“When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer / Superstition ain’t the way.”

– Stevie Wonder in “Superstition”

Briefly, scientism is worshipping the tools and trappings of science—in short, the idolatry of the Trojan Horse, the golden calf, or outdated scientific methods.

Let’s take a closer look. According to my 1981 Macquarie Dictionary, religion is “the quest for the value of the ideal life, involving three phases, the ideal, the practices for attaining the values of the ideal, and the theology or worldview relating the quest to the envisioning universe.” I don’t think Richard Dawkins has heard of this, and it isn’t what I mean by scientism.

Let’s look at ideology: “The body of doctrine, myth, and symbols of a social movement, institution, class, or large group.” That’s what I’m talking about, but Stevie Wonder said it better.

Put differently, science isn’t a an ideology—or a brand—and money doesn’t like it because real science isn’t about getting what you want or about what greases the wheels of the status quo. It’s about the truth, which gives you long-term safety but in the short term can upend human expectations. Ibsen’s Enemy of the People is a classic modern cautionary tale about what happens when doctors tell the truth to people who don’t want to know it. A recent Norwegian film sets this tale in the context of a bottled-water company.

Science for money is often pushed in the direction of pleasing funders—or peer review committees who favor those who produce the greatest number of “least publishable units” per publishing dollar, or those who publish the “blockbuster” articles that are most often cited. This leads quickly to scientism. While many in the brave new world of biotech aim for cure, those who aim to do just enough to keep funded may be likely to assume that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence, or to mistake skepticism for a method, or fall victim to the errors of what some call junk science—what we here refer to as scientism.

If you are alert for scientism, you will be less likely to give credence to bad information on the internet that arises from the worship of technology. You will be less likely to inadvertently assume that products—chemicals or devices, for example—are innocent until proven guilty and that patients are guilty until proven innocent. And you will be less likely to mistake heat for light.

Here’s an image that may help you to see through the scientism that you find on the internet to the social process behind it: in the temple of the computer, where you feel intimate and cozy yet global, you are like a john who is likely to contract an STD. For a more entertaining view of the perils of the internet, see Dave Chappelle’s bit “If the Internet Were a Real Place,” in which the internet is like an urban street where it’s hard to avoid the criminal and the malicious.