Andrew Sullivan responded to my post, Science is rational; scientists are not:
…One of the greatest errors of modernity is simply conflating the truths of one world of experience with the truths of another. I guess Michael Oakeshott instilled in me the sense that this confusion is the central intellectual problem of modernity. It is indeed at the root of a great deal of our difficulties. It is a mistake to apply the truths of science to that of history or aesthetics or politics. They are simply different categories of understanding the world. And the most profound mistake in human thought is to conflate the claims of religion with the claims of politics, and to conflate the truth-claims of the eternal with the truth-claims of the now.
On the broader points I agree with Andrew. Nevertheless, I quibble on the details here. Most of my readers would know that my own inclinations in terms of historical scholarship lean toward the positivist scale. That is, I believe there is some value in trying to view history as a quantitative science. I’m a fan of cliometrics, and I welcome a science of cliodynamics. I do not believe that either field has justified their value, but I welcome the attempt.
But in regards to aesthetics or politics I believe the distinction matters more. These are fields where the ought is prior to the is. These fields are not in the service of passions, rather, they elucidate and clarify passions. Political values are simply elaborations of normative presuppositions. Aesthetics vary from individual to individual because when someone sits back and reflects they project their own particular and specific intuitions. This does not mean that there are not general human aesthetic biases, it simply acknowledges that these are domains where individual subjectivity reigns supreme, and insofar as there is variation in particular preferences there will be stark disagreement. I personally believe that there is a smaller variance in aesthetic tastes than there are in political tastes.
Finally, the question of religion I feel somewhat an orphan. Most broadly I agree with the thesis of The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. That is, I believe that the separation of church and state is to a large extent an expression of government fiat and subjective interpretation of what the purview of the church (religion) is. On a personal level I am very skeptical of Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of the two majesterium. Yet when it comes to a broader social level I take religion as an inevitable background condition which can not be abolished from any calculation. Unlike Andrew I am not a believer in the validity of any religion as extra-human creations; that is, I believe religion is simply an elaboration on human creative impulses. As such, it is rather difficult to construct a heuristic which differentiates between religion and non-religion when it comes to human affairs. Pragmatically we must do this, but on a deep fundamental level I think it is somewhat a sham.
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