Sciencesplaining

Young men and the death of scientism

Self-described “evangelist of science,” Adam Frank, sciencesplaining on the “Armchair Expert” podcast. Image.

Something significant happened to Democratic Party discourse in the wake of Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral triumph. After years of dismissing and disparaging the rise of “bro podcasters,” Party operatives suddenly changed their tune. Just over a week after the election, The New York Times ran a story titled: “Trump’s Win Leaves Democrats Asking: Where Are Our Bro Whisperers?” Articles calling for a liberal “bro whisperer” soon became a genre unto themselves. Strategists went on to raise $20 million for a project to manufacture a “Joe Rogan of the left” to win young men over to the Democratic Party.

This approach took more than a page out of the well-worn book used to study and control black and Latino voters. After November 2024, the demographic of “young men” became the new favorite discussion topic of the liberal chattering classes. Young men were no longer active political subjects who could make their own decisions. They were now reduced to the status of political objects, a group to be scientifically measured, managed, and manipulated to particular electoral ends.

The multi-million dollar quest for a liberal bro whisperer has so far been unsuccessful. However, the political objectification of young men has only intensified in the year since Trump’s election. This is no more evident than in a recent New York Times op-ed by University of Rochester astrophysics professor, Adam Frank, entitled “Why Young Men Are Losing Faith in Science.” Frank, a self-described “evangelist of science,” diagnoses what he views as manosphere-induced science skepticism in young men:

While there can seem to be a sincere desire in the manosphere to learn more about topics like black holes and neuroscience, discussions in these communities can sometimes devolve into a compelling story about searching for “the truth” about the moon landings, ancient technology and climate change. That powerful story, repeated enough times, can become the background against which manosphere audiences come to see all science.

After explaining the problem, Frank proceeds to propose a solution. Rather than dismiss the bro podcasters outright, he echoes the new Democratic Party strategy that seeks to mimic the manosphere and—through a clever form of intellectual jujitsu—turn the manosphere’s strength into weakness. Frank writes that “The way to counter this story” about science promoted by bro podcasters, “is, ironically, already there in the manosphere.” Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson see

virtues like personal responsibility, honesty and a purpose-driven life as qualities that are important to manliness. Those same values surface in other manosphere interests, like rigorous athletic training and disciplined health regimens.

What does not get much airtime, however, is recognition that these are also the very virtues that guide science and its principal values of veracity, accuracy and precision—seeking the right answer. Essentially this is just honesty when it wears a lab coat. Reframing scientific inquiry as another area where these values are lived can help counter science skepticism.

For Frank, young men only partially recognize and aspire to the values promoted by the manosphere. They may live by these values in the gym, but fail to see them in their most noble manifestation: science, or, as Frank’s self-congratulatory narrative would have it, “honesty when it wears a lab coat.”

What explains this inconsistency? Taking more inspiration from liberal discourse on racial minorities, Frank attributes it to young men’s laziness: “the first step…for young men begins by reasserting to them the virtue of hard work—an often grueling but indispensable part of finding the right answers in science.” The next step, apparently, is listening to lectures by “[g]ood scientists” like Frank, who have endured difficulties akin to “the hardships required to become a champion middleweight boxer, a great rock climber or a master musician.”

I call the style of Frank’s op-ed sciencesplaining. Merriam-Webster defines mansplaining as the act of “explain[ing] something to a woman in a condescending way that assumes she has no knowledge about the topic.” Sciencesplaining, in its Frankian form, is similar in tone. However, it takes as its principal explainee not women but, rather, young men trapped in “conspiracy-tinged mazes rooted in misinformation.” Careful to leave no “antiscience” demographic unlectured, Frank takes women to task for having “more reservations about new vaccines than men” but identifies the most “alarming antiscience dynamic in the manosphere.”

Mansplaining was coined during the post-patriarchy zeitgeist in the late 2000s United States. The concept of mansplaining was less of a political attack on patriarchy than a celebration of patriarchy’s passing. By the time mansplaining entered common parlance in 2008, three decades of neoliberal deindustrialization and the growth of HEAL (Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy) jobs had feminized the American labor market beyond recognition. At the same time, demographic and cultural shifts within professional class industries produced a broader feminization process that extended well beyond the economy.

The feminist bloggers who popularized the idea of mansplaining did so not in spite of patriarchy but, instead, as a result of its structural collapse in America. By the late 2000s, the professional class world from which these women emerged had significantly shifted both economically and culturally in their direction. Stripped of their dominance in this milieu, men were left with little more than a certain way of using language (mansplaining) to create a simulacrum of their lost power and control. In this new environment, it made more sense for feminists to mock the patriarchy than to resist it. This is fundamentally what the mansplaining moment was about.

