The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything but his reason.
— G.K. Chesterton —
They are everywhere: on TV, the internet, and YouTube, advising us about raising our children and improving our sex life; in magazines and newspapers, lending a measure of weight to opinion pieces disguised as news; in business, promising to improve productivity and bolster profits through higher productivity, or slicker marketing, or yet another reorganization or “team-building” project. They are ubiquitous in government and politics, lending credence to the implausible and certainty to the unpredictable. Armed with statistics, studies, and the ethereal proclamations of other unnamed experts like unto themselves, they saturate our psyche with innumerable “facts” and “figures” so that we may live perfect lives in an imperfect world. The chaos that swirls around us need not engender fear and hopelessness — there will always be an expert to hold your hand, lest you become lost and wander from life’s perfect path.
Intimidated by their credentials and self-assured certainty, we slowly relinquish the uneasy feeling that their advice and conclusions invariably contradict our experience, common sense, and the simple wisdom of life acquired through parents and parish, logic and lore. Theirs is a relentless battering of our natural defenses, made ever more potent by lives lived without margin, frantically running to and fro, pursuing the very goals our experts have set forth while quietly dying to the insight gained by simplicity and satisfaction with life’s precious but fragile treasures. Their strident advocacy drowns out the quiet wisdom whispered to the soul in contemplation and prayer, found only in reflection and the fertile soil of rich relationships.
The fecklessness of our experts is often utterly dispensable, if annoying, as our gilded guides waffle from truth to contradictory truth: “The ice caps are melting!” “An ice age is immenent!” “Fats are dangerous!” “These fats are good!” “Sunshine causes cancer!” “Sunshine prevents cancer!” What is true today will be foolishness tomorrow — and nary a hint of humility will be heard from those who hustled us mere months before.
As our increasingly secular and superficial culture abandons the transcendent truths of faith and the tested wisdom of tradition, we search desperately for a lodestone upon which to ground our lives and so trade trust and belief in transcendent and transformational absolutes for fear and the desperate desire to control the world which has become our enemy. We frantically cling to every proffered proof, no matter how foolish or feckless, seeking something upon which to ground and anchor our lives. As these sands shift treacherously beneath our feet, we lurch and stumble from fragile branches to broken rails as we stagger along a path that leads ever downward.
Yet the allure of the experts can prove far more destructive than mere personal angst in a turbulent, fast-moving world: How many listened to financial gurus in 2008, who assured everyone they could not lose in real estate? “Leverage to the max; it can only go up!” The consequences across the economy were devastating — except for those who sold us this sage advice. These “experts” understood the game far better than the market, and walked away unscathed and wealthy, leaving only our wreckage in their wake.
Our dependence on the guidance of scientists, economists, educators, and technocrats proves especially toxic when their expertise becomes wedded to money and political influence. Under the guise of shielding us from the complexity of their disciplines, they evolve into closed guilds, guardians of a secret knowledge which we, in our harrowed and hectic lives, have no time and little interest in comprehending. When our educational system — itself run by a closed guild — produces generations of students tutored in women’s studies, postmodern deconstructionism, and the evils of the West, yet leaves students ignorant of logic, philosophy, and the rigors of the hard sciences, the problem is compounded. We increasingly are left with little recourse but to trust those who guard and disperse the hidden knowledge we no longer comprehend. Our Gnostic masters dispense their wisdom; ours is but to nod and obey.
One of the more notorious examples was seen in the East Anglia email scandal in 2009. Centered on one of the three major centers for climate research and data in the world, the hacked emails and software code have ripped open the veil to show us the inner sanctum of science, utterly corrupted and politicized. At issue is anthropogenic global warming (AGW) — the theory that recent warming trends in global temperatures are caused by rising carbon dioxide levels from human activity fostered by industrialization. It has long been a theory that struggled to pass the sniff test, placing undo weight on a minor component of so-called greenhouse gases while dismissing the enormous (and evident) impact of solar activity, water vapor, and cloud cover. Yet for years, we have been told — in increasingly shrill and strident tones — that this theory is “settled science,” and an “imminent climate crisis” is forthcoming.
It was fascinating to watch this ball of yarn unravel. In one of the greater hoaxes mankind has ever witnessed — most certainly the one with almost unimaginable financial impact globally — we were watching the “settled science” of AGW disintegrate. We read how data was manipulated to hide declining global temperatures and make them appear to rise sharply (“Mike’s nature trick“). The peer review process ensured no contrary or skeptical opinions were published, and efforts were made to delegitimize journals that published such articles. Proxy data, such as tree rings, were cherry-picked to ensure the data conformed to the AGW philosophy. FOIA requests for data were met with stonewalling and destruction of raw data. The homogenization of temperature station data—adjusting the temperatures to reflect changes in the surrounding environment, such as urbanization — showed striking and arbitrary adjustments to demonstrate a sharp rise in temperatures when no such changes existed in the raw data. Other prominent climate research centers have been similarly stonewalling such raw data requests. The data problems scratch the surface; the software used to generate reports and alarmist graphs was incompetently written by amateur programmers — and could not even reproduce the graphs from the original data without massive software hacks and fudge factors — by the programmer’s own admission.
The response of climate scientists to these devastating revelations? Denial and attack. The reaction of the UN Climate gurus and American and Western policy makers? Denial and attack. The response of the media to this massive global meltdown of AGW “settled science? Crickets.
Amazing. But hardly surprising.
Whatever the role of human activity in global warming, one thing is abundantly evident: the current “science” of AGW is not science at all but more closely resembles a cultic religion. Its priesthood holds the secret knowledge about “climate change,” and we, the fools who question or challenge them, engender naught but condemnation, ridicule, hatred, and disdain. For the priesthood and the true believers who bow to them, the payoff for guarding their secrets are huge: for our scientist priests, millions in research grants, often at taxpayer expense; for the evangelists (Al Gore and John Kerry come to mind), the ability to engender hysteria with wild, apocalyptic climate claims while raking in millions on carbon trading and investments in “green” technology; for the politicians, the opportunity to further extend the control and power of government into every aspect of its citizens lives while pocketing huge political contributions from environmental groups and green industries.
We have been lectured endlessly by our postmodern mentors that religion is naught but ignorance and superstition, while scientific “facts” are Truth. But “knowledge is power,” as the saying goes — especially when the knowledge can be hidden behind a veil of secrecy, manipulated at will to conform to unchallengeable presuppositions and philosophies, and then relentlessly drilled into our collective consciences through compliant and complicit channels of media, education, and politics.
The climate scientists are hardly alone in such Gnostic gambits; evolutionary biology — whose “scientists” seem to spend most of their efforts proving that God doesn’t exist rather than demonstrating that their tattered and threadbare theories of evolution have an actual basis in reproducible science and genetics and a demonstrable and reliable predictive value (which all solid science must have) beyond the pure speculation and projection that comprises most evolutionary science. Think I’m a crazy fundamentalist creationist? Try, as a scientist, to demand that evolutionists satisfactorily answer any host of devastating challenges to their theories: the irreducible complexity of biological subsystems such as the eye, the cellular mitochondria, and intracellular protein factories; the entropy problem (complex systems tend naturally to disorder and chaos, not more complexity); the Cambrian explosion; the impossibly long odds that all physical constants stood at precisely the correct values at the instant of the Big Bang; the enormous problem of free will, higher intellect, and purpose in the human animal which has no precursors in lesser beasts. Challenge these — even with understated, respectful, and serious questions — and watch how quickly the ad hominem attacks begin, how quickly you will be excluded from “peer-reviewed” literature, ridiculed and ostracized, and labeled as an ignorant creationist fundamentalist, an enemy of science — or worse.
In our repudiation of a world based on absolutes and transcendence, our free fall into secularization has ironically left us clinging to science as our sole absolute, our foundation in a world that no longer makes sense, in which there are no true absolutes. Yet science cannot bear such weight alone, detached as it has become from notions of absolute truth and the true nature of the creation that is man and his universe. Instead, It has become a tool of power, manipulation, and deception. The ship of knowledge no longer has an anchor and drifts aimlessly toward the rocks of self-righteous deception and the shoals of arrogance.
Writing over a century ago, G.K. Chesterton said, “this is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and un-theoretical majorities.” What was true then is ever more true today, as we relinquish our convictions and the truths that come by faith and tradition for the perilous tyranny of expert rule. True freedom requires absolute truth, liberating transparency, and the humility of knowing we are not gods. Science detached from absolutes will not bring progress but peril, not truth but tyranny. In our quest for the Utopia, which technology enticingly promises, to forget our foundational truths invites disaster and slavery.
