of pharmaceutical profiteering, totalitarian policing, and digital passports be set. 

The societal acquiescence to every manner of Covid regulation points to a collective inability to create meaning outside of mainstream culture. Our so-called ‘culture’ is now given to us through top-down commercial telecommunication. We lack our own communal means of expression to articulate and react to the sensation of crisis. In our desperation we turn to the powers that be for their ‘solution’. A void of meaning looms within the collective conscience, yet consciousness has turned away—it has no self-known theology, no reason to suffer for virtue, and instead aims itself at fruitless pursuits of pleasure.

This moral crisis of modernity is one which Scientism has no means of addressing. Its rationalistic framework seeks only to understand the question of quantity, relation and proportion. It has a crude awareness that death is to be avoided, yet knows little of what a good life ought to be like. It lacks an empathic vision of the divine, defaulting to the position that the future of humanity should be one of utmost ease and convenience. That Man, through use of scientific technique, ought to break the existential struggle of being and becoming, and instead live a transhuman life of artificial bliss.

There is an imperative to rebuild a strong sensibility toward the future amongst the politically disaffected in Ireland and the West, however bleak that future may appear. To affect a specific type of thinking about destiny and what it may hold. A type of thinking which firmly recognises that life has soul, an interior quality and direction, a transcendent aspect outside of the purview of Scientism. That the future is an ethereal form, waiting to be distilled by the present and vitrified forever as the past. 

History is the record of fulfilled or thwarted destinies. Perhaps the little we can do now is to poeticise the mystery of life once again, and affect a readiness for whatever happens next. 

“There is nothing in the real world which is merely an inert fact. Every reality is there for feeling: it promotes feeling; and it is felt.”—A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality