In the political history of the United States, there have been very many "out with the old, and in with the new" elections that have tended to follow a rather sad pattern:
(1) Some political party that is not in power will seek to win an election, claiming that things will be new and wonderful if only it takes power. The party in power will be portrayed as guilty of various sins of government such as negligence, incompetence or corruption.
(2) The political party seeking to gain the voter's trust may win in the election. Its leaders will promise that now things are going to be so much better.
(3) After a few years (or maybe only months) it will usually become rather apparent that the new leaders are largely guilty of the same sins of the old leaders.
Such a scenario happens over and over again, because of faults and foibles of human nature. Over the centuries humans tend to make the same mistakes over and over. Many a group promising to be a "change for the better" may end up committing many of the same old errors and sins as the group they replaced or superseded.
A rather similar scenario has played out very often in world history when some regime was overthrown by another regime. The new regime gains power partly by promising to correct the incompetence, injustice or tyranny of the old regime. But often the new regime may be guilty of incompetence, injustice or tyranny just as bad as the regime it replaced. Examples include the French Revolution (when an unjust monarchy was replaced by what turned into the brief tyranny of the Reign of Terror), and the Russian Revolution (when the often brutal and oppressive monarchy of the czars was replaced by an even more brutal and oppressive tyranny of the communists).
Americans have a cynical expression to describe this type of thing: the expression, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."
In the world of intellectual affairs, there very gradually occurred a kind of "regime change," under which the old power of the clergy was very gradually replaced by the power of scientists. Scientists describing such a change describe it as a great virtuous progression, in which the Bad Old Way was replaced by the Good New Way. But such a story is a gross oversimplification. It seems that in many ways we simply ended up with a new kind of white-coat priesthood with many of the problems of the old black-cloak priesthood.
The visual below illustrates this point. We see a Venn diagram that shows how scientists and their communities bear a great resemblance to clergy and their communities, with a large degree of overlap. The purple shows the tendencies we see in both scientists and their communities and clergy and their communities.
Let me explain each of the items I have mentioned in the purple section of the diagram above.
Rituals
The Cambridge Dictionary defines "ritual" as "a way of doing something in which the same actions are done in the same way every time." The clergy of the Catholic Church have many rituals such as the Mass and baptism. Protestant clergy also have rituals, doing the same things in exactly the same way during baptism, weddings, funerals and so forth. Like the clergy, scientists follow many rituals. The process by which someone becomes a scientist (by doing research and writing a PhD thesis, and having it approved by professors) is a ritual. The writing of a scientific paper and its approval and publication is a ritual that follows a set of old conventions. Such conventions include having a section of the paper entitled an "Abstract," and another section entitled "Materials and Methods" (even when no materials were used); requiring the paper to be peer-reviewed by scientists in the same field (very often a pure formality failing to exclude poorly designed research); and the submission of the paper to some expensive journal that often makes it difficult for the general public to read the full paper. Very much of experimental work these days is a ritual. There are quite a few other scientist rituals such as going to research conferences and giving presentations at such conferences, rituals involving research grant applications, many types of academia rituals such as teaching the same lessons over and over, and the annual ritual of awarding Nobel Prizes.
Dogmatism
A dogma is an unproven belief that is frequently stated as if it was a fact or certainty. Each type of clergy has its own dogmas. The clergy of the Catholic Church has dogmas such as purgatory, the Immaculate Conception, the Trinity, the infallibility of the pope, and so forth. The clergy of Protestantism rejects some of the chief dogmas of the Catholic Church, but tends to teach its own dogmas such as the power of intercessory prayer and the idea that the Bible is the Word of God. Dogmatism is also a very common trait of scientists. Scientists adhere to unproven dogmas such as the claim that life first arose accidentally, the claim that all species have a common ancestor, the claim that human memories are stored in brains, and the claim that the human mind is a product of the brain (or the same thing as brain processes). Because scientists enforce a constant repetition of such dogmas, you may not realize how questionable and unproven some of these claims are. For example, scientists constantly repeat the dogma that memories are stored in brains; but no one has ever discovered or read a memory by studying human brain tissue, and there is a long list of reasons (you can read here) for rejecting all claims that memories are stored in brains.
Speech Customs
The clergy have speech customs, things that they tend to say over and over again, using the same type of words and phrases each time. Priests of the Catholic Church have various Latin phrases that they used to repeat countless times when performing a mass, and nowadays the same phrases are massively repeated in languages such as English. Clergy of Protestant churches also have phrases that they repeat over and over again, such as "Praise the Lord" and various quotes from the Bible. Scientists also have many different speech customs. Using the phrase "natural selection" is an example of a speech custom of modern scientists. The phrase is not at all one that naturally arises from any consideration of nature, and when scientists use the phrase they are not actually referring to any act of selection. Another example of a speech custom of scientists is the strange custom of using phrases such as "your brain remembered" or "your brain decided" or "your brain selected" rather than simply using simpler and less dogmatic phrases such as "you remembered" or "you decided" or "you selected." Such customs serve as a way of reinforcing dogmas that the modern scientist wants everyone to believe in. There are innumerable other speech customs of scientists, such as saying "there must be a logical explanation" upon hearing any report of paranormal phenomena they don't understand and cannot explain. Implicit within such a phrase is a kind of accusation that any report that does not fall within their materialist framework must be illogical. An extremely common speech custom of evolutionary biologists is to describe features of organisms using phrases with a form "x evolved y." Such speech is an example of unnecessary ideological baggage. For example, you describe the ears of elephants adequately by saying something like "elephants have large sheet-like ears." It is unnecessary to make a debatable claim such as "elephants evolved large-sheet like ears."
Belief Traditions
It is rather obvious that belief traditions are extremely common among the clergy. The clergy of the Catholic Church dates back almost two thousand years, and over such a time very many belief traditions have developed. The Protestant clergy has only existed for a few centuries, but in that time many belief traditions have developed. In general the clergy tends to follow a rule of "believe as your father and his father believed." While scientists do not tend to explicitly state such a rule, there are very many belief traditions that scientists follow, largely as an act of social conformity and adherence to tribal tradition. I will give an example of one of the innumerable belief traditions of scientists. Let us imagine that there is an effect (call it Effect X) that occurs indoors inside a room with closed doors. A belief tradition of scientists is that any such effect must have some physical cause, and cannot be caused by some invisible agent. How did scientists get such a belief? It arose merely as a tradition. Scientists believe such a thing pretty much because they think that such an assumption has always been held (or has very long been held) by scientists such as themselves. They certainly did not reach such a belief after exhaustively studying nature, because the history of human observations contains countless thousands of respectable witnesses who reported indoor physical effects that seemed to arise from invisible agents, or at least were inexplicable from any observable physical cause or human cause.
There are very many other belief traditions of scientists which have slowly arisen, often without any adequate empirical warrant. In some major cases scientists have no insight that some belief dogma they hold is actually a belief dogma, and something never well-established by observations, because within their community there may be such constant repetition of a claim that the claim starts to sound like fact, even though the claim may be not established by observations and actually contradicted by observations. In Episode 3 of the Netflix TV show "Ancient Apocalypse," a scholar makes a relevant observation, stating this: "When a particular mindset has become the preoccupation of a group of scholars in a particular field, they are so reluctant to let go of it, they become existentially attached to it, and an attack on the paradigm becomes an attack on them, and they vigorously defend it."
Tribal Conformity
It is not true that there is a single clergy tribe that acts and speaks in the same way. Instead, there are quite a few different clergy tribes, each of which acts in a characteristic way. If you are a member of one of these tribes, you will tend to act and speak in the way that other members of your tribe are acting and speaking. For example, a Catholic priest will tend to act and speak in a way that other Catholic priests act; and a Baptist minister will tend to act and speak the way that other Baptist ministers act and speak. In the world of scientific academia, there are many different tribes, each of which tends to act and speak in some characteristic way.
