We've all seen those articles in Time magazine or Newsweek that purport to tell us about our sex lives, about love, about human happiness, about sexuality, marriage, and all number of things having to do with nothing less than what it means to be human. Am I the only one who thinks these popular journalistic attempts at drawing ethical or normative conclusions from scientific facts are, for the most part, bogus?
I have a kind of thesis... that as the popular mind (and this even includes scientists and medical professionals to the degree that they make unwarranted assumptions about the human condition... I'd rather ask a novelist or poet about humanity personally) attempts to conglomerate an immensely complex set of scientific data there will be mistakes and oversimplifications made in the interpretation of this factual knowledge into ethical or human terms. As a result, our mass-oriented culture will end up forcing a kind of regression of our conceptions of "normal" back to a mean which is itself reinforced by these popular mistakes and overly narrow interpretations.
In other words, I am saying that much of what will come to be known and accepted as "knowledge" will be bogus: a constructed idiom forced on the populace implicitly. Not everything of course, but the "knowledge" having to do with what it means to be human... that is, certain psychological presuppositions and also "biological truths" which purport to connect raw scientific data with ethical imperatives in a necessary fashion. What the scientists and journalists are missing is the philosophical, subjective, and often contingent but always existential connection between fact and reality, is and ought, object and subject.
This is an important and interesting issue to me, so I was wondering if anyone felt the same way. I am very skeptical about any set of statements regarding the issue of human happiness, for example, or love. My opinion is that they are fundamentally inaccessible to science and that only erroneous interpretations of these ideas into physical analogues results in our believing otherwise.
Question for all: If love and happiness are fundamentally inaccessible to science or objective evaluation then why do we find "scientific" articles about these subjects in our popular magazines?