Science & Tech Quote by Irving Babbitt

Babbitt’s line is a provocation aimed at a culture that thinks it has outgrown dogma, only to slip into a new one with better instruments. By pairing “physical science” with “theology,” he isn’t dismissing science; he’s demoting it from neutral method to rival authority. The quiet jab is that modern people congratulate themselves for escaping clerical rule while letting “the measurable” dictate what counts as real, valuable, or worth teaching.

The sentence works because it’s structured as a historical rhyme: once theology crowded out humane judgment; now science threatens to do the same. That parallel collapses the usual progress narrative. It also reframes “encroachment” as a territorial act. The humanities aren’t merely underfunded; they’re being annexed, pressured to justify themselves in scientific terms - datafied outcomes, utilitarian returns, neurological correlates of meaning.

Context matters: Babbitt wrote in an era intoxicated by positivism, industrial efficiency, and the prestige of laboratory knowledge. As a critic associated with “New Humanism,” he worried that modern education would produce technically adept citizens with weakened moral imagination and thin conceptions of character. The subtext is less anti-science than anti-reductionism: when science becomes the master language for ethics, politics, and art, it stops being science and starts being a worldview with its own orthodoxies.

What he’s defending is a different kind of knowing: interpretive, historical, tragic, self-critical. Not because it’s softer, but because it’s where a society learns how to argue about ends, not just optimize means.