The Altar of Hard Science

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Contrary to some people’s belief, I am not anti-science.

Even with my love for herbalism and vision boards and homemade bread, I am completely and emphatically pro-science. There is a saying amongst the more reasonable of us in the “woo” or “crunchy” crowd (I promise we exist) that usually goes something along the lines of “chamomile and honey for a sore throat, antibiotics for infections, and vaccines for public health.” These really aren’t opposing views and work very well in harmony when properly balanced. Treating things like mild colds with more natural remedies is genuinely helpful for preventing the over-prescription of antibiotics which causes the development of more resistant strains of bacteria, for example.

The same approach is true in my professional life, along with my general understanding of the world. Lawyers are trained to look to a wide range of sources when developing an argument, depending on who we’re speaking to and what context we’re in. What I cite when arguing in front of a judge is going to be different from what I cite giving testimony in front of a legislative body is going to be different from what I cite when giving a public talk, and so on and so forth. It can even change depending on the specific circumstance of the day.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell”Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published-Carl Sandburg

I use scientific studies and medical research hand in hand with sociology, anthropology, history, political theory, philosophy, theology, religious studies, the lived experience of contemporary humans, and beyond. And I’ve found this approach pisses a lot of people off, especially in the state-church separation space. These fields are a lot more “wiggly.” You can’t put them into a microscope or plug them into an equation, so a lot of people feel like they aren’t “real.”

I think in large part as a result of an entire generation’s fight for state-church separation being centered around the battle for evolution to be taught in public school science classes and for creationism to be moved into Sunday Schools (or at the very least social studies classes with other cultural creation stories) where it belongs, a lot of the state-church world has become overly reliant on celebrity scientists with very specific expertise related to this one issue. And I want to be clear that I am not discounting their work and advocacy in this area. I was never taught creationism in my rural Indiana public school outside of a unit on creation stories in my world history class, and I’m grateful to the activists that made sure of that.

But it causes a problem whenever any single field, or small group of interrelated fields, tries to claim that it has the answers to every part of human existence.

This isn’t really a problem that is unique to the state-church world, though I think the situation I just described plays a large role in that specific community. Instead I think it’s just one case study in the overall outcome of a century of over emphasis on the “hard” sciences and the cultural dismissal of social sciences, arts, and humanities as frameworks for understanding the world.

I grew up during the “STEM” boom of the ‘aughts and 2010s. I went to countless weekend workshops and summer programs and school field trips focused on robotics and coding and genome mapping and rockets that all came with the promise of high paying careers and the ability to build the future. During the 2008 recession it seemed like every spare cent, no matter how few were available, was going into teaching us computer skills. My junior high even required students to take a technology class that was focused in large part in teaching us the basics of CAD modeling. It took many people in my generation until college to realize that this push wasn’t because of a grand vision of a peaceful techno-utopia, but because of a very specific campaign run by the US military post 9/11 (almost everything about how the late Millennials and early Gen-Z understand the world can be traced back to 9/11) to ensure a new generation of engineers would be ready to build the next great super weapon to further the cause of American imperialism.

Many of my friends that went into STEM fields became quickly disillusioned when they realized that almost all of the secure high paying employment opportunities that they were promised were with military contractors. And while I still think tech innovation is incredibly important (after all, it allows me to communicate with all of you) this over emphasis on STEM came at the cost of social sciences, arts, and humanities.

Creative writing classes, art classes, music, drama, psychology and sociology classes, and more started being cut from school budgets across the country to create more and more room for engineering classes and computer labs. I remember my disappointment when my school cut its current events class in favor of yet another tech focused class. I only had a semester of home economics in seventh grade. By the time that I went to college, there was noticeable disdain for those of us that chose to major in fields outside of STEM or to a lesser extent business. Our degrees were reduced to jokes about underwater basket weaving, and any program that didn’t essentially have a job title in the name was derided as useless. My randomly assigned roommate freshman year, upon learning my major, told me “oh I’m not sure what I’m majoring in yet, but it will be in a real science, you know, something useful.”

