Science Is Political, and We Must Deal with It.

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Abstract

T notion of an “apolitical science” is appealingone might almost say axiomaticto many scientists. In contrast to the contingency and contextuality of ideas in the humanities or in social and political sciencelook, for example, at where the intellectual consensus once stood on the virtues of democracythe “hard” sciences are considered to attain knowledge that is reliable and in some sense “true” no matter what political milieu it arises in. Newton’s laws worked as well in nonrelativistic mechanics in the 17th century as they do today. The notion that science and politics do not mix is, moreover, seemingly recommended by the example of history, which, as the Viewpoint from Krylov recently pointed out, abounds with cases of political interference in science that have wrought harm and impeded progress. The anti-Darwinian views of Trofim Lysenko during the Stalin regime in the Soviet Unionwhich caused immense damage not just to Soviet biology but to its agrarian economyare a particularly notorious instance, as is the opposition to “Jewish science”, such as Einstein’s theories of relativity, in Nazi Germany. The persecution of Galileo by the Catholic church is another familiar example of dogma triumphing over sciencealthough that story is typically reduced to caricature when told by scientists, the real history being far more nuanced. And oppressive dictatorial regimes have no monopoly on interference with science, as George W. Bush’s administration showed: a US House of Representatives committee found in 2007 that the government had “engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science”. (That incident looks almost benign in comparison to the distortions and obstructions of science by the Trump administration.) But a well motivated opposition to such state interference in science should not be confused with the canard that science should or can be kept “free from politics”. The scientific endeavor has always been intrinsically entrained with politics, at least since Francis Bacon argued in Novum Organum (1620) that scientific knowledge, systematically amassed, could fuel the engine of state power. From nuclear physics to space exploration, research on HIV to Covid-19, biotechnology to climate change, there is no denying that scientific research can have potentially transformative political implications and that politics, economics, and society in general influence the choices that are made in what to fund and study, who owns the knowledge, and how it is used. If Bacon was right that knowledge is power, the pursuit of knowledge can hardly expect to be free from any taint of vested interests, and nor can it ignore questions about which voices hold that power and which are impotent. But surely scientific ideas are not themselves inherently political or ideological, or shaped by such influences? Well in fact they sometimes are, even if in ways that are not recognized or might seem unlikely today: consider, for example, the sociopolitical dimensions of Rudolf Virchow’s cell theory, Pascual Jordan’s work on quantum mechanics and its biological implications, or indeed Darwin’s views on the moral and intellectual hierarchy of races. Galileo’s problematic Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was itself saturated in the philosophical, religious, and political contexts of his time. For a more topical perspective, the pandemic strategy of “herd immunity”, aka “focused protection”, no longer seems a dispassionate argument based on epidemiology and virology, advocated and supported as it is by a right-wing, libertarian US thinktank that endorses antivaccination arguments. The issue is not, then, whether and how science can resist being “politicized”, but how the political and ideological dimensions of science can best be managed to make it most effective and beneficial both as an intellectual quest and as a means of, as Bacon put it, relieving (hu)mankind’s estate. Science Has Always Been Political. History should in fact teach us to be wary of claims that science is and must be “apolitical”. It was precisely because of the insistence of the German academic world that it remain “apolitical” that professors were discouraged from protesting the expulsions of “non-Aryans” from their departments under the Nazi civil service laws. That silence is a stain on the integrity of science, as is the way many scientists in Nazi Germany used their devotion to their work as a way to avoid hard moral choiceseven though only a minority actively embraced the regime. We should recall too that most of those scientists who accepted without question the racist aspects of Darwinian theory or the prejudices with which eugenics was imbued in the early twentieth century did not do so because they would have considered themselves prejudiced; they merely thought they were following science to its logical conclusion. The assertive nationalism that gave us element names such as germanium, gallium, holmium, and scandium in the 19th and early 20th centuries was perfectly normal for its time. The internationalist nature of science, while today considered an