Jason Blakely is an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University and the author of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power. Millennial editor Robert Christian interviewed him on key themes and arguments from the book.

Your book is ‘We Built Reality’ and looks at the role of social scientists in society. How did they help to build reality? And why are so many so reluctant to acknowledge this role?

People today are really bedazzled by the Left-versus-Right culture war. They carve up the world and polarize according to familiar litmus-test issues that everyone is supposed to publicly declare their position on. It’s like Dylan’s lines in “Desolation Row”: “Everybody’s shouting: ‘Which side are you on?’”

But that’s not at all the major ideological rift that interests me. What interests me is the way that in the modern period certain groups have declared rule in the name of a bogus science of human behavior (or what I call “scientism”). In We Built Reality, I am not so much criticizing social scientists directly as those who claim to rule in the name of “science.” The major division that interests me is between technocrats claiming the scientific authority to rule and make decisions versus humanists attempting to allow ordinary people to have a say in their own governments.

When you start looking at the world this way, you will notice that it cuts across the Left-Right spectrum. There are people within every major ideological tradition who are either more technocratic or humanistic. In terms of wielding power on the basis of scientism, there is everyone from Stalinist Marxists to free-market libertarians. Scientism is also exercised as a form of authority in areas of personal disciplining and conduct like psychology, courtship practices, religious beliefs, and so on. We Built Reality talks about all of these.

Ruling in the name of “science” can be hard to detect because it often presents itself as value-free and ideologically neutral. It is an ideological form that is highly invested in hiding its own ideological nature as part of its exercise of power. Instead, people repeat its formulas as governance by mere “data,” “facts,” “charts” and “numbers.” It’s everywhere but also invisible. You have to learn to see it.

You seem to argue that classical liberals are not quite as optimistic about self-interest as current libertarians/Randians or as their illiberal critics understand them, but do you think there is an inherent tension between the Catholic (or Christian) understanding of human nature and the understanding found in classical liberalism, particularly when it comes to the role of self-interest? Do you think the republican tradition or communitarian ideals or another worldview that emphasizes things like solidarity, virtue, duties, or the common good is needed alongside liberalism to sustain the American project (or, more broadly, what we often call liberal democracy)?

The liberal tradition is vast and made up of many rival strands. So, any criticism made of it must be localized to particular forms. That having been said, I do think many of the dominant forms of liberalism face a recurrent problem of how to generate solidarity. This is especially pronounced when liberals attempt to fortify their own ideological authority with the kinds of claims we were just discussing—to a science of “interests.” This is evident, for example, in the machine-like workings of institutions expected by early figures like James Madison in the Federalist Papers. But it is particularly dramatic in later forms of neoliberalism and libertarianism that expect the market or pricing system or some other organizing mechanisms of interests to predictably function as a machine.

When technocratic forms of liberalism have tried to organize according to this “science”, it has regularly generated a cultural crisis of solidarity or common belonging. But it must immediately be said (especially today when post-liberal critiques have become so facile and widespread) that there are social and solidaristic forms of liberalism that neither avow some kind of scientism nor expect politics to simply hang together through interests. I am thinking here of a range of possibilities: from certain interpretations of Tocqueville’s civic emphasis to Hegelian liberals like T. H. Green.

Engaging in scientism seems to be a persistent temptation from the Enlightenment forward. What role does it play in the construction of race? And what lessons should today’s social scientists draw from that?

Racist ideology, in its modern form, is almost inevitably a form of scientism. This is because almost all of the most common types of white supremacy make some kind of pseudoscientific claim to be able to organize and predict human higher capacities according to a vague cluster of superficial adaptive traits (or what we call “race”). It’s very hard for people like us who live awash in histories of racial caste to really see race for what it is: a completely arbitrary labeling system that falsely and brutally organizes human life into a pseudo-scientific color hierarchy.