One example of a scientific tribe is the small tribe of cosmologists, one that very much has its own speech customs and behavior customs. For example, within the tribe of cosmologists it has been a custom since about 1980 to make the empirically groundless claim that the universe underwent an instant of exponential expansion during a fraction of its first second. When such cosmologists follow this tribal speech custom, they use the term "cosmic inflation." Similar customs within the small tribe of cosmologists is to claim the existence of never-observed dark matter and never-observed dark energy. The tribe of neuroscientists is another example where we see very strong tribal conformity. Besides many speech customs, such neuroscientists have many behavior customs, some highly dysfunctional. Within the tribe of neuroscientists, it is a custom to run experiments using way-too-small study group sizes, often fewer than 15. In their papers such neuroscientists often state that the study group sizes were selected based on the study group sizes in similar papers in the literature. This is basically a confession that the scientists were acting according to prevailing customs within their tribe.
Below a professor discusses the tendency of professors to form tribes resembling religious sects:
"We organize ourselves into academic 'sects' that engage in self affirming research and then wage theological debates between academic religions...We narrow the permitted subject matter of our studies to those topics, periods, and observations that tend to confirm the particular strengths of our tradition....By narrowing its empirical focus, however, each tradition affirms itself by studying that which it does best and ignoring subjects that do not conform to expectations. This produces self-affirming sects that come to believe in the power of their tradition based on a selective reading of the possible empirical evidence. It is here that research traditions move from the realm of objective social science to theology. Having adopted a tradition, we then look only for evidence that affirms our prior belief in the rightness of that tradition. Practice becomes not an attempt to falsify theories through ever more demanding tests, but to support theories that were adopted prior to their confrontation with evidence."
We very much see such things occurring in neuroscience, where scientists senselessly focus on a few selected types of evidence (things like brain scanning and animal experiments) that they think may confirm their cherished dogmas, while paying no serious attention to a huge body of evidence (including study of heavy brain signal noise and signal unreliability, rapid brain molecular turnover and structural instability, and two hundred years of written evidence for paranormal phenomena) that conflict with their cherished dogmas.
Heretic Shaming and Heresy Suppression
Heretic shaming is when a member of some belief community attempts to shame someone holding a belief that deviates from the teachings of the belief community. Clergy have long engaged in heretic shaming. The strongest type of heretic shaming seems to occur when someone has been accepted into some belief community, but then deviates from the teachings of that belief community. In the history of the Catholic Church there was not merely heretic shaming but also violent persecution of Christians holding doctrines differing from the doctrines approved by the Catholic Church. In the community of scientists, there occurs very severe heretic shaming for anyone who deviates from the belief norms of the community. A scholar who seems to believe in some doctrine forbidden by a community of scientists may be denounced as a "kook," a "weirdo," a "crank" or a "crackpot." In the post here I document a very clear example of this type of heretic shaming: a case of the major scientific publication Science pretty much calling for the firing of a physical science PhD, merely because he seemed rather sympathetic to some claims of paranormal activity, without even clearly endorsing any such claim. That example is one of countless examples I could give of scientists engaging in heretic shaming. In the sociological study of what is called groupthink, the term mindguard is used for those who attempt to enforce group conformity by shaming or denouncing those within the group who deviate from the group's orthodoxy. Many a scientist has acted as such a mindguard. Some of the attempts in the world of scientific academia to suppress inconvenient observations are documented in Etzel Cardena's paper "The Unbearable Fear of Psi: On Scientific Suppression in the 21st Century."At the link here, we read of the heresy shaming of a thinker who did not even challenge any of the core tenets of astronomers, but merely maintained that Venus had arisen after being ejected from Jupiter:
"When Worlds in Collision came out, its would-be publisher, Macmillan, was threatened with a boycott of all its books. The editor who bought the manuscript was fired...A concerted effort was made to suppress Velikovsky's ideas. His data was distorted, the presentation of his views blocked, his books boycotted or scurrilously reviewed, his supporters fired, his integrity impugned -- all because his ideas challenged an existing dogma."
