The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [143]
It’s hard to follow the advice against taking narratives seriously when we seek to understand the past. After all, what is left from the past besides its artifacts and its stories? In some cases, there are other traces left, much more reliable than stories, that will enable us to reconstruct history. Gene sequence differences, slight differences between dialects and languages, and other quantifiable variables are already allowing biological anthropologists to uncover large swaths of human prehistory and even to correct written histories of settlements, migrations, technological advances, and military conquests. But even what these scientific means uncover can’t really amount to more than entertainment. The narratives about what actually happened in the past have no more value for understanding the present or the future than the incomplete and even entirely mythic narratives that they might replace. History, even corrected by science, is still bunk.
Once you adopt scientism, you’ll be able to put lots of the strife and controversies about politics into perspective. You will also be able to cease taking seriously aesthetic and ethical judgments that offend you. When it comes to politics, you will be able to sidestep disagreements in which other people try to force you to choose just by pointing out that the dispute is at least in part a factual one, and the facts are not in. You will be able to undercut some arguments just by pointing out that they make assumptions about reality that science has already shown to be false—for example, that humans have souls or that there is free will or that most people are selfish.
Of course, some disputes, especially about the meaning of works of art, literature, and music, are ones in which all disputants are wrong, for in these cases the argument is about whose illusion is correct. When the answer is none, the argument is hard to take seriously as anything but a game. Games are fun, and gamesmanship is the (naturally selected) function of many of the disagreements that divert the chattering classes.
When it comes to your own life, scientism makes no unqualified prescriptions. If you enjoy being unhappy, if you really get off on the authenticity of the tragic view of life, if you are not inclined to break harmful habits that will shorten your life or cause your body grief in the future, scientism has nothing much to say. You are at the extreme end of a distribution of blind variations in traits that Mother Nature makes possible and exploits. To condemn these extreme traits as wrong, false, incorrect, bad, or evil is flatly inconsistent with nihilism.
On the other hand, if you are within a couple of standard deviations of the mean, you will seek to avoid, minimize, or reduce unhappiness, pain, discomfort, and distress in all its forms. If so, scientism has good news. There is an ever-increasing pharmacopoeia of drugs, medicines, treatments, prosthetic devices, and regimes that will avoid, minimize, or reduce these unwanted conditions. Take them. And if you feel guilty for seeking surcease from the thousand natural shocks that flesh and especially gray matter are subject to, well there’s probably a drug that reduces such guilt feelings, too. Which of these treatments work, and which do not? That’s an easy (or at least an unambiguously answerable) question, too. The treatments that survive rigorous experimental testing are the ones to try. You can write off any treatment whose provider excuses it from double-blind controlled experiments on the grounds that you have to believe in it for the treatment to work. Even placebos pass the double-blind test.
We can organize our own lives in the absence of real purpose and planning. We do so by reorganizing the neural circuitry that produces these very illusions of design and forethought. If reorganizing our brain is needed, scientism commends a very ancient “philosophy.