The Left's Theft of the Open Society and the Scientific Method

American Thinker ^ | April 24, 2008 | Jonathan David Carson

[neverdem]

The Left misappropriates intellectual capital for perverse ends, in order to lend itself a veneer of respectability and befuddle its critics. According to the website of the Open Society Institute, the George Soros funded nerve-center of today's Left,

"The term ‘open society' was popularized by the philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 book Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper's work deeply influenced George Soros, the founder of the Open Society Institute, and it is upon the concept of an open society that Soros bases his philanthropic activity." 

But the Open Society Institute embodies Popper's idea of an open society the way the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) embodied democracy.  Here is what Popper said in the "Postscript" to his autobiography Unended Quest:

"I know very well that much is wrong in our Western society.  But I still have no doubt that it is the best that ever existed.  And much that is wrong is due to its ruling religion.  I mean the ruling religious belief that the social world that we live in is a kind of hell.  This religion is spread by the intellectuals, especially those in the teaching profession and in the news media."

In other words, yes, there is much that is wrong in our society, and people like George Soros are responsible for a lot of it.  "Open your eyes and see how beautiful the world is, and how lucky we are who are alive!" exclaims Popper.

Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies was aimed at Marx, Hegel, Plato and his philosopher kings, and their anti-democratic successors, such as George Soros.  The Poverty of Historicism was aimed at Marxist historical inevitability and its pink cousin Western progressivism.  We cannot predict scientific discoveries.  Otherwise, they would not be discoveries.  Scientific discoveries have an enormous influence on the future. Therefore, we cannot predict the future.  Marxists and progressives who think that they represent the future are dangerous and deluded.

The idea of an open society was invented by the French philosopher and Nobel laureate Henri Bergson, who won the prize for philosophy in 1927, one of the few times the honor has been rightly bestowed.  Like Popper, Bergson was an opponent of determinism and based his social thought on the indeterminism of the future, that is, its openness.  

Also like Popper, Bergson was the object of fierce criticism, some of it perhaps deserved.  The scientific establishment accused him of vitalism. The Vatican accused him of pantheism.  But Frederick Copleston, a traditional Catholic and a Jesuit, says this about him in A History of Philosophy: "Bergson's widest influence was exercised by his general picture, which offered an alternative to mechanistic and positivist pictures.  In other words, this picture exercised a liberating influence on many minds."  Late in life Bergson drew near to Catholicism and would have converted but remained a Jew out of solidarity with the victims of Nazi persecution.  He died in 1941.

So Popper continued Bergson's work of providing a metaphysical foundation for an open society in an open universe, free people in a world that is free to chart its own course.  But a thousand times more significant than his social thought was Popper's philosophy of science.  Whenever someone says that scientific theories should be "falsifiable," he is, probably without knowing it, citing Popper.

Unfortunately, The Logic of Scientific Discovery has been as much stolen by the scientific establishment as The Open Society and Its Enemies has been stolen by George Soros.  As Popper recounts in Unended Quest, he created his famous philosophy of science in reaction to Marx, Freud, and Alfred Adler, another psychoanalyst, whose advocates found confirmation of their views in everything that happened, no matter how much it contradicted their theories, much as global warming hysterics find justification in both hot and cold weather and in both floods and droughts.  The Left is fond of making predictions, not so fond of checking up on them.
  
Popper came up with the idea that a scientific theory must be falsifiable to distinguish science and pseudo-science, not to deny the meaningfulness of other modes of thought and expression, such as religion and literature.  But the scientific establishment, in true Open Society Institute fashion, holds falsifiability up to the general public long after abandoning it itself.  Perhaps it had to.  What it did not have to do was to abandon it without telling the general public, which would have also meant abandoning its use against religion and traditional values.

The problem that scientists face is that they can often build a myriad of mathematical models that all describe the physical systems they are investigating.  They may have no way to choose one among all the others and may never have a way.  If we're lucky, they will choose the one that seems most beautiful to them.  If we are unlucky, they will choose the one that seems most likely to unsettle the public, as when Scientific American says that each of us has an infinite number of alter egos far away in space, that we really exist in only two spatial dimensions and gravity is an illusion, and so on.  None of these bizarre assertions is remotely falsifiable.

The scientific establishment uses falsifiability the way postmodernists use deconstructionism: selectively, to tear down the ideas of their enemies but not to apply to their own ideas.  The deconstructionist will happily deconstruct your ideas, but never his own.  You say something about economic growth or Islamofascism, and he wants to talk metaphysics.  Just don't bring up metaphysics when he condemns Dick Cheney and Karl Rove.  We can't believe in God because religion is unfalsifiable.  We can believe in an infinite number of other universes from which no information can ever reach us.  Western governments literally spend tens of billions of dollars annually in support of such lunacy.

As for the Western society that Popper so loved, George Soros and the scientific establishment are among its most vicious and determined enemies.

Contact Jonathan David Carson, Ph.D. For more information, see makehasteslowly.com.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[x]

True, but it's so transparent a theft that few thinking people are taken in by Soros's appropriation of Popper's phrase.

FWIW, I'm not so sure Popper got much from Bergson. They came out of very different traditions.

[Calvin Locke]

I always thought Plato’s desire to ban a book or two was wrong.

[bioqubit]

this is the kind of stuff that saddens me. The scientific method is how we learn and discover whether it is applied informally as children comparing things or formally as researchers designing experiments.

The process of cricizing experiments can be part of intellectual pursuit for pure emotional vendetta with no rational basis. Either way can still produce better science, and better insights into the natural world.