A recent paper ("Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy: Tactics and Counter-Tactics") in an academic journal described some more recent examples of heresy shaming and heretic persecution in which people with reasonable unpopular opinions on COVID-19 (such as the now widely accepted "lab leak hypothesis") were defamed: "Respondents reported that exclusion was only the first step: shortly after that they started being subjected to defamation by the media, and disparaged as 'anti-vaxxers,' 'Covid deniers,' 'dis/misinformation spreaders' and/or 'conspiracy theorists.'" We read of a wide variety of tactics used to suppress dissenting opinions on COVID-19, including threats, non-renewal of academic contracts, paper retraction, and a kind of "blacklisting." The article paints the media, government, doctors, scientific publishers and academia officials as the main bad guys in this heretic persecution affair, failing to mention that scientists themselves played a very large role in such heresy shaming and heresy suppression, as I discuss and document here and here. Recently I read a post by an archaeologist furiously libeling an archaeological theorist who seemed guilty of nothing other than advancing a mildly unconventional theory of archaeology. Quite a few similar posts appeared at the same time.
An extremely common form of attack (rather like an attempted burning of a heretic) these days in academia is what I might call "contagion allegations," in which some professor attempts to deligitimize some contrarian thinker mainly by attempting to claim some association or similarity between such a thinker and some other group regarded as kind of "radioactive" within the professor's echo chamber. The attempts are often ridiculously strained. It's kind of like what went on during the McCarthy Era, when people tried to deligitimize someone by showing any trace of association with forbidden ideas. During the early 1950's in the US there was no need to prove someone was a communist; it seemed sufficient within certain circles to merely show that maybe the person was a friend of a friend of a communist, or that maybe the person once had dinner with a communist. Much the same goes on nowadays in academia. Large fractions of the populace have been branded as the politically incorrect "radioactive," and our academia would-be-heretic-burners seem to think all that you need to take down some person (to kneecap him) is to claim some association or similarity (no matter how tenuous) between that targeted person and anyone in the many despised groups branded as "radioactive" because of their "thought crimes."
Centralization
In a belief community there is centralization whenever there is some hierarchical structure under which a relatively small number of people have enormous control over the beliefs or conduct of other people. While there isn't much centralization in Protestantism, the Catholic Church is very much an institution showing centralization, with there existing a hierarchical structure with the Pope at its top. Among scientists there is also a large amount of centralization. A relatively small number of scientists (such as Nobel Prize winners and professors at the ten most famous universities) have influence so enormous that it is often like all the other scientists in their field are controlled from the top. The diagram below illustrates such centralization.
Strange taboos exist among clergy communities. Perhaps the most prominent example in the Catholic Church is a taboo against marriage or sexual relations for priests or nuns, who must take oaths of celibacy. For most of the time that the Catholic Church and Protestant churches have existed, there has been in both groups a taboo against the clergy engaging in homosexual behavior or premarital sex. There are countless other taboos that are followed by clergy or encouraged by clergy. Scientists also have many odd taboos. A very strange taboo among modern scientists is the reporting of paranormal phenomena, and the serious honest study of previous reports of paranormal phenomena. This taboo is extremely strange, given that science is supposed to be centered around observations. Serious respectable people have been writing written reports of paranormal phenomena for nearly two hundred years, going all the way back to the 1831 report of the French Royal Academy of Medicine, which found resoundingly in favor of clairvoyance. So how could making such observations (or objectively reporting on such observations by others) be a taboo among scientists? The explanation is to be found in the belief traditions of scientists, including beliefs that there are no unobservable entities influencing our world, and that human behavior is entirely explained by the brain. So it has become a taboo among scientists to discuss or seriously study observations that conflict with the belief traditions of scientists.
An old news story gives us an example of neuroscientists trying to exclude their fellow tribe members from hearing about things that might upset their belief system:
"A growing number of neuroscientists are calling for the cancellation of a special lecture to be given by the Dalai Lama in November. The Buddhist leader is due to speak at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) in Washington DC, but a petition against the talk has already gathered some 50 signatures....Over the past decade he has increasingly encouraged researchers, sometimes at gatherings at his home, to study whether Tibetan Buddhist meditation can reshape the brain and increase mental well-being (see Nature 432, 670; 2004)."