I am sad to say that although, of course, thousands of good-willed social scientists are antiracists, there are still very prominent parts of these disciplines that are entangled in white supremacy. One big example is the tendency to treat race as a mere variable and correlate it with IQ tests. I am thinking of infamous cases like Charles Murray and his whole intellectual milieu. These people love to present themselves as hardnosed and unsentimental empiricists who are just following the “facts.” Instead, what has happened is that racists have spent centuries inventing the idea of race, violently sorting millions according to its violent logic. Much later social scientists like Murray come along and make bogus tests supposedly verifying that the world white supremacy has created was simply “factual”—a product of the “data.” Not only are IQ tests highly questionable in terms of ideological and cultural biases but also the whole notion that intelligence can be reductively “quantified” is dubious at best. Instead, this army of facts and data is wielded mostly as a way of reproducing the inequality they are pretending to simply discover.

In We Built Reality, I call these “double-H Effects” where supposedly “scientific” descriptions of the world actually participate in constructing a highly tendentious social or political reality. We might view Murray as involved in a process of intellectual laundering by which a wicked and fallacious ideology is rendered merely “empirical.”

In this way, an intellectual charlatan and demagogue like Dinesh D’Souza can come along and Tweet as he recently did that: “Virtually every IQ study over the past half century shows that blacks … have the lowest IQ of any ethnic group.” D’Souza is a clear case of a non-scientist wielding scientism as a way to justify a technocratic (and in this case white supremacist) hierarchy. Through such demagogues, millions of people come to earnestly believe in the myth of race under the banner of “Science.” Dinesh is a peddler of racial myths who believes himself the total opposite: sober, rational, willing to follow the “facts.”

Social scientists seem obsessed with making predictions, even though these are very often wrong, including on massively important issues, as you point out. I remember studying realism in international relations theory, and the explanation for getting Hitler wrong (if they acknowledge that he did, in fact, do some irrational things) is that he is merely the exception to the rule. With 50 or 60 million killed in the war, the Shoah, and everything else, I thought perhaps the rule is not very useful if that is the exception. What accounts for this obsession with making predictions that so many social scientists seem to have?

I agree with the philosopher Charles Taylor that the main driver for prediction in the human sciences is actually ethical. Modern people really want to have rational control of society on the model of the natural sciences. Some of this is for good reasons—after all, the natural sciences have worked wonders. But people don’t sufficiently ponder the fact that the day they have total control over humans, the way they do over mere physical objects, is also the day they will have abolished the human.

Some forms of social science have constructed the metaphor of humans as machines. What has been the impact of this type of thinking?

In We Built Reality, I talk about how when we reduce humans to mere “machines”, the real danger is us. We ethically and culturally become machine-like. This is the kernel of truth behind all the tech and A.I. doomerism. The truth is that there is no machine that is a single step closer to human intelligence than a hammer. Even our marvelous computers are only accomplishing intelligent tasks because we humans are there wielding them and relative to our purposes. These arguments were made long ago by Taylor, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, and others. If computers and ChatGPT were doing the same functions alone in outer space, there would be nothing “intelligent” about it. It would just be a wheel spinning in the abyss—churning out letters. Intelligence in our machines still only happens because we are there to interpret, direct purposes, and ascribe significance. The real fear of machines is fear of ourselves. As we imagine ourselves to be more and more machine like, we start treating each other more coldly and disconnected from empathy and humane sentiments.

Do you have advice for social scientists or scholars in these types of fields on how they should approach their work going forward? What about for people who read social science literature?

Read interpretive and cultural social science to participate in an alternative paradigm. It is a small but heterodox intellectual community but tremendously dynamic and not at all monolithic ideologically or philosophically. Read Clifford Geertz, Robert Bellah, Charles Taylor, Dvora Yanow, Peregrine Schwartz-Shea, Stuart Hall, Alasdair MacIntyre. Read ethnographies like Arlie Russel Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land. Or the historical sociologies of religion by Jose Casanova. Check out the work of many sociologists around Jeffrey Alexander’s cultural sociology school at Yale. Or in a very different vein familiarize yourself with humanistic social theorists like those associated with the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies of Culture.

I am truly only scratching the surface here… If all else fails, Mark Bevir and I wrote an entire primer on how to conduct inquiry in social science that is against scientism—Interpretive Social Science.