Falsifiability simply means “Oops, my hypothesis appears to be wrong. Back to the drawing board.” Somehow, falsifiability also presumes some kind of precision about what is being claimed. Reality, especially biological reality, is a whole lot messier than that. A colleague and I could never figure why we could never get within 25% of each other’s enzyme assay measures. We stood side by side, using the same equipment, reagents and preparative methods, and still we could not agree on the measure. So, where is the falsifiability in that?

Attempts to hi jack science for one point of view or another will always fail, unless the science is right. But falsifiability is supposed to always leave you in a state of “provisionalism” that accepts nothing as a final answer.

So, I don’t get the gentleman’s discussion other than to say, we will always be second-guessing our selves.

[Coyoteman]

With junk like this being published is it any wonder that conservatives and Republicans are accused of being anti-science?

(And my horse is far better looking than his!)

[aposiopetic]

Be grateful. It could have been Feyerabend.

[Eleutherios]

So, Coyoteman,
what did you find to be “junk”?

[Coyoteman]

So, Coyoteman,
what did you find to be “junk”?

The article's portrayal of scientists.

And be careful how you answer; there are still one or two scientists left here in spite of the increasingly pervasive anti-science attitude.

[rdb3]

...there are still one or two scientists left here in spite of the increasingly pervasive anti-science attitude.

If that is the case, why do they stay?

[steelyourfaith]

Unfortunately, The Logic of Scientific Discovery has been as much stolen by the scientific establishment as The Open Society and Its Enemies has been stolen by George Soros. As Popper recounts in Unended Quest, he created his famous philosophy of science in reaction to Marx, Freud, and Alfred Adler, another psychoanalyst, whose advocates found confirmation of their views in everything that happened, no matter how much it contradicted their theories, much as global warming hysterics find justification in both hot and cold weather and in both floods and droughts. The Left is fond of making predictions, not so fond of checking up on them.

It was the perversion of the scientific method for left-wing political gain that first grabbed my interest in the Anthropogenic Global Warming™ scam.

 

Beam me to Planet Gore !

[WOSG]

PING for intellectual read.

[Coyoteman]

...there are still one or two scientists left here in spite of the increasingly pervasive anti-science attitude.

If that is the case, why do they stay?

I stay because I want to assert that rationality and science are conservative values.

[Dumb_Ox]

Strauss and Vogelin discuss Popper, a "thief of Bergson":

Leo Strauss: May I ask you to let me know sometime what you think of Mr. Popper. He gave a lecture here, on the task of social philosophy, that was beneath contempt: it was the most washed-out, lifeless positivism trying to whistle in the dark, linked to a complete inability to think "rationally," although it passed itself off as "rationalism"--it was very bad. I cannot imagine reading, and yet it appears to be a professional duty to become familiar with his productions. Could you say something to me about that--if you wish, I will keep it to myself.

Dear Mr. Strauss, The opportunity to speak a few deeply felt words about Karl Popper to a kindred soul is too golden to endure a long delay. This Popper has been for years, not exactly a stone against which one stumbles, but a troublesome pebble that I must continually nudge from the path, in that he is constantly pushed upon me by people who insist that his work on the "open society and its enemies" is one of the social science masterpieces of our times. This insistence persuaded me to read the work even though I would otherwise not have touched it. You are quite right to say that it is a vocational duty to make ourselves familiar with the ideas of such a work when they lie in our field; I would hold out against this duty the other vocational duty, not to write and to publish such a work. In that Popper violated this elementary vocational duty and stole several hours of my lifetime, which I devoted in fulfilling my vocational duty, I feel completely justified in saying without reservation that this book is impudent, dilettantish crap. Every single sentence is a scandal, but it is still possible to lift out a few main annoyances.

1. The expressions "closed [society]" and "open society" are taken from Bergson's Deux Sources. Without explaining the difficulties that induced Bergson to create these concepts, Popper takes the terms because they sound good to him[he] comments in passing that in Bergson they had a "religious" meaning, but that he will use the concept of the open society closer to Graham Walas's "great society" or that of Walter Lippmann. Perhaps I am oversensitive about such things, but I do not believe that respectable philosophers such as Bergson develop their concepts for the sole purpose that the coffeehouse scum might have something to botch. There also arises the relevant problem: if Bergson's theory of open society is philosphically and historically tenable (which I in fact believe), then Popper's idea of the open society is ideological rubbish . . .

2. The impertinent disregard for the achievements in his particular problem area, which makes itself evident with respect to Bergson, runs through the whole work. When one reads the deliberations on Plato or Hegel, one has the impression that Popper is quite unfamiliar with the literature on the subject--even though he occasionally cites an author. In some cases, as for example Hegel, I would believe that he has never seen a work like Rosenzweig's Hegel and the State. In other cases, where he cites works without appearing to have perceived their contents, another factor is added:

3. Popper is philosophically so uncultured, so fully a primitive ideological brawler, that he is not able even approximately to reproduce correctly the contents of one page of Plato. Reading is of no use to him; he is too lacking in knowledge to understand what the author says. Through this emerge terrible things, as when he translates Hegel's "Germanic world" as "German world" and draws conclusions form this mistranslation regarding Hegel's German nationalist propaganda.

. . . Briefly and in sum: Popper's book is a scandal without extenuating circumstances; in its intellectual attitude it is the typical product of a failed intellectual; spiritually one would have to use expressions like rascally, impertinent, loutish; in terms of technical competence, as a piece in the history of thought, it is dilettantish, and as a result is worthless.

It would not be suitable to show this letter to the unqualified. Where it concerns its factual contents, I would see it as a violation of the vocational duty you identified, to support this scandal through silence.

[SunkenCiv]

the Open Society Institute embodies Popper's idea of an open society the way the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) embodied democracy... Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies was aimed at Marx, Hegel, Plato and his philosopher kings, and their anti-democratic successors, such as George Soros.

Thanks neverdem.

[SunkenCiv]

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