Mr. Science Goes to Washington
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
“The Science” is not doing O.K. It recently endorsed Kamala Harris—or rather its representatives, the editors of Scientific American, did so on The Science’s behalf. They cited among their reasons Harris’s devotion to such principles as taxpayer-sponsored healthcare, easy abortion access, and gun restrictions, none of which I recall finding discussed in Bacon’s Novum Organum or Popper’s Logic of Scientific Discovery.
But, say the editors, “the evidence is clear” that Trump’s policies will cause disaster, meaning that voting against them is not simply a matter of preference but of science denialism. By “evidence” the editors refer to social science studies akin to those invoked by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who defended affirmative action on the grounds that black doctors contribute to society by virtue of being black. “For high-risk Black newborns,” wrote Jackson, “having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”
A statistician who writes under the name “Crémieux” explained that the study in question failed to control for a major confounding variable (birthweight), which the authors seemingly knew would skew the results. Yet the study was published anyway, in none other than the Proceedings of the National Academy of…you guessed it: Sciences.
Those of us who lived through the COVID era are no strangers to motivated reasoning and tendentious politics traveling under cover of “Science.” But we still haven’t come fully to grips with why fraudsters and bureaucrats should want to frame their specious arguments as data rather than simply as morality or good policy—that is, why they think the mere word “science” itself will command assent.
The answer is buried so deep in our intellectual history that taking stock of it requires upturning centuries of bad assumptions. It has to do with something implicit in the word “science” itself—a word which, in its Latin root, simply means “knowledge.”
What we now call science, the ancient philosophers and even the early moderns would have called “natural philosophy” or “natural science,” so qualifying it because it furnished knowledge specifically about nature. This in turn was just one branch of a larger enterprise, the pursuit of human knowledge writ large—not just about the physical world, but about everything from souls to sea lions.
By the 19th century this pursuit, and knowledge itself, was being narrowed down to include just the physical world. As a result, Wissenschaft—the German equivalent of scientia or the process of knowing—came gradually to mean the technique of empirically verifying material information. And as I argue in my upcoming book, that shift was motivated in turn by a division that was drawn earlier between “primary” and “secondary” qualities or truths: hard, measurable physical fact on the one hand, vaporous and subjective spiritual conjecture on the other.
In other words knowledge itself became synonymous with things you could measure and verify experimentally, so that gradually “science” became “The Science”—that undeniable oracle whose pronouncements on matters empirical, political, and spiritual were unassailably true.
Unfortunately the kind of knowledge science really is fit to provide—quantifiable, physical knowledge—can’t tell you how to balance competing political interests or attain inner peace. So it became necessary for those who wanted to make unquantifiable, value-laden arguments about what we must do, to cloak those arguments in pseudoscientific language. If only science is knowledge, all knowledge must pose as science.
Usually, as in the case of the junk social science that impressed Ketanji Brown Jackson, this is done by fiddling with the parameters until they say what you want them to say. I think of this as number ventriloquism: you decide at the outset on things you believe for other reasons, then you manipulate your data until it speaks for you. That way it’s not just your opinion but a sacred and impartial Truth.
This is a disaster for republican liberty but also an abuse of science itself, or rather that branch of knowledge about the material world which serves as gracious handmaiden to wisdom. Friends of science everywhere—and I count myself one—should deplore the injustice done to and in her name.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:
Precisely! One of the biggest lies of our age is that “science” is “neutral.” One of the things that drives me battiest is when, faced with a ridiculous study, conservatives nitpick the methodology and details rather than highlight the *fundamental* worldview flaw inherent in the study’s outlook. I’m sorry if that’s not clear, I attempt to explain it here, via ancient Sparta:
https://gaty.substack.com/p/this-is-science
“ the practice of killing off the weak isn’t cruel – it’s science. He hands you the latest copy of the Spartan Journal of Medicine (and Battle). There’s a study in there, co-authored by the leading minds of the day, presenting a straightforward statistical analysis of the clear benefits of child killing. It’s peer-reviewed! The evidence is unmistakable. Whenever a weak child is not left out to die, that child has a significantly higher rate of depression and suicide in adolescence compared to his peers (p<0.005). As the locals explain, the greatest glory imaginable is to die in military service. To condemn a Spartan to life without the hope of battlefield honor is unfathomably cruel. Killing weak children is not an act of brutality, but of the utmost mercy. The Spartans ignore your entreaties. The weak remain slated for death; the science is settled.”