Scientists spend their working lives pursuing a rational understanding of the world around them. They are often both ignorant of, and intolerant of, the irrational. Because they pursue a rational understanding of the world they typically do not recognize their own irrationalities. This can be a problem when scientists venture into discussions of politics and morality.
Consider this brief note from Chris Patil at Ourobouros:
“The Essential Parallel Between Science and Democracy”
Bush administration science policy was a mini-Dark Age for American science. Religious dogma superseded evidence and there was very little room for scientists in the halls of power. As that era recedes into the past, there’s cause for optimism — President Obama began his term with a pledge to “restore science to its rightful place” in government, and he has demonstrated a willingness to seriously consider the advice of scientific experts in formulating policy. Most exciting from the biogerontologist’s perspective, he has taken steps to do so by reversing George Bush’s ill-advised and religiously motivated ban on the use of federal funds in embryonic stem cell research.
His comment includes the now standard scientist's dismissal of religious based morality and concludes with some sage advice:
... even if the establishment accepts us, we shouldn’t turn that acceptance in an opportunity to make ourselves into a priesthood that plays by special rules.
In his post, Chris Patil linked to an article in Seed magazine, which extends the argument that the Obama administration offers the potential for a new Enlightenment after the mini-dark ages of the Bush administration. The article is authored by Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
The Essential Parallel Between Science and Democracy
The main lines of the “Obama Restoration” of science are already clear, and many of the president’s early actions deserve praise. In speech after speech, Obama has stated that science and technology will feature in his administration as both instruments and objects of public policy. Prominent scientists and engineers, with long experience of public service and advising governments, were named to key posts early in his presidential transition. The administrative rank of the president’s science adviser has been raised, placing him on an equal footing with the president’s other top aides. The alliance between the White House and religious extremists on science and medicine has been decisively broken, and policies ranging from development aid to stem cell research will now be carried out without ideological constraints reflecting America’s peculiarly corrosive politics of abortion. The hollowing out of scientific competence at federal regulatory agencies will cease, as will the dangerous US fence-sitting on climate change.Programs to benefit the environment through green innovation and renewable energy research will not go begging as in recent years. On a host of technology-intensive policy issues, there is reason to believe that a president who prides himself on listening to all sides will not be afraid to heed uncomfortable advice conveyed by the nation’s brightest. [Emphasis mine-SW]
The article is well worth reading as it delineates the author's understanding of the ideal relationship between Science, government, and the greater society. Yet within the article, the author, unaware of her own unconscious biases (ie, her unconscious irrationalities) subtly and not so subtly contradicts herself on several occasions. Consider this from later in the article:
In restoring respect for science within government agencies, the new administration should recognize that our understanding of the relations between knowledge and power have changed fundamentally over the past 50 years. ... The old formulation suggests both the accessibility of an unambiguous truth and a clean separation between knowledge and power that are radically at odds with the ways in which knowledge actually develops in disputed policy contexts. Rather than claiming the rarely attainable high ground of truth, scientific advice should own up to uncertainty and ignorance, exercise ethical as well as epistemic judgment, and ensure as far as possible that society’s needs drive advances in knowledge instead of science presuming to lead society. [Emphasis mine-SW]
One of the most conspicuous failures of the advocates of AGW is the acknowledgement that the science is not yet definitive and that the debate over the meaning of the relatively minimal data we already have is far from over. To simply assume, as the author does, that the scientific debate is over is a reflection of her own prejudice, not a reflection of the science involved. But that is only the most overt problem in her exegesis.
There are other reasons to cultivate the critical sensibility that a robust democracy encourages. For one thing, much of science today is closely linked to special economic and political interests. Indeed, in the effort to speed discoveries into commerce and everyday lives, US public policies have fostered a partnership between science and business that strikes many as too intimate for detached inquiry and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. For science to regain its rightful place, it will be necessary to rebalance the portfolio of public science, rethinking the mix of curiosity-driven and mission-oriented research, of science that tackles fundamental questions and science that serves corporate interests, of science for pleasure and science for pay. It will be necessary to create more safe havens where smart minds can tackle hard questions without any expectation of immediate applications. It will be necessary to reward discovery as well as invention, and to reaffirm that ours is a society that values the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Scientific knowledge is a public good, and courageous policymakers should be prepared to pay for that resource without imposing the same utilitarian calculus on all publicly funded acquisition of knowledge.
...
Returning to our own context, rebalancing the incentive structures for science will call for a revision of current intellectual property laws and practices. The old Jeffersonian dichotomies between discovery and invention, and between laws of nature and their useful applications, are too simplistic to serve a scientific culture in which even abstruse mathematical formulas can acquire unexpected economic value and the first person to identify a new biological structure stands to profit hugely from simply naming it. There is great need for a renewed societal conversation about what in our natural environment should be viewed as humankind’s common property and what can be owned by the fortunate few who first gain access to it.
