Scientism, Beliefs and the Fight against Dérives Sectaires

Scientism, Beliefs and the Fight against Dérives Sectaires

By Denis Mathieu (August 2010)

Given the current sensitivity of certain subjects, it is fitting to specify straight away that the article’s object is not to denigrate science, nor to promote creationism or a “return to candlelight” (without either passing a value judgement on those conceptions), but to underline a trait of our education and of our culture (Western and more particularly French) which certain scourges of “beliefs” and of “cults” abuse. This “trait” of our education, Jean Baubérot recalled at the colloquium “Cults: social scourge or scapegoat?” in 2007: ”[…] Because from the moment when these laicising regimes, these regimes that laid claim to 1789 and to the tricolour flag, took their distance from religion, they needed a new source of legitimation, and that was Science with a capital S. The political impelled belief in Science. France was the homeland of positivism.” Let us add that scientism is close to positivism — indeed, according to various authors, a rebirth, a radicalisation or a continuity of positivism. Anatole France wrote 120 years ago: “If science one day reigns alone, credulous men will have nothing left but scientific credulities”. We are perhaps not far from it… Robert Nadeau, an epistemologist, considers that school culture is constituted of “epistemological clichés” which would form a sort of “mythology of the new times” not unrelated to a sort of scientism.

The history of epistemology teaches us that “Science” has multiple definitions, still controversial today, influenced by a highly competitive context where budgets, chairs and honours were limited, and within the framework of a struggle for the possession of meaning, for the holding of a reigning ideology (with all sorts of political implications according to the period).

Scientism, according to Ernest Renan’s formula, would make it possible to “organise humanity scientifically”. It is therefore a faith in the principles and methods of science applied to every domain. Which has led some to say that Science had become a religion. Set out in this way, scientism may seem simplistic, indeed archaic, and yet it forms an integral part of our culture, of our reasonings, of our tastes, of our manner of apprehending the world.

We grew up in an installed scientism that no longer says its name and which, since Auguste Comte, inspires the French institutions and, first and foremost, the school of the Republic. From Marie Curie to Pasteur erected as heroes by our teachers, by way of mathematics, supreme judges of our school success, and the myth of the great scientific and technical schools; to the history books describing on the one hand the religions with the tweezers of a starchy laïcité, ancient or foreign cults and “beliefs” with condescension and an absence of emotion that made them impenetrable to us, and the flawless linearity of a technical progress accompanying the retreat of superstitions — we bathed in a consensus that we ended up admitting unconsciously, according to which: “Science” is superior to “beliefs” and the scientist is its prophet…, the schoolteacher its apostle, medicine its finest jewel. Like Bibles, our childish and adolescent questionings were fed with: Science et Vie, Ça m’intéresse and other “popular science” magazines, “Euréka”, “E=M6” and innumerable television programmes and articles impregnated with a vision of science — glorious, immaculate, sure of itself — that would shame many a scientific mind that still knows that doubt and humility are essential to their approach and that knows the compromises of the science of the two past centuries.

The “investigation” published in June in “Ça m’intéresse”, entitled “Naturopaths, clairvoyants, coaches — all gurus?”, brings on stage a “Specialist in questions of belief”. In the middle of the page: “To distribute pay rises, a boss follows the advice of a fortune-teller!”, and by way of introduction: “The French are fans of experts in the occult sciences and specialists in alternative medicine. Among them hide swindlers who promise the earth to a society that needs reassurance.” Close-up on the left-hand column: we learn there that one French person in two has experimented with parallel medicines (acupuncture, naturopathy…), that 15 million people consult clairvoyants, that a Parapsy fair draws 20,000 visitors each year, that the Church of Scientology offers an iPhone application and that the Parapsychological Association is holding its annual congress in Paris this year. This, under the heading “the facts”, as a scientific demonstration would begin.

Henri Poincaré said: “One makes science with facts as one makes a house with stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” The principal common denominator of the “facts” in question is to stage the traditional targets of the scientistic and anti-cult militants; they demonstrate nothing, unless it be a certain vitality of these activities. The suspicion towards the latter, which grows on reading the article, comes not from a demonstration but from an arbitrary juxtaposition of facts, names and pejorative qualifiers, endorsed by the tacit authority of “science” incarnated by the expert in “questions of belief”. In support of the thesis, in the headline: “The experts in mental manipulation are above all after… our wallets”, and at the bottom of the page a short evocation of the MIVILUDES report (another authority, this one governmental). No proof of significant delinquency, no quantitative or qualitative study will come to justify having associated “guru”, “expert in mental manipulation”, “swindlers”, “endangering others”, etc., with the practices, beliefs and philosophies designated. Moreover, “mental manipulation” is a vague concept, without any scientific or legal validity, easily reproachable to all the actors of society, beginning with the most powerful. As for the MIVILUDES report, its approximations, its contradictions and its absence of method disqualify it on the scientific plane. Might science be a belief that has succeeded? “Ça m’intéresse” commonly furnishes the shelves of school libraries and CIDJs; it is a very innocuous magazine in the eyes of a public that considers it “scientific”. If it can pass off heaps of stones as houses, it is indeed because the sacralisation of science has caused a certain critical spirit to be lost.

