Monthly Musings are published during the last week of every month. In each Monthly Muse, I recap content from the past month of Handful of Earth, offer some freewheeling reflections, and share a passage that I’ve found especially thought-provoking.
Here’s the August 2025 Monthly Muse.
Recapitulation: Published since last month’s Monthly Muse
Contemplation
Shortly after re-publishing my 2019 article at Handful of Earth with the new title, “Jeffrey Epstein and the Cult of Scientism,” I came across an article by
from this month at the Humanum Review entitled “Follow the Scientism.” I already shared some excerpts from Kheriaty’s piece in this week’s Weekly Grounding, but at least one other point in the article is worth highlighting in relationship to Epstein’s science philanthropy.Kheriaty writes:
To hide its own internal contradiction from view, the self-refuting premise of scientism—that science is the only valid form of knowledge—is rarely stated explicitly. Scientism is instead implicitly assumed, its conclusions repeatedly asserted as propaganda, until this ideology simply becomes the air we breathe. Careful policing of public discourse admits only evidence supposedly supported by “science,” and this atmosphere is rigorously enforced. As we experienced during the Covid crisis, qualitative (e.g., familial, spiritual) goods were repeatedly sacrificed to quantitative (e.g., biological, medical) goods, even when the former were real and the latter only theoretical. This is the fruit of scientism, which turns our scale of values and priorities upside-down.
Jeffrey Epstein—like many other technocrat billionaires including Elon Musk—justified his scientism through the invocation of quantitative goods. Indeed, Epstein’s science philanthropy empire was centered on theoretical biology and its relationship to technologies such as artificial intelligence. Many of his pet projects, such as the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard University, were focused on highly theoretical research surrounding “population structure, prelife, eusociality, [and] evolutionary economics.” But because of the purported quantitative goods that could emerge from this kind of research, the funding of such programs appeared natural and even necessary to the scientistic mind. As Kheriaty puts it, the ideology of scientism “simply becomes the air we breathe.”
A New York Times report entitled “Jeffrey Epstein Hoped to Seed Human Race With His DNA” indicates that Epstein’s quantitative priorities were often quite literal: to “seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.” According to the article, one scientist stated that “Mr. Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his 33,000-square-foot Zorro Ranch in a tiny town outside Santa Fe.”
Epstein’s worldview was one of quantitative increase: more money, more girls, more (trans)humans seeded with his DNA. While the details of his behavior “shock the conscience,” his scientistic ideology surely seemed eminently normal and commendable to most members of the global elite. Perhaps this is one of the reasons (among others) that he was accepted for so long in polite society, even after his initial 2006 conviction.
Provocation
“In a scientistic-technocratic regime…[r]epressive social conformity is…achieved without resorting to concentration camps, gulags, Gestapo, KGB, or openly despotic tyrants. Instead, dissenters are confined to a moral ghetto through censorship and slander. Recalcitrant individuals are placed outside the purview of polite society and excluded from enlightened conversation. The political theorist Eric Voegelin observed the essence of totalitarianism is simply that certain questions are forbidden. The prohibition against asking questions is a deliberately and skillfully elaborated obstruction of reason in a totalitarian system. If one asks inconvenient questions—‘Do we really need to continue locking down?’ or ‘Are we sure these vaccines are safe and effective?’ or ‘Why has the promised utopia not yet arrived?’—this will not spur reasoned discussion or civil debate. Instead, one will simply be accused of being a pandemic denier, wanting to kill grandma, being anti-science, or of placing oneself on the ‘wrong side of history.’”
—Aaron Kheriaty, “Follow the Scientism”
"Instead, one will simply be accused of being a pandemic denier, wanting to kill grandma, being anti-science, or of placing oneself on the ‘wrong side of history.’”
Of course, that sort of overzealous authoritarian exclusion of troubling questions is not unique to scientism; it is clearly on display in the current anti-science cult. Those who ask for empirical evidence of authoritative assertions are fired from their jobs, excluded from press pools, sued into submission and labeled as members of the lunatic left suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome. People of all stripes tend to get scared and angry when their core beliefs are challenged. The documentary "Flight from Death", which focuses on relatively modern explorations of terror management theory and Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, is an engaging exploration of this phenomenon.
Good piece, thanks for highlighting.