These questions will raise hackles and temperatures because they are both hard and pervasive. May a scientific journal require corporate researchers to disclose less of what they know than is asked of university professors? Can a multinational company own a plant long known to local people for its medicinal properties because company scientists were the first to genetically sequence it? Is the insertion of a single gene enough to convert an animal from a thing in nature to a product of human invention? Which biological structures derived from the human body can be treated as property without violating human integrity? Should scientists be required to make public their data-sharing practices, and should the same rules apply whether a research institution is publicly or privately funded? When, if ever, should intellectual property rights take a backseat to ethics? Questions such as these have been germinating on the internet, in NGO campaigns, in relatively unpublicized lawsuits, in letters to editors, on op-ed pages, and in doctoral dissertations — but not in the halls of government. If science is to regain its place as one of our most valued democratic institutions, then it’s time for such issues to be widely and publicly debated.
Note the assumption that the greatest danger now resides in the alliance between science and business, ie the profit motive. Many, perhaps most, scientists are liberal by temperament and intellectual insularity. They have generally focused far more on their areas of expertise than on the political and moral dimensions of their work. Since liberalism has gained a monopoly (in the popular press and especially in academia) on morality, the assumption is that government run programs will be protected form the dangers of avarice. Government research is therefore, somehow more pure than business supported research. (We see this all the time when research supported by business is always reported in ways conducive to accepting that such research is tainted by its funding whereas government supported research is never considered tainted by the analogous human desires that determine its course and contents.)
Ms. (Dr.?) Sheila Jasanoff ends with some reasonable advice that in its grandiosity captures the hubris of the new Enlightenment:
Finding the rightful place for science in these circumstances demands a Second Enlightenment. This time, we do not need to overthrow the false gods of superstition or the self-serving autocracies that thrive by creating their own reality. This time, like the fox of Greek philosophy, we already know a great many things about how to examine life, harness energy, measure society, create incentives, and use statistical evidence to support rational public decisions. Nor should we hesitate to learn more. But do we, like the hedgehog, also know the big things? What makes for human happiness? Which manipulations of nature are we too ignorant to safely undertake? When might attempts to enhance human capability bump up against deeply held beliefs about the value of being human?
The Second Enlightenment must be the enlightenment of modesty. All through the 20th century, grand attempts to remake nations and societies failed. Today, as this nation heeds its president’s call to “begin again the work of remaking America,” it would do well to reflect on those modest virtues that underlie the long-term successes of both science and democracy. These are not the programmatic ambitions of revolution or of wholesale system redesign, but rather the skeptical, questioning virtues of an experimental turn of mind: the acceptance that truth is provisional, that questioning of experts should be encouraged, that steps forward may need corrective steps back, and that understanding history is the surest foundation for progress.
The First Enlightenment emerged from the belief that a benevolent Deity, who knew infinitely more than mere humans, nonetheless had established a world that followed rational rules and could be understood by men. The proposed Second Enlightenment expressly eschews any notion of G-d and as a result substitutes man's opinions for G-d's laws (which have, let us never forget, evolved with human understanding.)
The scientists who dismiss the interests and input of those who they pejoratively label religious extremists are proposing a dangerous solution to a non-existent problem. As I once noted, Democracy works better than any other system because it allows us to sum the irrationalities of the maximum number of people, which, when it works well, enables rationality to triumph over irrationality more often than not. If we dismiss the irrationalities of religious believers, who, after all, have inherited a structure that has developed over several thousand years expressly designed to help us manage our own irrationality, we are significantly diminishing our ability as a culture to contain our irrationalities.
I thought that George W. Bush was wrong to place such strict limits on research involving Embryonic Stem Cells, yet I also understood at the time and since, that he was engaged in a good faith effort to resolve extremely difficult moral problems involving what it means to be human and what we would be willing to tolerate as a society in manipulating our humanness. I do not yet pretend to know if it is moral to allow all research on ESC, but I do know that Barack Obama has given a great deal less thought to this issue than George W. Bush. (See Yuval Levin on Stem Cell Wrestling for more on this.) Paradoxically, the limits on ESC research forced many researchers to devote more time and energy to working on the problem of Adult Stem Cells; interestingly, the research thus far indicates pretty conclusively that Adult Stem Cells have far greater clinical utility than ESCs ever will.
(To understand why Adult Stem Cells are, and forever will be, far more useful than ESCs, simply consider the science involved: It is much easier to take a partially differentiated cell and tweak it until it differentiates in the desired direction than to take a fully pluripotent cell or ESC and guide it through the very long and complex process of differentiating into a cell that we can use. It is akin to the difference between creating gasoline from crude oil versus creating it de novo from simple carbohydrates.)
Whether a scientist believes in religioun or not, he should have the humility to understand that the religious community has a much longer, deeper, and more complex understanding of morality than the scientific community does and should advocate discarding such hard won understanding with much greater humility and caution than is on display in Sheila Jasanoff's article.
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