The diagram below (which fails to mention the key factor of govenment funding) is only a very rough sketch of the extremely complicated power structure maintaining the excessive influence of professors. A key element in the power structure is various parties acting to enforce taboos by discouraging contrarian worldviews and suppressing or discouraging the fair and thorough scholarly examination and discussion of evidence contrary to professor dogmas.
Hubris
Hubris is a two-syllable word meaning the same as the five syllable word "overconfidence." Intellectual hubris has long been a characteristic of the clergy, whose members have sometimes sounded as if they had God's phone number, or an exact understanding of deep mysteries that philosophers continue to debate. Hubris has also long been a characteristic of scientists. When modern science got started around the time of Galileo, scientists seemed very humble before the great mysteries of nature. But in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, scientists began to spread many a triumphal legend. Showing very great overconfidence, scientists claimed that professors now understood great mysteries such as the origin of life or the origin of most species or the origin of humanity. As the amount of discovered complexity and organization in human bodies and all organisms has grown exponentially during the past 100 years, such triumphal legends sound more and more like groundless boasts, mere examples of hubris.
A huge example of hubris among modern scientists is their groundless claims to understand the origin of human minds, something they refuse to properly study because of their strong taboos against studying anomalous mental phenomena that conflict with their explanatory boasts. Such unfounded claims are propped up by the carrying out of dysfunctional rituals, such as the running of poorly designed experiments following shoddy research practices such as having insufficient study group sizes. A proper study of the low-level details of the brain (and the shortfalls of modern neuroscience research), will lead you to the conclusion that the explanatory hubris of scientists on this topic is senseless, and the reigning explanatory tales on this topic are not merely unfounded but in conflict with the most relevant observations. You can begin such a study by reading the posts of this blog.
Mystifying Obscurantism
Not mentioned in the diagram above (for lack of space) is another tendency common in both scientists and clergy: a tendency towards mystifying obscurantism. In the Catholic Church there is a very large body of ecclesiastical jargon employed by priests, and for most of this church's history the Mass would be performed in Latin, rather as if priests were trying to make the words spoken as hard to understand as possible. Mystifying obscurantism is a very prominent feature in many tribes of scientists. It often seems as if scientists were trying to write their papers so that only other scientists (or very well-read layman) could understand them. In theoretical physics and cosmology, mystifying obscurantism reigns supreme. Papers on topics such as string theory and cosmic inflation theory are typically written as if they were designed to be understood by as few people as possible. It is quite possible to write papers with complex equations in a way that even layman can understand, by very carefully documenting each and every symbolic term that is used, and giving numerical examples that clarify the mathematics. But such clarity is avoided in the vast majority of papers on topics such as string theory and cosmic inflation theory.
Sexism
Not mentioned in the visual above (for lack of space) is the similarity that sexism has been prominent among both the clergy and scientists. In the Catholic Church woman have always been excluded from roles as priests, bishops, cardinals or popes. Even in Protestant churches only about 10% of congregations are led by women. In scientific academia sexism has for a very long time been a problem. In various branches of scientific academia there has been an "old boy's club" atmosphere in which women were often regarded as inferiors. An "old boy's club" is defined as "a network of privileged men who are members of the same organizations and institutions and who assist each other in professional advancement." Doing a Google search for "sexism in scientific academia" will produce first-hand accounts by women describing being treated differently than men.
The Inaccuracy of Narratives Claiming Scientists and Clergymen Are Polar Opposites
There is an extremely common narrative stated repeatedly by scientists, one that claims that scientists and clergymen are kind of polar opposites. What typically occurs is this:
(1) First, the narrative will start out by describing clergy in a stereotypical way, a way that makes the clergy sound like persons of blind faith who pay no attention to evidence, and who believe only according to tradition or acts of faith involving no study of evidence.
