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Title: Science and Liberation Author: Justin Podur Language: en Topics: science, capitalism, Anarcho-Transhuman Source: http://anarchotranshuman.org/ Issue #2
A colleague of mine in environmental science recently told me that he is
about to run out of funding since his Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council (NSERC) discovery grant has not been renewed, twice in
a row. Scientists like him, focused as they are on their work, are
encouraged to think their funding has not been renewed because there is
something wrong with them or their research. In fact, there are broader
social forces at play.
It turns out that the feminist slogan the personal is political is
relevant to science as well. For decades, the membership card in the
club of Canadian scientists was the NSERC discovery grant. The purpose
of the grant was to give every working scientist basic funding to do
their research. In recent years, two changes have been made to this
paradigm. First, as detailed in a new book by Chris Turner, the federal
government has declared an outright war on science, cutting funding for
basic research and redirecting it to business-friendly projects. Second,
NSERC has moved to a model of rewarding “excellence,” which in fact has
nothing to do with excellence but means concentrating funding with
smaller numbers of researchers while leaving many researchers with
nothing.
Last September, a group of scientists took the unique step of organizing
themselves into a movement called Evidence for Democracy. Mounting a
series of rallies and media events, they announced a platform targeting
the federal government with three demands: to fund research from basic
through to applied science; to base decisions on the best available
science and evidence; and to make scientific findings open to the
public.
While their demands are hardly radical, these scientists have been
galvanized to step out of their labs and enter the public sphere because
of a Canadian government that, like the North American conservative
movement from which it sprang, dislikes science. We are at a point in
Canada where Prime Minister Harper’s government controls communications
by government scientists from Environment Canada and the Department of
Fisheries and Oceans. It has eliminated the position of national science
adviser. It has scrapped Statistics Canada’s long-form census (vital to
research on social inequality) and closed labs and environmental
monitoring stations. And more than any other government in the world
today, the Canadian government is dedicated to denying the results of
climate change science and preventing civilization-saving action at
international climate forums.
The conservative movement’s attack on science has several prongs. Where
they can attain government office, as in Canada, they use the highly
effective tools of funding and de funding, and regulation and
de-regulation, to control government scientists and embolden private
interests. The goal is to transfer power and resources from public
services and public science to private institutions, while often
appealing to moral and religious doctrines in the process.
The success of these attacks on science are partly due to
vulnerabilities caused by the way science itself is done in our society,
for the word science has multiple meanings.
Albert Einstein said that science is the refinement of everyday
thinking. In that sense, science is a fundamental human activity: it
means paying attention to evidence, using logic, rendering explicit
assumptions, and testing hypotheses formally in a way that is repeatable
by others. It is this kind of science that is under attack from
conservatives and other forms of authority. Let us call this kind of
science Science C, where C stands for curiosity.
Today, hacker subculture exemplifies Science C better than academic
science does. Hackers are dedicated to following their curiosity
wherever it goes, and the open-source, free software movement that most
hackers belong to is also dedicated to making information freely and
universally accessible. No one exemplified Science C and hacker culture
better than Aaron Swartz. Swartz developed Creative Commons, Reddit, and
other innovative works before moving into activism explicitly.
Creative Commons is an organization and a licensing system that
facilitates the sharing and use of creative work. Like the GNU Public
License (GPL) for software developed by Richard Stallman, Creative
Commons has an implicit philosophy that creative work is a collective
endeavour and that human instincts to share knowledge and information
should be celebrated and encouraged, not suppressed. This is the spirit
of Science C.
Creative Commons and the GPL are legal tools to facilitate sharing, and
in their domains they are analogous to peer review and publication in
scientific journals for scientists. However, like the conflict between
free and proprietary software, there is a conflict between open access
and proprietary access to scientific publications, a conflict Aaron
Swartz became aware of as an activist.
Swartz was so appalled by the privatization of scientific knowledge in
expensive journals that he took direct action to make the journals
public, breaking the copyright of the academic database known as JSTOR.
As Swartz explained, without broad public access, “Everything up until
now will have been lost.” Swartz believed the commodification of
essential knowledge must be vigorously resisted: “Forcing academics to
pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire
libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing
scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World
but not to children in the Global South? It’s outrageous and
unacceptable.”
Facing dire federal charges that could have landed him in jail for
decades, Aaron Swartz committed suicide in January 2013.
If Science C is about curiosity, and as such constitutes a potential
threat to those with power, science can also mean authority. Anyone
making any claim wants to say that science backs them. In popular media,
scientists from government and prestigious universities can make
authoritative statements because they possess scientific authority. Let
us call this aspect of science Science A, for authority. Ideally, the
practice of Science C can lead to the authority of Science A. But in
reality, the authority of Science A is abused and sold as a commodity.
