From Skeptic To Leftist
How I stopped being an insufferable science nerd and instead became an insufferable Marxist.
All the best writers and commentators interpret the world through an analytical lens. This helps them make sense of the endless complexities that constitute reality, to pick out interesting and instructive themes, and thereby to formulate something worth saying.
When I started blogging back in 2009, my analytical lens was scientific skepticism, which I describe as a science-based worldview that emphasizes critical thinking. But longtime readers may have noticed that this has changed in recent years: that I have been choosing more political topics, and that I have been drawing more revolutionary conclusions than I used to. In fact, I no longer even refer to myself as a skeptic but rather as a leftist, or (more specifically) a scientific socialist, or (even more specifically) a Marxist. This is my new analytical lens, and it has been for a couple years now.
However, I have yet to directly address this transformation or explain the reasoning behind it — it just kind of happened. And I do feel a nagging obligation to explain myself to my longtime readers, and to set out exactly how I have changed and how I have not. Besides, I have come to realize that I am far from the only person who has taken a ride down the skeptic-to-leftist pipeline, and therefore that in explaining my own transformation I may also be clarifying how this pipeline works and encouraging others to follow suit.
So here it is at last: my rationale for trading in a skeptical lens for a Marxist one, and how doing so has (and hasn’t) changed my analyses.
My honeymoon with skepticism
I began to describe myself as a skeptic not long after I was introduced to the podcast The Skeptics Guide to the Universe and read Richard Dawkin’s book The God Delusion (2006)1. I was in the early stages of my biology degree and undergoing what might be described as my own personal Enlightenment. I was enthralled by the majesty and wonder of the world as seen from a science-based perspective, and skepticism’s power to dispel the religious and new-age magical thinking with which I had long been inundated held strong appeal for me, as did its power to push back against the tsunami of conspiracy theories and misinformation that had seemed to accompany the rise of the internet and social media.
Politics, on the other hand, was a different matter. At the time, the political landscape entirely uninspiring and I was perfectly happy to pay only fleeting heed to it. Stephen Harper had just become our Prime Minister and George “War on Terror” Bush was coasting through his final years in the White House; Barack Obama was still gearing up to launch his first campaign for US president, and it was a telling sign of the times that his bland, centrist brand of politics would seem downright progressive, and his hopey-changey rhetoric would actually seem inspiring. In this context, skepticism’s relatively apolitical nature did not even occur to me as a shortcoming — if anything it was a virtue. Besides, politics seemed endlessly messy and complex, whereas science seemed comparatively clear-cut. In matters of science you were either correct or you were incorrect, and I liked that.
Moreover, the skeptic movement was in its heyday. This movement had grown out of a long tradition that includes among its heroes the 20th century escape artist/debunker Harry Houdini and the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (although its roots can arguably be traced even further back to the ancient Greek Pyrrhonists), but it was still fairly young as a social force. It had only originated in the 1980’s and cohered in the 1990’s and early 2000’s thanks to the advent of the internet, which allowed the formation of online spaces where skeptics could associate in addition to facilitating the spread of the Skeptics in the Pub phenomenon and the proliferation of skeptic-themed conferences like The Amazing Meeting, Skepticon, and CSICon.
My first two blogs, MemeScreen and Curiosity-Driven Investigations, were both inspired by this movement and my own love of science, and the articles I published on them clearly reflected that. For example one of my earlier blog posts addressed the fear-mongering about the health effects of the non-ionizing microwave radiation emitted by cellphones (and “smart” hydro meters) that was in vogue in the 2000’s, and pointed out that not only was this widespread concern contradicted by the scientific literature, which suggested that this form of radiation is safe, but also that the literature raised other grave concerns about the very serious health effects of another kind of radiation that cellphones emit — namely, the visible radiation, otherwise known as light (at night) —, which were almost entirely absent from the public discourse.
Later, I also wrote about things like the shortcomings of acupuncture (SPOILERS: they are severe) and the idea of immortal souls (SPOILERS: they don’t exist), and I even made my first and only YouTube video about the effect of the full moon on human behavior (SPOILERS: it is negligible).
I found this work rewarding, even if it was not always well-received by those too invested in their beliefs to appreciate it, or those who figured I was just a nay-sayer who was trying to make himself feel clever by making them look like gullible fools. It felt like I was using what I had learned in science school to benefit my community, like I was helping people who did not have the privilege of a science education to understand how to protect themselves in our science-ridden society, and like I was on a noble mission to fix what was fundamentally wrong with the world. People in general are good and decent and smart, I thought; the problem is that they just don’t always understand things properly.
Soon, The Skeptic’s Guide was joined in my podcast playlist by others with names like The Skeptic Zone, Skeptically Speaking2, Skepticality, and Skeptoid, while The God Delusion was joined on my bookshelf by the likes of Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World (1995) and Christopher Hitchen’s God Is Not Great (2007). Sagan in particular was able to encapsulate what motivated me to evangelize skepticism when he wrote that:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization of which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a recipe for disaster.”
Swiping left
So what changed? In part, it was the political landscape: Obama came and went, and proved to be a huge disappointment, and Bernie Sanders had made socialism cool again. And in part, it was me: I had become disillusioned with academia following a bad experience with grad school, I had become severely depressed, I had suffered homeless and food insecurity, and as a result of all of this, I had become much more angry at the world and, accordingly, much more politically motivated. The fact that skepticism had little to say about politics thus became increasingly unsatisfying, and I began, more and more, to tune in to progressive leftist commentary.
