Good Science Always Has Political Ramifications

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Why? Because a scientifically testable claim can be shown to be either most probably true or false, whether the claim is made by a king or a president, a Pope, a Congressperson, or a common citizen. [Book Excerpt]

By Shawn Lawrence Otto ?| November 24, 2011?|

Image: Rodale books

When speaking about science to scientists, there is one thing that can be said that will almost always raise their indignation, and that is that science is inherently political and that the practice of science is a political act. Science, they will respond, has nothing to do with politics. But is that true?

Let's consider the relationship between knowledge and power. "Knowledge and power go hand in hand," said Francis Bacon, "so that the way to increase in power is to increase in knowledge."

At its core, science is a reliable method for creating knowledge, and thus power. Because science pushes the boundaries of knowledge, it pushes us to constantly refine our ethics and morality, and that is always political. But beyond that, science constantly disrupts hierarchical power structures and vested interests in a long drive to give knowledge, and thus power, to the individual, and that process is also political.

The politics of science is nothing new. Galileo, for example, committed a political act in 1610 when he simply wrote about his observations through a telescope. Jupiter had moons and Venus had phases, he wrote, which proved that Copernicus had been right in 1543: Earth revolved around the sun, not the other way around, as contemporary opinion?and the Roman Catholic Church?held. These were simple observations, there for anyone who wanted to look through Galileo's telescope to see.

But the simple statement of an observable fact is a political act that either supports or challenges the current power structure. Every time a scientist makes a factual assertion?Earth goes around the sun, there is such a thing as evolution, humans are causing climate change?it either supports or challenges somebody's vested interests.

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Why did the church go to such absurd lengths to deal with Galileo? For the same reasons we fight political battles over issues like climate change today: Because facts and observations are inherently powerful, and that power means they are political.

Failing to acknowledge this leaves both science and America vulnerable to attack by antiscience thinking?thinking that has come to dominate American politics and much of its news media coverage and educational curricula in the early twenty-first century. Thinking that has steered American politics off course and away from the vision held by the country's founders.

Wishing to sidestep the painful moral and ethical parsing that their discoveries sometimes compel, many scientists today see their role to be the creation of knowledge and believe they should leave the moral, ethical, and political implications to others to sort out. But the practice of science itself cannot possibly be apolitical, because it takes nothing on faith. The very essence of the scientific process is to question long-held assumptions about the nature of the universe, to dream up experiments that test those questions, and, based on the observations, to incrementally build knowledge that is independent of our beliefs and assumptions. A scientifically testable claim is utterly transparent and can be shown to be either most probably true or false, whether the claim is made by a king or a president, a pope, a congressperson, or a common citizen. Because of this, science is inherently antiauthoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power.

AUTHORITARIAN POLITICS

Because this is the case, it's reasonable to ask how science fits into political thought. Science writer Timothy Ferris reminds us that in politics there are not just two forces, the progressive left (encouraging change) and the conservative right (seeking constancy). In fact, there are four. Imagined on a vertical axis, there are also the authoritarian (totalitarian, closed, and controlling, at the bottom of the axis) and the antiauthoritarian (liberal, open, and freedom loving, at the top), which one can argue have actually played much more fundamental roles in human history. Politics, then, can be more accurately thought of as a box with four quadrants rather than as a linear continuum from left to right.

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