I want to suggest that something similar has happened to scientism in the 2020s that happened to patriarchy in the 2000s.

Aaron Kheriaty, MD

writes that

Scientism is the philosophical claim—which cannot be proven scientifically—that science is the only valid form of knowledge. Anyone who begins a sentence with the phrase, “Science says…” is likely in the grip of scientism. Genuine scientists don’t talk like this; they begin sentences with phrases like, “The findings of this study suggest,” or “This meta-analysis concluded…”. Scientism, by contrast, is a political, or even a religious, ideology. “It has been evident for quite a while that science has become our time’s religion,” Georgio Agamben observed, “the thing which people believe that they believe in.” When science becomes an ersatz religion—a closed and exclusionary belief system—we are dealing with scientism.

Kheriaty argues that the covid crisis exposed scientism as more than just a philosophical position; it was revealed as a foundational structuring force for the global order. The “intellectual hubris” of scientism manifested itself as authoritarianism in the material world.

Scientism’s hubris, however, could not mask its own declining public sway, which had begun well before covid. Widespread resistance to lockdowns and vaccine mandates indicated that significant sections of the population were already under the influence of what Frank calls “science skepticism.” The covid regime accelerated this phenomenon, radicalizing the already skeptical and causing countless others to question scientism for the first time.

We need look no further than the perceptive mainstream liberal commentator, Edward Luce, to understand the significance of this phenomenon. In a remarkable column published earlier this year at The Financial Times, Luce connects “the waning star of Western liberalism” directly to the unmasking of scientism during covid:

Liberals said, “Follow the science,” which confused science with faith. Science is a trial and error process that only works with openness to dissent. The same applies to political debate on campus, within newspapers, at think-tanks and society at large. To many younger voters, particularly men, today’s liberal establishment looks more like a conservative one. Educated elites confect orthodoxy on what we should say and do. The resemblance to high Victorianism is more than passing. Victorians regulated manners and etiquette. They also dreaded the mob.

Expanding religions look for converts. Waning ones hunt down heretics. In form and content, western liberalism is dangerously close to the latter.

The greatest legacy of covid was its role as a catalyst for the collapse of scientism and, along with it, the liberal world order. It is in the context of this new reality that the concept of sciencesplaining makes sense. Sciencesplaining is the form that the postmortem content of scientism takes in the 2020s. When I use the word sciencesplaining, I mean it less as a critique of scientism and more as a invitation to recognize—and revel in—the possibilities of a post-scientistic world.

Whatever your views are on scientism, writing its postmortem may seem premature. The same could certainly be said for patriarchy. Scientism, like patriarchy, does and will continue to exist in varying contexts to varying degrees. The mere fact of existence, however, does not imply structural power. Just as patriarchy no longer serves as the dominant ideology governing sex and gender in the United States, I believe that scientism has been dethroned from its privileged position as the way of knowing and shaping the world.

These realities do not preclude the possibility of backlash. We can understand this clearly with regard to the feminization of American society. The recent mainstreaming of many manosphere talking points serves as a perfect example of a backlash against the post-patriarchy. Established media figures now indulge what were just a couple years back fringe redpill positions. Higher brow critics of the “The Great Feminization” frantically strive to turn the clock back on gender relations in the United States.

Perhaps these interventions will usher in a counterrevolution against the post-patriarchal status quo. Perhaps they won’t. Either way, the fact that there are now so many efforts to win the American public back to patriarchy is itself indicative of a shared post-patriarchal reality.

Understood from this perspective, Adam Frank has even more in common with the manosphere than he would like to admit. His effort to browbeat young men back into the scientistic fold is—like the patriarchal rants by the bro podcasters he detests—a last ditch effort to resuscitate what is a dead ideology. Reading Frank’s op-ed, we get a palpable sense that young men have already moved on from scientism. Frank’s aggressive backlash against this new post-scientistic reality may convince a handful of fence-sitters, but it will be unable to revive scientism as the dominant way of understanding and steering the world.

Jeffrey Epstein, one of the most vocal proponents of scientism in the twenty-first century, was particularly interested in the study of “prelife.” Perhaps the more pressing concern with regard to scientism today is the study of postdeath. I can now write a postmortem for scientism, but it is still unclear what will fill the void left in its place. What I am quite sure of, though, is that sciencesplaining is a lost cause. And that is a cause for celebration.