Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
7
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cientism
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cientizeD
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 posi-
tivism in an effort to illustrate the features that distinguish it from the alter-
native 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 cul-
ture of science needed something
like
positivism, a scientistic ideology that
could align the ideals of science with the ideals of an emerging secular soci-
ety, 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
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