Although it is just six years old, the 21st century already seems on track to rival its predecessor in sheer cruelty and barbarity. Consider this: in the last hundred years, science has eradicated scores of fatal diseases, revolutionized food production, and improved the material conditions of life for millions of people; but we are no closer than we were a century or even two centuries ago to eliminating war, crime, genocide, systematic rape, or politically imposed famine. How, Lee McIntyre asks, can we be so cruel to one another? Theories abound, but true understanding escapes us. In his ambitious little book, Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior, McIntyre would like to do for the social sciences what Galileo did for the natural sciences. 400 years ago, the natural sciences emerged from their own dark ages by throwing off the yoke of religious ideology in favor of a scientific method based on experiment and evidence. The social sciences can follow a similar path. Only by doing so can they begin to help us solve our intractable social problems.
Here’s how McIntyre thinks we can learn from Galileo:
Contemporary social science has much to learn from Galileo. In him we see the embodiment of the scientific revolution in full flower, at the defining moment when science broke free to become an independent discipline. What is so important about the example of Galileo is not just the idea (Copernicanism) that he was fighting for, but his willingness to fight for it with such vigor against the forces of resistance to knowledge brought to bear by the Catholic church. In the story of Galileo, we see in sharpest focus that natural science too faced incredible resistance to knowledge. Yet perhaps even more important, we also see in Galileo the foundation of the modern conception of science. No longer satisfied merely to rely on the authority of Aristotle or the church—where one is obliged to check the facts about nature only against our Reason or our faith—Galileo ushered in a new method of scientific practice that was experimental. The power of these two ideas—that science may stand up to the forces of resistance to knowledge, and that it may decide matters of fact solely on an empirical and experimental basis—is the reason that many consider Galileo to be the father of modern science.
[snip]
There is perhaps no more compelling story in the history of science that demonstrates the remarkable ideological resistance faced by early scientific inquiry and no finer example of true intellectual courage in all of human history than that of Galileo. To those who would argue that natural science had it easy in comparison to social science, there stands no better refutation than the fate of Galileo. And it should be remembered that Galileo was fighting for the freedom of all scientific inquiry to proceed on an empirical and nonideological basis. When we are able to gather evidence for ourselves, he argued, what is the point of relying so heavily on authority and ideology? Thus may the example of Galileo’s courage in the face of the forces of resistance to knowledge give heart to those who wish to pursue a genuine science of human behavior.
—Excerpted from Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior by Lee McIntyre
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