Sam Harris and the N.I.C.E.

I've been re-reading C.S. Lewis's science-fiction novel That Hideous Strength. The villains of the piece are members of a nebulous research group called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. The N.I.C.E. wants to use impartial science to rebuild Britain in a rationalized way, though its leaders admit to each other that the real point of all their work is that they get to be the ones running the experiments — a power grab in the name of instrumental reason.

I would have said that Lewis's take on the modern scientific project is overly pessimistic, that our scientists do not really think like that, and that in our society the democratic project has a salutary oversight of the scientific establishment. I would have said that, but just this morning I read a review of Sam Harris's books at The Nation which made me second-guess my position. (I've only read Letter to a Christian Nation, and the review is on point about that one, so I'm hoping the reviewer is right about the other two books.) The reviewer sums up Harris's political project, and it's chilling:

These high-minded questions conceal a frightening Olympian agenda. Harris is really a social engineer, with a thirst for power that sits uneasily alongside his allegedly disinterested pursuit of moral truth. We must use science, he says, to figure out why people do silly and harmful things in the name of morality, what kinds of things they should do instead and how to make them abandon their silly and harmful practices in order “to live better lives.” Harris’s engineering mission envelops human life as a whole. “Given recent developments in biology, we are now poised to consciously engineer our further evolution,” he writes. “Should we do this, and if so, in which ways? Only a scientific understanding of the possibilities of human well-being could guide us.” Harris counsels that those wary of the arrogance, and the potential dangers, of the desire to perfect the biological evolution of the species should observe the behavior of scientists at their professional meetings: “arrogance is about as common at a scientific conference as nudity.” Scientists, in Harris’s telling, are the saints of circumspection.

Harris would fit right in at the N.I.C.E. — as long as he stuck with Frost rather than Wither.

(I found the article via David Sessions at Patrol.)