Unlike science, which is a method of attaining knowledge of the natural world, scientism refers to the claims that scientific knowledge is the only kind, and that it is the best way to attain answers to all of life’s questions, including moral and political ones. Sohrab Ahmari explores the dangers of believing in scientism:

We rarely pause to notice [that] the (very real) achievements of modern science continually beguile reason into surrendering its mandate to men and women in lab coats. Only occasionally, under the press of extraordinary calamities, do we attain the lucidity needed to pose fundamental questions anew.

There is nothing quite like a sudden and unforeseen pandemic to puncture the confidence of confident men. Scientists have calculated the age of the universe down to the smallest unit of time, penetrated into the most minuscule depths of physical reality, built self-driving cars, and on and on—yet a novel and mysterious virus can jump from a certain species of bat into Homo sapiens and wreak havoc on the modern world. Yes, science will very likely conquer the novel coronavirus (please God!). But events of this kind should shatter the illusion of scientific-technical progress toward some terminus of ultimate truth expressible in scientific or mathematical language. Nature, it seems, keeps throwing up new mysteries, keeps humbling us.

We long for a meaning science can’t supply. We wonder why we should carry on living and transmit life. We marvel at our discoveries, yes, but we also wonder why reality is intelligible to us in the first place: why, for example, do we find such beauty in the swirling shapes of galaxies, even as the sizes of these objects boggle our minds? We wonder, too, what it means to live well, what duties we owe one another and the other creatures that share the earth with us. And so on. Four centuries after it took off, the scientific outlook still can’t supply scientific answers to these fundamental questions.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.