The Authority of Science

Joseph Knippenberg has some interesting comments about this article detailing the Bush administration’s alleged assault on science.

The article does point out that Americans don’t grant scientists as much authority as they once did, and that scientists themselves have undermined some of their authority with their political activism.

Knippenberg observes that such skepticism toward science may actually be more scientific than blind authority in scientists anyway.

This is obviously a huge topic. I’ve always been impressed with the willingness of administration bodies including the President’s Council on Bioethics to engage with philosophical, humanistic, and theological views of the human in its attempts to come up with ethical ways of dealing with bioethical issues. Examples include the writings of Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and others. As Knippenberg notes, NOT to engage these profound thinkers would be unscientific. I somehow doubt the scientist-activists mentioned in the above noted article have read much Tolstoy.

Even so, politics is not a great-books debating club any more than it’s a scientific lab. Politics also includes wielding power and making decisions that promote goods that can conflict with science. Plato’s Apology of Socrates, when read with nuance, points this way: the Athenians also had grounds for convicting him because his philosophizing threatened the foundations of political authority itself. The scientist-activists are no Socrateses, however. As Knippenberg notes, they ally with the Enlightenment’s attempt to have science control politics. Read Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis as an example, and Jonathan Swift’s story of the Laputians, which is a parodic account of the Royal Society, as a critique. One of the best critiques of the Enlightenment’s technological ambitions on politics remains the work of George Grant, especially his Technology and Justice. Here’s another excellent study of the problem.

The example of Grant is illuminating in identifying the differences between Canada and the US with respect to this question. While Grant is famous for criticizing the US as the vanguard of predatory technology (the culmination of Bacon’s dream), less well known is his view that Canada is even worse. Grant had difficulty finding academic positions in Canada, which was the result in part to the state-university system in Canada having a strong anti-religious bias. He also considered the stronger pro-life activism in the US than in Canada as a sign that the technological mindset as seeped in less there than in Canada. To bring this discussion up to date, it would interesting to compare the roles of science and other sources of human wisdom in bioethical decision-making (and others where science is involved) in Canada and the US. Did the Canadian Royal Commission on Reproductive Technologies (and here) ever meditate upon the wisdom of Jane Austen? (see here for a skeptical view)

The upshot is this: scientists reveal their unscientific understanding of politics when they whinge about political decisions not going their way. At the same time, a truly scientific understanding of politics (and here) would understand the interaction between reason and unreason in society, and would find a way to guide it with practical reason.