A few pages before the denigration of “beliefs” by the “Ça m’intéresse” investigator, one can read, as a title in another article: “In ten years, man will have succeeded in recreating life in a test tube”. But it is a scientist who says so, so… Another trace of the scientistic inspiration: the inescapable “in the land of Descartes” where, according to the journalist, a “technophobia” would “paradoxically” reign, pushing, by way of example, a credulous population to: “doubt” the H1N1 vaccine; “polemicise” about the installation of relay antennas; “panic” following the revelation of the carcinogenic character of bisphenol A baby bottles; “be afraid of a new AZF”.

One could almost say that she missed an opportunity there to keep quiet. She forgets in any case to explain in what way these fears, panics and doubts would be unfounded or irrational (since she appeals to Descartes). There is also, in these pages, a reference to the work Petit traité de manipulation à l’usage des honnêtes gens by Robert-Vincent Joule and Jean-Léon Beauvois, researchers in social psychology. The book is cited to endorse the theory of mental manipulation, according to which certain so-called “cultic” groups would have the monopoly of manipulation, indeed specific methods of indoctrination and persuasion. Now, a complete reading of this book leads one rather to think that relations in our societies are saturated with manipulative modes, most of which are judged “fair game”, in commerce in particular (see our reading report).

For the CICNS, accustomed to anti-cult literature, there is no surprise either in the four pages of the “investigation”, or in the argument, or among the examples given, abundantly commented on our site. We invite the reader in particular to visit the pages we have devoted to the “Védrines affair” and to the “Jacqueline Starck affair”.

Let us note however that the journalist underlines a particular difficulty in the fight against “mental manipulation”: “One has to fight against the victims themselves…” Another example of scientistic thought associated with anti-cultism in the popularising magazines: the September 2005 issue of “Sciences et Avenir”, which ran the headline “The cults and science”. In the introduction to the dossier, one can read: “For a long time science seemed the best rampart against the irrational; the lights of reason, the most effective repellent against the supernatural” — the presupposition therefore being the necessity of fighting against the “irrational” and the “supernatural”, a veritable scientistic parti pris and not an application of the scientific method, far from it. Note, a few lines further on, that the pragmatic (and courageous, given the context) attitude of certain sociologists of religions studying the new religious movements without anti-cult prejudices, which could honourably be qualified as scientific, is dismissed as “wholly academic reserve” by the journalists of Sciences et Avenir. Finally, a quotation from Nathalie Luca, researcher at the CNRS, used by the authors of the article to try to demonstrate how the “cults” would unjustly reappropriate the sciences, and which they would do better to use for the purposes of self-criticism: ”[…] Our society wanted to rid itself of the hold of the religions over its institutions […]. Science took over from religion to satisfy it. There occurred a transfer of sacrality.”

Conclusion

The current dominant position in France of a certain rationalism, of a certain scientism, which sometimes calls itself humanist, heir to Descartes or, more popularly, laying claim to “common sense”, must not make one forget, on the one hand, that there exist other historical ways of apprehending the world — religious, philosophical (metaphysical), spiritualist… (without claiming to be exhaustive) — by which, moreover, numerous scientists say they are inspired or guided; and, on the other hand, that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and, by extension, our Constitution carry within them the wise intention of seeing all forms of belief respected (without hierarchy or condescension).

“Although he is dressed in the clothes of modernity, the approach of the scientific obscurantist is the same as that of the man of the Inquisition: to deny self-evident facts in the name of a dogmatic conception of what Truth must be.

Today, the scientific obscurantists multiply warnings and excommunications. For this new millennium is a harsh period for those obscurantists.” - Jean Staune (source)

Denis Mathieu was born in 1967. He is an electronics engineer by training. He has frequented numerous associative circles in France and abroad and, for some fifteen years, has been an attentive observer of the context of the expression of spirituality in France. Attached to the defence of spiritual freedom, he has taken an active part in the action of the CICNS since its creation. Since 2007, he has worked on the recording and editing of the interviews.