Our Puritan Legacy

While reading Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline, I began to realize something startling: Puritanism is alive and well in America. It takes many forms today, but the essential spirit of it is preserved. It allows various groups to attach themselves to beliefs so rigid and adamant that no facts or contrary information need apply. These groups are posited on the right and the left of any issue and inevitably suffer the hubris of certainty. In all cases they are truly anti-scientific in process and instead begin with self-appointed truths rather than hypotheses. Hypotheses are for pragmatists and other promoters of relativism.
On the left there are puritanical environmentalists who would rather see people starve than introduce genetically engineered crops because they are “unnatural” or who would ban nuclear energy in favor of renewable sources such as solar and wind even though solar and wind will assure a continued gap-filling dependence on burning coal that will kill tens of thousands more people than nuclear energy ever has or will.
On the right we have “Gospel of Wealth” true believers who insist that the Market will solve all economic problems and continue us down the road to progress if we can only free it from intervention by evil government. And we have true believer religious fanatics who are certain what God wants us to do and not do who are perhaps the most direct descendants of Puritanism. Finally, there are those who refuse to believe in climate change because Al Gore does.
In either case, the trial and error shiftiness of science with its hypotheses and murky data are not to be trusted. Science is just too full of doubt and uncertainty to warrant serious consideration, unless it reinforces one of our existing beliefs. Then its evidence is selectively plucked from the tree of knowledge, polished until it gules, and presented as an additional commandment, even when additional data and syntheses suggest that the original hypothesis was wrong.
For example, genetic engineering, the process of which actually does occur in nature, is considered evil by the puritan strain of environmentalists who insist that hybridization or cross breeding is the only natural way to develop pest resistant crops. They are so married to their idea of organic, they cannot entertain the notion that genetic engineered food is safer and less risky scientifically and rationally than hybridization is. Hybridization is the equivalent of a sawed-off shotgun approach to advancement as opposed to engineering which is more the rifle and scope approach. (Brand uses the analogy of marrying a whole village as opposed to marrying a spouse without in-laws)
On this 4th of July, as we celebrate our independence from the British, perhaps we can consider gaining independence from the certainty of belief and submit to the slow, deliberate process of science. Just as we get frustrated with democracy at times because we have to put up with all kinds of theories and notions that get bandied about in the general discourse of our nation, we get frustrated with science’s grinding, deliberate method. And yet it is the best tool we have yet developed to move away from ignorance and toward truth. If it does not produce ready answers to everything, we should still listen to what it has to offer, which is far better than some undocumented, untested belief that we latch on to at our probable peril.
The loudest voices preach; the quiet ones consider.