In this post, I want to display an example of PostModernism's destructive effect on Science. This can get a little arcane, since most sciences are so full of jargon that the description of the pickled pathologies is incomprehensible to  the uninitiated. However several PoMo wars have been in the news recently, and they provide a perfect laboratory or example of the PoMo infection. I'm referring to global warming of course, though embryonic cloning is a good second example, both of which demonstrate that PoMo isn't an isolated event, but a deep and pernicious infection, affecting the whole body of Science in both the US and the world.

To recap, PoMo is the logical step beyond Dualism, that denies absolutes of any sort. Not only the absolutes of Modernism, but absolutes of ethics, morals, and even of empirical knowledge itself. It would seem that such a view makes any progress of science impossible, but instead PoMo confusingly idolizes the process, making a big fuss about progress, while distracting critics from the growing discrepancy with facts. It is, in fact, a highly deceptive tactic, and requires great discernment to probe beneath a superficial resemblance to Science. It is Scientism rather than Science, a belief in the process of doing science rather than in the facts themselves.

Congress
Here is Senator Inhofe's criticism of the House of Representatives, and Speaker Pelosi's apparently endless hearings on global warming.

Thank you for having this hearing today, Madam Chairman. I have to say, however, that we seem to have hearing after hearing after hearing on climate change, indeed, this is the Committee's second one this week alone,  but we don't seem to actually discuss legislation. While other Committees without jurisdiction on this issue attempt to write our nation's global warming policies, this Committee sits idly by talking about tangential issues. I believe that if we do wrestle with actual legislation, then the folly of cap-and-trade carbon legislation will become apparent.

The good Senator makes the point that the process has become more important than the product. PoMo at work.

Six Degrees
Lest you think GloMo is a disease afflicting only politicians, here is a lengthy extract from Josie Appleton's review of global warming author Mark Lynas' "Six Degrees".  (Read the whole thing).

Environmentalist writer Mark Lynas’ new book about global warming takes for its metaphor Dante’s descent through the circles of hell. But while Dante was guided by the poetics of Virgil, Lynas follows the research findings of scientists; and while Dante plotted a route down through the unbaptised, gluttonous, slothful and treacherous, Lynas descends through one, two, three or even six degrees rise in global warming (we’re spared Dante’s final three circles of hell because the Intergovernmental Planet on Climate Change (IPCC) only estimated a rise in temperature of up to six degrees).

Dante dealt in moral failings such as betrayal and faithlessness; Lynas deals with the more anodyne stuff of car journeys to work and buying tropical fruit at the supermarket. Regardless, we will be visited with the results of our sinful actions, as daily energy usage is repaid in the rising of the planet’s mercury. The events described in the book will be our future, says Lynas, unless we ‘repent’ and cut back on energy consumption. His predictions go like this:

At one degree rise in temperature, the western USA is wracked by droughts: powerful dust and sandstorms ‘turn day into night across thousands of miles of former prairie’, while ‘farmsteads, roads and even entire towns will find themselves engulfed by blowing sand’. At two degrees, southern Spain will empty, with a ‘mass scramble to abandon barely habitable temperatures, as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med’. At three degrees, Texas is hit by ‘Super-Hurricane’ Odessa: ‘the winds from the storm’s eyewall slam into Houston, the gleaming towers of the central business district begin to sway ominously’. Four and five degrees are worse still. Then at six degrees there will be mass extinction, something approaching ‘global apocalypse and doom’ (it is ‘unlikely’ that humanity will be wiped out completely, but there will not be many of us left).

Notice how Lynas is less concerned with the scientific support of his predictive "facts", and more concerned with the journey, with the meaning of those six degrees.  Sure, he puts in lots of footnotes to peer-reviewed articles, but then, so did Whitcomb and Morris. Here's Appleton on the footnote war:

Is this true, or is it all a story? Lynas certainly seems to be following scientific advice. There is artistic license in the telling, but the book is impeccably footnoted with peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. Lynas spent a year ensconced in the basement of Oxford University’s Radcliffe Science Library, reading from publications with titles such as the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, Geology, Earth and Planetary Science Letters and Geophysical Research Letters. For his predictions, he says that he goes with the ‘best available science’, results that have been repeated by a number of scientists, rather than the calculations of some doom-obsessed maverick.
    So are these scientists right? One way of answering this would be to examine their science – and perhaps, after a year in the Radcliffe Science library, we would find rival articles in Geophysical Research Letters that say that the Amazon would adapt as temperature rises, and that actually agriculture would increase in northern regions. Perhaps we might find other articles that would question whether CO2 emissions would increase temperature as much as predicted, or which highlight feedback cycles that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Then it would be a case of one set of citations against another. This is how the global warming debate generally progresses, with the two sides invoking ‘the science’ rather like divisions of Christians invoking the Bible.