And as I did so, something strange happened: my old skeptical heroes started to seem less politically neutral and more politically conservative.
This clearly had nothing to do with their enthusiasm for scientific inquiry and critical thinking per se — there is nothing conservative about these things. The problem, I realized upon reflection, was that they just weren’t applying these principles to political matters. They weren’t subjecting political claims to the same level of rigor to which they subjected scientific claims. And this by no means made them political neutral: on the contrary, their unwillingness to apply skepticism to politics was itself a political decision — one that effectively spared the capitalist status quo from scrutiny to the benefit of the ruling class.
But that was not all. At the same time, I came to realize that skepticism is by definition logically incoherent since properly interpreting science demands properly understanding the society in which that science is done; whereas in striving to properly understand society one ceases to be a mere “scientific skeptic” and by definition and grows into something else (ideally, a revolutionary socialist). Skeptics, I gradually realized, are therefore hamstrung in their pursuit of truth, despite the fact that this pursuit is ostensibly their raison d'être. The truth demands a skeptical approach to all aspects of society. The truth demands political action to overthrow the status quo. To quote the Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci:
“the truth is revolutionary.”
Skepticism’s logical incoherence is especially salient when contrasted with scientific socialism, which I eventually began to familiarize myself with in the form of Marxism. Marx, I came to realize, was just as grounded in science as any skeptic, and Marxists (at their best) are just as concerned with an accurate discernment of reality — which, of course, often necessitates discussion of matters that capitalist society typically deems non-political and purely scientific. Marxist politics flow naturally from Marxists’ conception of reality, which is informed by science; conversely, their interpretation of science is informed by their politics. And their politics remind them that the scientific establishment — along with the education system that perpetuates it — is controlled by and therefore largely serves the interests of the ruling capitalist class.
So at some point I stopped thinking of myself as a skeptic and became a Marxist. It was a graceful transition that felt more like a maturation than a complete metamorphosis; it was a natural extension of my scientific worldview. And many of my opinions have shifted only subtly as a result of it. For example I still hate quacks and snake oil — only now I have become more preoccupied with capitalism as the root cause of unscientific and opportunistic medical practices.
Admittedly, however, there are a number of things on which my opinions have about-faced. For example I am now much more receptive to the idea that JFK was not killed by a lone gunman acting alone, which I previously accepted rather uncritically out of a knee-jerk aversion to conspiracy theorizing; and I am now convinced that the environmental crisis has no technological fix, as I previously thought theoretically possible, but requires political-socioeconomic change (i.e., the end of capitalism). More generally, Marxism has led me to a completely different diagnosis of the world’s ills and, of course, a completely different prescription to address them. In place of the plague of scientific and technological ignorance that I perceived as a skeptic and for which I prescribed education, now I see the unplanned, profit-driven economy and its unequal, class-ridden social structure as the primary problem with which the world is beset. This problem, obviously, calls for more than just education, but for a planned economy and a classless society. In other words, it calls for socialism — something only achievable through revolution because the ruling capitalist class is addicted to power and privilege and will never willingly forego it.
That is not to say that I Marxism has blinded me to the immense value of education — not at all. In fact, an education is essential to understanding the principles of Marxism. Even the capitalist education system, which is deliberately designed to downplay the problems that stem from the profit incentive and class society, to skirt subjects like working class history (see Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, 1980) or dialectical materialism (see my article on A Marxist Biology), and to instill conformist and centrist tendencies, is of great value and cannot help but supply students with the tools they need to become revolutionaries. As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels observe in The Communist Manifesto (1848), this is because the logic of capitalism compels the bourgeoisie to provide the proletariat with “its own elements of political and general education”, and in doing so “it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie”, thereby producing “its own grave-diggers.”
And despite my disavowal of skepticism, I have no doubt that an understanding of science and a capacity for critical thinking are exactly the kind of weapons to which Marx and Engels were referring.
So worry not: although I have traded in my scientific skepticism analytical lens for a Marxist one, I have hardly abandoned the core principles that have always informed my writing; on the contrary, I have built upon them and extended them into areas that were previously off-limits to them. And in so doing, I am convinced, I have become a more insightful and well-rounded writer. I have become more clear-eyed about who the real enemy is: namely. the bosses, and the landlords, and the shareholders, and so on. I have come to realize that these are the worst scam artists of all. And now, as a Marxist, I seek to challenge them wherever they are active — whether that is in the domain of science or of politics.
While not synonymous, there is substantial overlap between skepticism and atheism.
This podcast is now called Science for the People, after its producers presumably underwent a similar skeptic-to-leftist transition.
Inspiring as always, you articulate your ideas and experience with such clarity. Thanks, insufferable Marxist. ;)
Yes to all of this. So good, as usual. I frequently feel a little “ughhh” when I read your articles because we had so many conversations along those lines back in the day (about how your skeptical worldview was great but not quite enough) and you were not super inclined to give it more thought! Lol! But I think that was most likely my own fault, for many reasons, and obviously I am ultimately SUPER STOKED that eventually you did find the path! Every time I read your stuff I overflow with joy and feel very proud of you.