(2) Then the narrative will describe an idealized portrait of the noble truth-seeking scientist. The scientist will be described as some impartial judge of truth, who calmly weighs matters purely according to the latest and greatest evidence. The scientist will be described as someone ever-ready to discard his previous beliefs when some new evidence appears contradicting such beliefs. The scientist will be described as someone ready to stand against authority, and the example of Galileo will often be used.
Such a narrative is very misleading. For one thing, it isn't actually true that members of the clergy have no interest in defending their beliefs with evidence. For example, anyone looking at the many volumes of the New Catholic Encylopedia will see innumerable articles written by clergymen scholars very interested in using evidence to back up their belief claims. Protestant clergy also like to use evidence to back up their claims. For example, a minister may claim that this or that event fulfills some prophecy made in the Bible; and Protestant ministers like to cite witness testimony of "born-again" believers or faith healing testimony as evidence to back up their theological claims.
Secondly, the modern scientist is very often no impartial judge of truth, but more like some juror bribed to favor some particular verdict. Unlike a judge who can rule in whatever way he wants with little fear of repurcussions, the modern scientist is very often an Organization Man who fears above all the disfavor of his colleagues. Just as a clergy member strives to produce work products (sermons, articles and books) that will be approved by his fellow clergymen and his superiors in his ecclesiastical organization, the modern scientist tends to be someone who strives to produce work products (class lessons, papers and books) that will be approved by his peers and superiors in his particular tribe of scientists. In particular:
- A scientist will tend to write research proposals that agree with whatever belief traditions are popular with his peers and superiors, which will maximize his chance of being granted research money, which is doled out by members of his own scientist belief community, some little tribe of academia.
- A scientist will tend to write papers that agree with whatever belief traditions are popular with his peers and superiors, to maximize his chance of passing the "peer review" needed for paper publication.
- A scientist will tend to teach classes and write books that agree with whatever belief traditions are popular with his peers and superiors, so that he maximizes his chance of getting favorable "book blurbs" from fellow scientists, and maximizes his chance of being granted academic tenure by a vote of his fellow scientists.
- A scientist will tend to interpret observational data (and describe observational results) in a way that will maximize his chance of being able to claim some important or positive result, so that his chances of getting a paper published in a journal is maximized, and so that his chance of getting the greatly-sought "high citation count" will be maximized.
- Very many scientists and physicians have financial entanglements (direct or indirect) with corporations that make products or provide services related to claims that the scientists are judging.
So just as the clergyman has all kinds of social conformity reasons and economic reasons why he may tend to speak in some particular way, a scientist has all kinds of social conformity reasons and economic reasons why he may tend to speak in some particular way.
- the short lifetimes of the proteins that make up synapses, which are known to have average lifetimes of only a few weeks or less, a span of time about 1000 times shorter than the longest length of time that humans can remember things;
- the short lifetimes of the dendritic spines that synapses are typically attached to, which are unstable things typically lasting no longer than a few months;
- the fact that humans can instantly form complex new memories, something that cannot be explained by the "synapse strengthening" evoked by neuroscientists as an explanation for memory formation, because such strengthening requires protein synthesis taking many minutes;
- the fact that many humans can perfectly recall very large bodies of information such as 6000+ scriptural verses (as discussed here), a fact inconsistent with the known unreliability of synaptic transmission (a scientific paper says "We have confirmed that synaptic transmission at excitatory synapses is generally quite unreliable, with failure rates usually in excess of 0.5");
- the complete failure of any scientist to ever discover complex learned information (such as historical information or episodic memory information) by microscopically examining any synapse or any other part of the brain;
- the complete failure of any scientist to ever discover anything like a neural code or codes that would be needed to allow the storage of complex conceptual information and episodic memory information in human brains;
- the complete failure to ever observe any mechanism in the brain capable of reading information from synapses or writing information to synapses;
- the fact that humans can instantly recall much complex relevant learned information after hearing a single word, despite the lack of any kind of addressing or index or position notation system in synapses or anywhere in the brain that might allow such instant recall;
- the ability of humans to form new, lengthy and highly persistent memories during near-death experiences occurring during cardiac arrest when the brain very rapidly flatlines in a way that should be preventing any neural formation of memories.
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