But rather than focus on the logic of the argument, focus on the conclusion of the argument. Global warming, says Lynas (and Gore and Hansen and Pelosi and Moore...), is a result of evil men, bad choices, societal sin.

Whoa! Where did all those ethical absolutes come from? Especially since PoMo doesn't believe in ethical absolutes? Well, PoMo does have absolutes, but they are absolutes of derivatives, of slopes, of comparisons, of processes. The goal here is to compare my behavior with yours, my carbon offsets with yours, my green consciousness with yours, and find yours always lacking. It is the comparison that is absolute, not the standard. That is why nearly everything listed as a consequence of 6 degrees is speculation. My goal in this post isn't to refute every bit of scientific nonsense out there, but merely to point out its purpose, its referents. Lynas isn't trying to argue that global warming will produce some uncomfortable weather, he wants it to be apocalyptic, judgmental, punitive.  The goal is clearly conversion, the science is just window dressing.

But why would a Modernist want to ignore the facts? Appleton explains why this is not Modernism.

But there is another way to approach this question, which is to look at the political circumstances in which climatic science is produced, a process that also has its own laws and patterns. It is strange, at a time when the social construction of science is an established idea (Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in which he describes science’s progress through ‘paradigms’, is on every undergraduate’s reading list) that nobody thinks to look at the social construction of global warming theories. Global warming science is being produced in highly febrile times; and history tells us that the more the political temperature rises, the more science’s view of nature is distorted.
***
If you look at the dates on the citations in Six Degrees that deal with carbon feedback cycles, global emissions scenarios or the impact of temperature rises on agriculture and ecosystems, then you’ll see that the majority of them date from 2004-2006. It was only very recently that scientists started running the models on which Six Degrees is based, predicting the collapse of ecosystems and wild feedback loops that would take us from two degrees to apocalypse. Why was this? If we trace the development of scientific theories about global climate, we can see how they shift in predictable relation to the preoccupations of the time – which suggests that a similar thing could be occurring now.

Appleton's analysis goes on to show how societal concerns shape the science. She could just has easily demonstrated how financial returns shaped the science, or how publication and tenure concerns shaped the science. The point made by PoMo liberal-arts-majors such as Appleton (No, engineers don't do Dante), is that science is nothing but a reflection of cultural psyche.

Yet while society may change what gets funded, it doesn't change the "facts on the ground". Even when warming is funded and cooling not, why should predictions swing so dramatically from one funding cycle to the next? Is science as fickle as funding agencies? Appleton's unfortunate conclusion is that there is no empirical truth test for science, that science is no more likely to be true than philosophy or politics. Here is her explanation:

Any form of science that is morally and politically loaded, and involves putting large numbers of variables into a computer to predict changes for 50 years hence that cannot be tested, is going to be distorted. While the world’s climate does appear to have warmed - the earth is on average 0.7 degrees warmer than it was 150 years ago, before large-scale industrialisation – it’s a fair leap from 0.7 degrees to apocalypse. As a non-climatologist, it seems logical to me that carbon dioxide emissions will cause global warming in some form – but if global warming meltdown starts in eight years’ time, I will eat my copy of Six Degrees, appendices and all. That is a conviction founded not on an analysis of Geophysical Research Letters, but on a consideration of the circumstances in which such science is produced.

While I would disagree with her that science is so easily relativized, I am in complete agreement about the computer modelling part. Computer modelling is no substitute for data, nor even for theory. It is a tool, not a database, and when it is treated like reality, we achieve precisely the outcome deserved, virtual reality.  But why this particular virtual reality? Why would PoMo desire (much less propagate) such a Chicken-Little fear-mongering, disaster scenario? Appleton is right on the money here:

There are two more aspects of Six Degrees that are worth discussing. First, its notion that tackling climate change is an historic challenge; and second, its idea that global warming holds within it moral lessons, for humanity and for individuals. These help to explain why the idea of global warming is now so compelling and has come to dominate public life. For it provides, not just an expression of anxiety, but also a way out of that anxiety: a way of reframing the big issues of historical purpose and personal morality....
   Yet global warming also plays a teleological role: it provides a decisive point towards which history is heading, and provides an overall meaning for events. A decade-and-a-half after Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘end of history’, environmentalists have apparently found an occasion to which we must rise. The impending ‘climate crisis’, and our need to respond, is the first post-political narrative that has aroused significant passion or conviction. It is the first post-political notion of an historic task, a decisive future event that will determine humanity’s fate. It is perhaps the only way in which today’s society can discuss the idea of the judgement of the future, or the condition of life for our children. Hence, the dramatic sweep of the campaign against global warming throughout the elite – especially members of the political elite who spent periods in the cold. This is Al Gore on what global warming means to him:

‘The climate crisis also offers us the chance to experience what very few generations in history have had the privilege of knowing: a generational mission; the exhilaration of a compelling moral purpose; a shared and unifying cause; the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict that so often stifle the restless human need for transcendence; the opportunity to rise…. When we do rise, it will fill out spirits and bind us together. Those who are now suffocating in cynicism and despair will be able to breathe freely. Those who are now suffering from a loss of meaning in their lives will find hope.’

In the post-modern world bequeathed to the dualist generation, there is no purpose, no glory, no goal beyond the bemused spectator sport of watching "progress" evolve. But in these disaster scenarios, as Al Gore so eloquently explains, there is a place for heroism, for heroes, for hope. Meaning is reconstructed from action, even if the goal be itself meaningless, at least the intent is righteous.  One thinks of the Crusades, whose intent may never have been realized, but whose participation was redemptory.

When global warming becomes so laden with moral meaning, it becomes difficult to approach it as an environmental problem – to work out to what degree it is a problem, and what would be the most appropriate response...
   Here’s the rub: when an environmental problem becomes a generational mission, nobody wants very much to solve it. Lynas criticises the notion that ‘the white knight of technology will come riding to the rescue’ – this is in fact ‘the most pervasive and enduring form of denial’. There is no ‘miracle energy cure’, says Lynas. Indeed, you often hear environmentalists say that the hopes of a ‘silver bullet’ to solve global warming is merely ‘avoiding’ the question. Avoiding how? What they mean is that it is not energy production that must change; it is us. Global warming is not a problem to be solved; it is a lesson to be lived. Lynas writes: ‘The faith in a “techno-fix” evades the need for any serious behavioural change.’ ...
   Think about that quote from Gore: ... Global warming offers us the chance to experience what few generations have had the privilege of knowing. It is a thrill, no less.

Appleton's critique is very penetrating, demonstrating all the pseudo-science that goes on in the name of global warming, and yet, like Discovery Institute, her conclusion left me banging my head against the wall.

We need a new school of thought in the global warming debate, which is founded not on scientific facts but on political critique. It is only this that can explain the way in which the issue is framed, or its hold over social life and public debate. Lynas’ books suggest the attraction of the global warming issue has little to do with environmental problems. Instead, global warming appears to provide answers to life’s big questions, offering a new kind of historic mission and a new structure for personal morality.
   Only global warming doesn’t really answer any of these big questions - it shuts them down, solving the problem of meaning by abolishing meaning itself. As we look forward to 2050, we could hope to find some more profound answers to the riddle of existence than that measured in the rise and fall of carbon atoms. We could also hope to find some more sensible (but, possibly, less dramatic) solutions to any environmental challenges we face.
   We need to strip drama from climatology, and add drama to our lives. The question of how we live should be subject to mass, passionate debate, and Geophysical Research Letters should be left in the basement of the Radcliffe Science Library for the consultation of specialists.

Appleton concludes that Science is incapable of addressing any of the aspects of life that really matter. She uses the word "drama" to replace the better word "purpose", and suggests that our lives need purpose but not our science. She resorts to the Kantian dualism that has forever been the false refuge of Modernists. And while it may have been helpful in the past two centuries, the entire fiasco with global warming should be a cold water shower on Modernists that Kant isn't working anymore. We want a Science that is also a religion, we want salvation and redemption, we want hope and glory, we want meaning and purpose, and we want it in GRL.

Conclusion
We learn from this ongoing debate, that PoMo desires all the things that religion provides, but has disavowed the absolutes available to the ancients. Therefore it turns to the one source of epistemic truth left by its Dualist parents and Modernist grandparents: science. Science becomes the source of legend, of myth, of meaning. In the idolization of science, the facts are irrelevant, just as the wood of the graven image is irrelevant to the worship. It is not the world-out-there, Kant's ding-an-sich that is absolute, but the process, the scientific pursuit itself, foxhunting without a fox, debut without debutante, sex without kids, food without calories. And in this world of science without facts, there is no better method than computer modelling.

So what is the best indicator of PoMo Science? Purpose sneaking into the data? Religion masquerading as theory? No, these are the sins of a Modernist, and the mistakes of a Dualist, but throughout history, every good theory was driven by metaphysics, every good observation was made on purpose. If anything, we need more purpose and religion in our science, for PoMo reveals its presence by something more subtle, by the process usurping the product, by virtual reality presented cleverly as fact.  Just as heresies are superficially reasonable, but deeply irrational, so also PoMo science is superficially plausible, but analytically incoherent. Computer modelling, with its marvellous attribute of hiding the incoherence in a jumble of code (even to a practitioner, it is a jumble!) becomes nothing more than window dressing, nice graphics, cool videos draped over a deeply irrational belief.

So the best indicator of PoMo Science is computer simulation; the more graphics, the more PoMo.