Blakely applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power, and reported the following:
Page 99 of We Built Reality captures in fragmented form not only a part of the whole work but also anticipates a tiny bit of the American political scene in the summer of 2020—a time of pandemic, massive unrest, and scenes of highly militarized police forces in the streets. A short excerpt from page 99 reads: “with super predators supposedly wandering open, hostile urban environments … foot soldiers would need to be deployed with the latest military technologies. What the futuristic Robocop aesthetic communicated was a technocratic fantasy of scientifically inflicted violence.” This chapter analyzes how a complex of social scientific theories from the late twentieth century developed by scholars like James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray played an important role in generating a pseudoscientific notion of race that was linked to increasingly militarized policing practices. Today we see these very same pseudo-sciences of race and crime reaching a climax in the atrocious murder of George Floyd (one in a seemingly endless cycle of killings of unarmed black citizens by police).Follow Jason Blakeley on Twitter.
Page 99’s image of dystopian, futuristic policemen not only resonates with today’s newspapers but also captures in snapshot form a much broader transformation that I argue in my book has seized our society—one in which technocratic forms of scientism dominate an enormous range of phenomena in our everyday lives. The central thesis of my book is that counterfeit claims to a science of human behavior while failing to predict the political world we now live in, did play a central role in creating it. Throughout the course of the book I argue that supposedly scientific theories helped generate the 2008 financial crisis; yawning inequalities; overly medicalized notions of love and happiness; managerial and top-down notions of democracy; abstract and anesthetized forms of global drone warfare; and much more.
--Marshal Zeringue
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