This push away from humanities and social sciences to a hard core focus on STEM fields only didn’t start with Millennials and Gen-Z, for the record. My parents were born during the post-WWII baby boom (1952 and 1963), and while neither of them majored in technology fields (my dad is a journalist and my mom was an accountant), much of their education was influenced by the Cold War and the Space Race. My grandparents’ generation was influenced by the World Wars and the surrounding arms races. All of this, however, has built up to the political and social situation we now find ourselves in, and far too many people lack the knowledge and language to understand it.

Our cultural hyperfixation on “hard sciences” and “tech” created the exact conditions that lead to Elon Musk’s current hostile takeover of the American government. Musk has successfully convinced large swaths of the world’s population that he is a technological genius, not because he is one, but because our education system has slowly taken critical thinking and media literacy skills out of the curriculum. In truth, Musk is at best a con-man aided by the absurd amount of money he inherited from his family’s apartheid mining operations. But because he has presented himself as a Tony Stark-esque technological messiah, ushering in a new age of American industry alongside the prophet of American “greatness” Donald Trump, we are now watching him ransack the Treasury in an attempt to become a dictator that is glaringly obvious to anyone with a base knowledge of political history. Because Musk has put a veneer of science and business over his public persona, he’s been able to go beyond Trump’s previous propaganda campaigns to take control of the US government without ever having to be elected to public office, or even confirmed by the Senate.

Arts, humanities, and social science teach us about the world around us in a much different, but equally necessary way to fields like biology, physics, and mathematics. They teach us how to effectively communicate with each other. They teach us how to empathize and relate to life experiences other than our own. They teach us the variety of different answers that people have come to in approaching the same philosophical questions. They teach us about how history forms culture and informs our views so that we can better critique our previous notions of the world. They teach us how to approach ethical questions beyond just what “is” and “is not.” They teach us all of the ways that humans have learned that just because we can do something doesn’t always mean that we should. And most importantly they teach us that there is no single way to interpret the infinite complexities of human existence, and that there can never be a single solution to all the world’s problems. Even as a person of faith, I don’t think there is a single system of belief that can explain every aspect of the universe, and we repeat the same historical problems of organized religion every time we insist that one single type of knowledge can provide the “right” answers for everything, even if that approach is an ostensibly secular one.

I don’t ever intend to present myself as an expert in every possible field that exists. Would I call myself an expert in my particular niche of the intersections of law, politics, queerness, and religion? Yes. It’s something I have devoted my entire academic and professional career to. Work in this area is one of the things that gets me out of bed in the morning. I’m the weirdo reading a book about the history of gender diversity in some far off part of the world while on the treadmill at my gym. I genuinely find that fun. But you don’t want me making decisions on transportation infrastructure (it would be all trains all the time), or talking about how bugs do…bug things (I have a childhood phobia of butterflies thanks to an episode of Spongebob), or even calculating the tip when we’re in a rush to get somewhere after dinner (math is…hard). Because my area of expertise doesn’t actually deal with those things.

We cannot sacrifice human complexity on the altar of “hard science” without doing a massive disservice to ourselves, our communities, and our descendants. We must not worship “science” and “tech” and the people who work in those fields as god-priests of all that is true and good. We need people to pursue knowledge in vast and diverse ways, or we will lose that knowledge far faster than it can be gained, with absolutely disastrous consequences.

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Kat (they/them) is a queer lawyer, activist, and theorist focusing on the intersections of law, queerness, religion, and politics, with the occasional bit of theology, political theory, and legal theory thrown in for good measure. Originally from rural southern Indiana, Kat earned their B.A. in Political Science in 2019 before continuing on to earn their J.D. in 2022, both from Indiana University- Bloomington. A former Equal Justice Works Fellow for the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Kat has spent their professional career fighting for the separation of church and state and LGBTQIA+ rights. Outside of work you can find them at a ballet or contemporary dance class, sipping on dirty shirleys at their local gay bar, or playing video games with their cat, Merlin.