Culture jamming the scientific method
Published on 2024-09-12
Last week, a few friends of friends were over and we were talking about magic. These people, who are all really into the local Renfair scene, were particularly interested in Western esotericism. We were talking about approaching esotericism from an academic angle, which admittedly I know very little about. Not too surprisingly, since there's really not all that many universities that treat Western esotericism as an academic discipline. A friend commented on how fascinating it'd be to try and approach an old grimoire using the scientific method, in search of reproducible results. Interesting, I thought, before blurting out "wouldn't that be a bastardization of the scientific method?"
This idea—studying a grimoire empirically—is quite old. Someone pointed out to me recently that this is in fact most of the history of Western esotericism over the last two centuries. I've written about how I feel about this sort of thing before. I'm kind of critical of the scientific method, but it's unavoidable that it is at least useful. There's a lot of things that purport to be "science" when they really shouldn't, because, of course, science has this trustworthiness that comes from the fact that it's observable and reproducible. To call something that isn't that a "science" feels dishonest to me.
A cargo cult in the imperial core
While I think that criticism holds for things like economics, I don't think it needs to hold for something like esotericism.
Esotericism generates lots of testable hypotheses, in theory; it's just that there isn't really a scientific framework for processing its results. It's very immaterial—something science is famously not all that good at handling. But like, obviously, if we suppose that there is a diametric opposite to material reality that we're calling immaterial reality, then it's not surprising that our new "immaterial science" wouldn't generate a lot of useful knowledge about material reality.
I'm reminded of samplesize.one, which describes an unnamed author's successful attempt to document everything she did over the course of a year on fifteen-minute intervals¹.
samplesize.one is indubitably a scientific endeavour. It's not one, however, that's likely to be useful for anyone other than her. But that doesn't make it any less scientific, does it? Most research isn't useful to me personally. It doesn't even have to be useful for understanding consensus reality; it only really needs to be useful to one person for something, and it looks like samplesize.one was.
You can kind of think of this as the détournement of science. The scientific method, of course, being the epistemological methodology that largely uprooted traditional knowledge frameworks across the West, sometimes to disastrous ends². The scientific method doesn't need to be in the sole custody of Enlightenment thinkers. It can be experimented with, just like anything else. Who knows, we might even learn something. Scientific esotericism has as much to offer in critique of science as science has to offer as another way to approach esotericism.
In as much as this is a "bastardization" of the scientific method, that can be a good thing. It could encourage us to think more critically about the way we frame knowledge construction. And I think that's kind of cool.
Footnotes
¹ Fun fact: I also did this, although I did it slightly differently. I decided to log my activity once an hour by assigning points to activities done during a particular hour proportional to how much time I spent doing them. This is a really bad idea. Don't do this. It makes the data science part of this exercise ridiculously hard. I did this for like six months before calling it, and manipulating the data ended up being so hard that I never made more than a few plots.
One of the metrics I was measuring was relative happiness, and the biggest discovery I made during this exercise was that my average happiness score was 0.5. In other words, I am usually as happy as I usually am.
² If you don't believe me, come visit the Pacific Northwest next summer
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