‘Anything goes’ is not a scientific ideal

It is universally acknowledged that there is a big gap between the two cultures of science and the humanities. Six years ago, New Zealand’s top scientific organisation, the Royal Society, tried to close the gap by appointing representatives of the humanities to its councils.

This has produced some curious results because most humanities people are slaves to a fashionable cult largely opposed to science – the cult of postmodernism.

Set up in the 1960s by fruitcake French philosophers Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, postmodernists assert that:

There are no such things as facts, just opinions about facts.

In the arts, there are no rules, anything goes. Ambiguity is okay.

Everybody’s opinions are of equal value, whether you’re a rocket scientist or a Stone Age nobody.

It is wrong for people of one belief to question other people’s beliefs (thereby committing the sin of ‘‘decontextualisation’’, aka political incorrectness).

Science is just another myth on par with the rest of the world’s myths. These five assertions fly in the face of scientific endeavour which aims to establish facts by experiment, question everybody and everything, and clear up ambiguity at any cost.

There is a big difference between science and myth. Scientific facts or theories change from day to day, are always open to question and can be disproven.

Myths are not open to question and can never be proved or disproved.

Members of its humanities forum have already channelled Royal Society money away from science and into such projects as ‘‘The Orgasm as Metaphor’’, ‘‘Missing Narratives in Modern Chinese Intellectual History’’ and ‘‘Managing Monks in Southeast Asia’’.

No doubt these are all worthy research topics but they should be funded by the humanities, not by the scientific Royal Society.

A couple of months ago, the Royal Society ran a workshop to address the ‘‘lack of diversity and equity in New Zealand’s research’’.

Top humanities councillors, known as Te Whainga Aronui o te Aparangi, concluded that the Royal Society needed ‘‘to place the Treaty of Waitangi centrally to what we do and bring alongside that inequity and diversity issues in a holistic manner’’.

In the National Business Review, commentator Rodney Hide takes exception to these developments.

He writes: ‘‘The Treaty may be politically significant but its scientific significance is nil.’’

He also says: ‘‘The Royal Society is not doing science but politics. ‘‘Its standards are not those determined by experiment but rather the ebb and flow of contemporary politics and what’s politically hot and what’s not.’’

Since the 1600s, the Royal Society’s motto has been ‘‘Nullius in verba’’ or ‘‘take nobody’s word for it’’.

Hide suggests the society’s New Zealand branch change its motto to ‘‘Ventis secundus, tene cursum’’ or ‘‘anything goes’’.

Naively, in my view, the Royal Society has embraced to its bosom a cabal of anti-scientists.

Listen up mathematicians, nuclear physicists, geochemists, molecular biologists and rocket scientists!