Rhetorical Darwinism: Religion, Evolution, and the Scientific Identity

7. Scientism Scientized

199 scientism scientizeD 7 Every human society . . . has some form of verbal culture, in which fictions, or stories, have a prominent place. Some of these stories may seem more important than others: they illustrate what primarily concerns their society. They help to explain certain features in that society’s religion, laws, social structure, environment, history, or cosmology. Other stories seem to be less important, and of some at least of these stories we say that they are told to entertain or amuse. —Northrop Frye In the previous chapter I looked at Huxley’s ongoing chess match with positivism in an effort to illustrate the features that distinguish it from the alternative ideology of evolutionism. This contrast also illuminates the political circumstances of the emerging professional culture that made Continental positivism untenable for natural scientists. The positivists were all about science, but Huxley clearly recognized that this was a love more likely to smother than to nurture the object of his affections. The professional culture of science needed something like positivism, a scientistic ideology that could align the ideals of science with the ideals of an emerging secular society , but this needed to be an ideology created by scientists for scientists, not by outsiders who would use it to rule over them. As evolutionism emerged in concert with this battle, we are witness to a revolutionary change in how science related to the larger social world in which it sought patronage. By seeming to situate within natural history a version of the Baconian narrative that had traditionally justified science’s place in the world, Huxley was working to collapse scientism into science itself. This was revolutionary as an effort to resolve a fundamental problem 200 g RhetoRical DaRwinism that had plagued science since the seventeenth century: scientific patronage had always depended upon the public appeal of scientistic movements, and because the motives of such movements were never fully consistent with the interests of scientific inquiry, the need to tap this rhetorical resource had always risked compromise and co-optation. Baconianism was thoroughly scientistic, but as an ideology closely identified with clerical interests, it was also responsible for setting up the social barriers that had frustrated Huxley ’s early aspirations. The older ideology had made the fate of the scientific laborer dependent upon an Anglican worldview not subject to scientific interpretation and therefore not subject to scientific control. Huxley had come into a scientific world that relied on the goodwill of powers that were blindly disposed to bar its gates against him. In proposing to substitute a sociological hierarchy for an Anglican one, English positivism threatened to institutionalize a new set of compromises, and it was under the competitive pressure of its rising influence that Huxley began to articulate a more fine-tuned rendition of the old Baconian faith. Agnosticism retained the basic features of Comte’s ideology, its radical empiricism, a philosophy of history purporting to have scientific credentials , and even a proposed scientific religion, but it redefined the positivist creed so as to entrust authority only to the natural sciences. The scientific laboratory, Huxley now declared, was “the fore-court of the temple of philosophy ,” and “whoso has not offered sacrifices and undergone purification there has little chance of admission into the sanctuary.” David Hume was the high priest who had represented the faithful in this holy of holies, while Comte illustrated only “the connection of scientific incapacity with philosophical incompetence.”1 Scientific capacity, in fact, now meant the same thing as philosophical competence—science was philosophy. The emerging evolutionary paradigm symbolized science’s absolute supremacy, and thus it invited appropriation by Huxley. The positivists had already proposed a social evolutionary model as the basis for their claim that all the roads of history lead to science, and if Huxley hoped to outdo them in scientizing scientism, the most logical move was to ground history in biological evolution. But this is only one side of his alternative scientism. His constant criticism of the positivist view of history was that its scientific pretensions were undermined by its obvious mimetic basis, but he was unable to resist the allure of an analogous construction. Thus, just as Comte and Saint-Simon had made sociology the evolutionary descendent of Catholicism , Huxley presented his own universalized natural science as the heir of the Reformation. This version of the positivist narrative appealed to his scientism scientizeD f 201 English constituents because, by imitating the...