Academia and the new dark age: Part 1

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes

In September of 2022, I listened to DarkHorse podcast host Bret Weinstein’s interview of Steve Patterson, on the subject ‘Are We Living in a Dark Age?‘

Having written a three-part series in 2021 titled ‘The Death of Science?’ (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3), in which I argued that “science is under attack in the 21st century” and that the survival of the scientific method as a system of reliable knowledge production was far from certain, I was struck by Patterson’s thesis. Patterson argued that science was not dying, but was in fact already dead, and that its demise occurred in the twentieth century. As a consequence, according to Patterson, “we’ve been living in a dark age since at least the early 20^th century.”

Intrigued, I began digging into Patterson’s work. His essay ‘Our Present Dark Age, Part 1’ is an excellent introduction to his argument, providing an explication of his claim that we are living in a new dark age, his assessment of how deep the rot goes, and six major reasons why he believes we descended into an anti-Enlightenment.

First, what does Patterson mean by ‘dark age’?

“By a ‘dark age’, I do not mean that all modern beliefs are false. The earth is indeed round. Instead, I mean that all of our structures of knowledge are plagued by errors, at all levels, from the trivial to the profound, periphery to the fundamental. Nothing that you’ve been taught can be believed because you were taught it. Nothing can be believed because others believe it. No idea is trustworthy because it’s written in a textbook.
The process that results in the production of knowledge in textbooks is flawed, because the methodology employed by intellectuals is not sufficiently rigorous to generate high-quality ideas. The epistemic standards of the 20^th century were not high enough to overcome social, psychological, and political entropy. Our academy has failed.” [emphasis in original]

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

(N.B. Epistemology is the study of knowledge; in essence, it concerns itself with how we know what we know. Patterson is arguing that 20th century intellectuals were not sufficiently rigorous in establishing that what they believed they knew was objectively true and as a result, the social and political institutions built on the ‘knowledge’ that these intellectuals produced are veering toward chaos [entropy].)

Next, how extensive is the intellectual corruption, in Patterson’s estimation? To put it another way, just how dark is the dark age that we’re living in?

“Our present dark age encompasses all domains, from philosophy to political theory, to biology, statistics, psychology, medicine, physics, and even the sacred domain of mathematics. Low-quality ideas have become common knowledge, situated within fuzzy paradigms. Innumerable ideas which are assumed to be rigorous are often embarrassingly wrong and utilize concepts that an intelligent teenager could recognize as dubious.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

Finally, how did we get here? According to Patterson,

1. Intellectuals have greatly underestimated the complexity of the world.

Consequently, they believe that controlled laboratory experiments can adequately explain what happens in the real world, failing to appreciate the complexity and interwovenness of living systems. Patterson singles out medicine for particular condemnation on this front:

“The medical establishment has greatly underestimated the complexity of biological systems, and due to this oversimplification, they yank levers that end up causing more harm than good.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

2. Specialisation has made people stupid.

The sum of human knowledge has become so vast that specialists don’t just lose sight of the forest for the trees; they can (metaphorically, and in some cases literally) spend their entire careers focused on studying the veins on the leaf of just one tree in the forest. This reductionism, as Professor T. Colin Campbell has forcefully argued, prevents us from understanding how organisms – let alone the ecosystems they live in – actually work (wholism).

Patterson asserts that

“Specialization fractures knowledge into many different pieces, and in our present dark age, almost nobody has tried to put the pieces back together.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

As a consequence, according to Patterson,

“The specialist ends up with ideas that are often inferior to the uneducated, since uneducated folks tend to have more generalist models of the world.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

Is this not the experience of many of us, who look on in wonderment as supposedly intelligent individuals struggle to offer a definition of a ‘woman’, or insist that it is justifiable to mandate a vaccine that offers no public health benefit because it does not prevent transmission of a virus? Try finding a plumber who does not know that a woman is an adult human female, or a shop assistant who cannot grasp that there is no moral or legal ground for forcing anyone to take a vaccine that doesn’t prevent the vaccinated person from infecting someone else.

3. The lack of conceptual clarity in mathematics and physics has caused a lack of conceptual clarity everywhere else. These disciplines underwent foundational crises in the early 20^th century that were not resolved correctly.

While the theoretical gyrations within the fields of mathematics and physics may seem abstruse and irrelevant to the average person, these domains of knowledge are considered central to the entire scientific enterprise. In a nutshell, if physicists begin to question that the reality that we perceive with our senses actually exists, then everything that scientists believe they know is up for grabs.

