How to Actually Defend Science

     Scientists quite legitimately feel their authority is under assault and that this loss of status and authority is a menace to the public. The evidence for this is incontestable as the climate crisis and the COVID crisis attest. How are we to get people to believe current science on these questions? There is one way to do this which will NOT work and that is reaction towards earlier forms of ‘scientistic’ ideology. For such an ideology the authority of science rests on an epistemology usually labelled ‘foundationalist’. Foundationalism holds that there is a bedrock principle or method which can give a rational account of itself and hence of other things. Science is an application of  this ‘method’, a method rationally justified in itself such that any claims resting on its correct application are also rationally justified. ‘Believe science’ would then mean ‘believe in the power of method for method guarantees the best approximation of truth or at least minimizes our chances of error'. I am not going to go into detailed critiques and counter-critiques of this claim as there numerous iterations of foundationalism not all subject to the same evaluation. I only note that this move has failed (obviously) where the sciences are concerned and the reason it has failed is that it excludes too many valid human concerns. ‘Science’ on this account is supposed to secure us ‘objective truth’ apart from things like ethics, politics, religion, aesthetics. This means that science (so constructed) is in competition with other human projects which it can validate or invalidate by pronouncing from the lofty pedestal of pure, indifferent truth.

Suppose ‘race science’ were to make a roaring comeback (not an impossible scenario by any means). Such ‘truth’ as this sort of science would construct would be a direct threat to the dignity and social advancement of individuals. We would have to decide between the true and the good. If truth here is just the mechanical production of statistical results then I can’t see a single reason why such ‘truth’ should be preferred to the welfare of flesh and blood people. I would join most people in choosing ethics over science, especially the people affected adversely by this so called ‘science’. This 'science' would be untrue truth; dull empirical facticity that human beings would be obligated to assert themselves against. Of course such ‘objective constructions’ are exercises of power with the cloak of objectivity being the irrefutable guarantee of power. This is what I call ‘theocratic science’: science that uses the supposed neutrality of ‘objective truth’ to justify social hierarchies and underwrite commercial and military interests. We can and must challenge theocratic science, the rule of a certain regional construction of ‘truth’, in the name of human truth. The reason for this is simple: if science is embedded in a certain power structure then people outside that power structure have no reason to trust or listen to it. We might say too bad for them, they will be excluded from plumb jobs or career advancement but this is exactly what does NOT work in a plague. In a plague the excluded get their revenge like pent up chickens who cause the flu. If THEY do not listen the whole society suffers, even the privileged who have the watch the value of their companies plunge.

Take the example of Steph Curry. Steph Curry thinks the moon landing was faked. Why should he think otherwise? Well one might say because it is a simple fact and up to a point that is valid. But facts are part of narratives, inevitably so. As Gil Scott Heron brutally pointed out in Whitey on the Moon this narrative is one of white triumphalism. NASA appropriated the physical and intellectual labor of black people but the public face of the space program was, and to a great extent remains, white. Why should Curry regard this narrative as sacrosanct? It is a brute fact but a brute fact that has been conscripted to a narrative of western, liberal triumphalism bound up both with cold war rivalry and racism. Indeed, Curry’s refusal to accept the ‘fact’ of the moon landing might well imply a critique not of the fact but the narrative built around it. At any rate complaining about conspracy theories is idle under current conditions. Conspiracy theories flourish becasue people are losing any real stake in the culture of bourgeois managerial 'reason' and a 'science industrial complex' that works only for corporations and defense contractors.

What then does science look like when it devoted not to ‘scientific truth’ in some abstract methodological sense but to ‘human’ truth; truth that represents human good in all its dimensions from the physical to the psychological, social and spiritual? The answer to this is not theocratic science (the rule of a well- funded scientific priesthood that pretends to be ‘impartial’ and devoted to ‘pure truth’) but democratic science. Democratic scientists are craftsmen and workers. They are not pretentious mythologizers a la Carl Sagan eager to pontificate on politics, ethics or religion on the basis of some assumed superior theoretical stance. Myths serve interests and a democratic science would be about serving society not ‘interests’ within it. As such it will not propound grand narratives that force others to choose between their interests and those of the mythologizers. Of course such a science cannot exist under current institutional conditions. Our science can only be ‘science for some but not for others’ because of the way it is funded and the institutions (university, government, corporations) it answers to. In this regime much good science, science that say, concerns itself with adjusting human life to the ecology that sustains it, goes to waste because of the simple impossibility of turning it into policy. Defending science and the authority of science would, minimally then, begin with keeping universities at arm’s length from any corporate or military interests. Until then there will indeed be a credibility gap between science and the general society with all the dangers that accompany that and this will be the fault not of the 'ignorant masses' but of science itself.