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The need and attempt to "scientifize" any endeavour (which is not just to apply the methods of science or make rigorous, but to enumerate, tabulate, and reduce even at other cost, and also in situations where the system being replaced is not demonstrably weak as an alternative), to create experts and to appropriate knowledge. Things like morality (from a humanist angle) are *only* either wolly-headed nonsense or actually oppressive.
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I agree with pretty much all of what you wrote. In his book, "Wholeness and the Implicate Order", British physicist David Bohm asserts the following, which I take to be a call for a kind of humility before the natural world's complexity and science's capacity to reveal it:
"As the Greek root of the word indicates, a hypothesis is a supposition, that is, an idea that is ‘put under’ our reasoning, as a provisional base, which is to be tested experimentally for its truth or falsity. As is now well known, however, there can be no conclusive experimental proof of the truth or falsity of a general hypothesis which aims to cover the whole of reality. Rather, one finds (e.g., as in the case of the Ptolemaic epicycles or of the failure of Newtonian concepts just before the advent of relativity and quantum theory) that older theories become more and more unclear when one tries to use them to obtain insight into new domains. Careful attention to how this happens is then generally the main clue toward new theories that constitute further new forms of insight.
So, instead of supposing that older theories are falsified at a certain point in time, we merely say that man is continually developing new forms of insight, which are clear up to a point and then tend to become unclear."
[...]
The opposite of scientism - if I'm understanding your definition correctly - would be an acceptance of science's provisional hold on "truth". Our understanding evolves, never reaching a final state of perfection. It would, I think, be very difficult to conjure up the sort of arrogance you (rightly) criticize if Bohm's view was more commonly held.
I find there's a modified form of scientism at work in the computer field; call it cyberneticism. Jaron Lanier dissects this in his essay, "One Half Of A Manifesto" -
<http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_p1.html>
We can abstract the concept of scientism further afield and identify what Jacques Ellul, in "The Technological Society" described as "La Technique".
.d.
--------- "It's a simple equation folks. Prostitution, divided by Hotels, equals dead Elves."
Olly