But in the twentieth century, as Patterson explains, “The foundational notion of a knowable reality came into serious doubt” among mathematicians and physicists. The knock-on effect of these doubts was inestimably vast:

“Due to the importance of physics and mathematics, and the influence of physicists and mathematicians, the epistemic standards of the 20^th century were severely damaged by these foundational crises. The rise of logical positivism, relativism, and even scientism can be connected to these irrationalist paradigms, which often serve as justification for abandoning the notion of truth altogether.” [emphasis in original]

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

4. The methods of scientific inquiry have been conflated with the processes of academia.

Patterson echoes Bret Weinstein and his wife and fellow evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, in alleging that academic and research institutions no longer follow the scientific method, but instead engage in a pantomime of sciencey-looking practices that fool the public (and probably themselves and their peers) into believing that actual scientific work is being done.

Patterson’s critique of academic science is scathing:

“Science is now equivalent to the rituals of academia.
Real empirical inquiry has been replaced by conformity to bureaucratic procedures. If a scientific paper has checked off all the boxes of academic formalism, it is considered true science, regardless of the intellectual quality of the paper. Real peer review has been replaced by formal peer review—a religious ritual that is supposed to improve the quality of academic literature, despite all evidence to the contrary. The academic publishing system has obviously become dominated by petty and capricious gatekeepers…
‘Following standard scientific procedure’ sounds great unless it’s revealed that the procedures are mistaken. ‘Peer review’ sounds great, unless your peers are incompetent. Upon careful review of many different disciplines, the scientific record demonstrates that ‘standard practice’ is indeed insufficient to yield reliable knowledge, and chances are, your scientific peers are actually incompetent.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

5. Academia has been corrupted by government and corporate funding.

While it may seem counterintuitive that more funding for scientific research would result in inferior results to the work product of the self-funded, amateur ‘gentlemen scientists’ of the Enlightenment era, Patterson asserts that

“Over the 20^th century, the amount of money flowing into academia has exploded and degraded the quality of the institution.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

He blames increased funding from both public and private sources for the degradation of the scientific enterprise:

“Universities enjoy bloated budgets, both from direct state funding and from government-subsidized student loans. As with any other government intervention, subsidies cause huge distortions to incentive structures and always increase corruption. Public money has sufficiently politicized the academy to fully eliminate the separation of Science and state.

Corporate-sponsored research is also corrupt. Companies pay researchers to find whatever conclusion benefits the company. The worst combination happens when the government works with the academy and corporations on projects, like the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The amount of incompetence and corruption is staggering and will be written about for centuries or more.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

6. Human biology, psychology, and social dynamics make critical thinking difficult.

Critical thinking, asserts Patterson, does not come naturally to humans, and most of us do not acquire the capacity to exercise it. Instead,

“From what I can tell, most people are stuck in a developmental stage prior to critical thinking, where social and psychological factors are the ultimate reason for their ideas. Gaining popularity and social acceptance are usually higher goals than figuring out the truth, especially if the truth is unpopular. Therefore, the real causes for error are often socio-psychological, not intellectual—an absence of reasoning rather than a mistake of reasoning. Before reaching the stage of true critical thinking, most people’s thought processes are stunted by issues like insecurity, jealousy, fear, arrogance, groupthink, and cowardice. It takes a large, never-ending commitment to self-development to combat these flaws.

Rather than grapple with difficult concepts, nearly every modern intellectual is trying to avoid embarrassment for themselves and for their social class. They are trying to maintain their relative position in a social hierarchy that is constructed around orthodoxies. They adhere to these orthodoxies, not because they thought the ideas through, but because they cannot bear the social cost of disagreement. 

The greater the conceptual blunder within an orthodoxy, the greater the embarrassment to the intellectual class that supported it; hence, few people will stick their necks out to correct serious errors. Of course, few people even entertain the idea that great minds make elementary blunders in the first place, so there’s a low chance most intellectuals even realize the assumptions of their discipline or practice are wrong.”

Our Present Dark Age, Part 1

Patterson’s devastating critique sets the stage for my analysis of several papers recently-published in what is (perhaps euphemistically) described as the ‘scientific literature’. Each of these papers passed the formal peer review process and gained publication in high-impact journals, despite failing to contribute anything remotely useful to human progress. These papers are essentially recitations of articles of faith by acolytes aspiring to ascend to the High Priesthood of ‘The Science’. They are not only devoid of any semblance of actual scientific thinking; they are anti-science. In this sense, they buttress Steve Patterson’s contention that we are deeply ensconced in a new Dark Age.

We'll commence, in the next post, with a remarkably stupid study demonstrating the inability of academics to understand why people who observe that their government has lied to them, don't trust that government. Stay tuned!

For information on my private practice, please visit Empower Total Health. I am a Certified Lifestyle Medicine Practitioner, with an ND, GDCouns, BHSc(Hons) and Fellowship of the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine.