There’s more to human life than science. Of course, elites like Dawkins and Tyson know this perfectly well since they’re highly cultured individuals. Why, then, the contempt heaped upon poor, already-unpopular academic philosophy? Is this a case of schadenfreude?
No, the best explanation is that the scientismist uses philosophy as a scapegoat to distract attention from the fact that science, not philosophy or religion, threatens indeed all culture. Naturalists like Tyson or Dawkins really ought to rail against the arts, romantic love, and all other cultural illusions, just as they castigate philosophers and theists for not keeping up with the torrent of scientific discoveries.
Just as philosophical speculations can appear juvenile next to an ironclad scientific theory, so too a painting, a song, or an intimate relationship seems preposterous in light of the mechanistic facts of nature. But postmodern scientists are typically neoliberals and so they play the game of the double standard. Secretly, they may worry about the apocalyptic implications of naturalism; perhaps they even soothe themselves by blaming hapless philosophy for cultural nihilism and hyper-irony, as if philosophers weren’t just channeling the upshot of scientific naturalism. But scientists aren’t saints, so they tend not to embrace the posthuman, which is to say antihuman, perspective from which phenomena are stripped of all meaning and purpose except for the horror made plain to anyone with aesthetic detachment. Scientists cling to their neoliberal humanistic values and sacred ideas in spite of the antihuman implications of naturalism. Moreover, they need to preserve the
infantilizing culture of the uninformed masses, so the peons can continue to support the scientific enterprise, the latter being self-destructively all-important to the scientists’ higher culture.