In a famous case from the mid-’90s, University of Toronto medical
researcher Nancy Olivieri discovered harmful effects of a blood disorder
drug called Deferiprone. In the stir of controversy that followed,
Olivieri was forced to defend herself, her research, and her job against
a wide range of attacks from the drug manufacturer and senior staff at
her hospital.
The most pressing attack on scientific authority today, however, centres
on the consensus of climate scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, which released its fifth and most dire report this past
October. Before resigning from NASA as the world’s leading
climatologist, James Hansen once lamented “the politicization of
reporting of global warming.” Hansen stressed that with corporate
consolidation of the media, the task of resisting the negative
politicization of scientific inquiry, including attacks on the
credibility of scientists, is “formidable.”
Such direct attacks on scientific authority are relatively rare, but
they reveal how powerful business interests seek to discredit scientific
authority when scientific findings challenge their profits and social
control. More insidiously, such business interests do not merely wait to
attack scientific results they don’t like. On the contrary, they have
developed sophisticated ways of channelling and controlling scientific
curiosity.
This is what I call Science B, the business of science. The sad truth is
that most of what scientists do is not Science C, exploring the world
through systematic investigation. Most of what scientists do is try to
raise funds, generate publications in prestigious journals, find
students to work on their projects, and keep up with other scientists
according to these metrics. Science B operates like other sectors of
capitalist society. It is competitive, comparative, and divided by
status into superstars, has-beens, and also-rans.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) launched a
campaign last summer called Get Science Right. Aiming to overhaul the
federal science policy that oversees Science B, CAUT argued for more
money for basic science, since funding in the natural sciences has
fallen by 6.4 per cent since 2007. Meanwhile, the federal government has
increased funding for research partnerships – partnerships between
science and business - by 23 per cent since 2011.
The business of science makes science vulnerable to attack by
authoritarian governments and conservative movements, streamlining
opportunities for the wealthy and powerful to steer science to their own
benefit. As a result, we can create tens of thousands of chemicals but
haven’t thought much about what to do with them after we’ve used them.
Half a dozen countries have nuclear weapons that can destroy whole
cities, but no country has a functioning renewable energy system. Human
curiosity (Science C) could have solved our environmental problems long
ago, but it cannot take flight because it is trapped within Science B.
Writing for the Baffler magazine, the well-known cultural anthropologist
David Graeber assessed the problem. “The increasing interpenetration of
government, university, and private firms has led everyone to adopt the
language, sensibilities, and organizational forms that originated in the
corporate world. Although this might have helped in creating marketable
products, since that is what corporate bureaucracies are designed to do,
in terms of fostering original research, the results have been
catastrophic.
“Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific
creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they
need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them
alone ... if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected
breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at
all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each
other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to
discover.”
Graeber gives us an important insight into how Science B has come to
trump Science C. Leftists, meanwhile, are natural supporters of Science
C, and left-wing scientists like the evolutionary biologist Richard C.
Lewontin and the mathematical ecologist Richard Levins use the term
“people’s science” to describe how science could be done in a better
society. While most of us have a healthy anti-authority streak that can
bring us into conflict with scientific authority (Science A), the best
challenges to that authority, indeed any authority, are themselves made
on the basis of logic, evidence, and inquiry. One of the tasks of the
political left, then, is to liberate and encourage the rigorous
curiosity of Science C.
Marx and the early socialists viewed their work as scientific in nature,
and even their errors can be understood as failures to act according to
their own scientific principles. Generations later, socialists like
Trotsky, Luxemburg, and others tried to popularize scientific
discoveries and intellectual culture for the people. Today, even though
leftists are few in number and not especially influential, the natural
and social sciences are good places to look for them.
Leftists try to make change by convincing large numbers of people to
take action in social movements. Insights from the social sciences could
inform leftists in these efforts. For example, recent studies
correlating a wide range of social problems with economic inequality
suggest that people are highly sensitive to status and that social
policy should be designed to minimize inequality with this in mind.
Philosophers have long debated whether human nature has an instinct for
freedom, and while scientific knowledge about human nature remains
extremely limited, what little science has revealed suggests that humans
do have instincts both for freedom and for equality.
Another set of studies, about moral licensing, suggests that voluntarist
appeals have severe limitations. In one study, subjects who had made a
green or eco-friendly consumer choice were afterwards less likely to
donate to a good cause or help an individual in need. Here, too, we find
social science research that suggests that relying on solidarity works
better than relying on charity, as charity can be brittle.
A third area of research shows that political ideology affects consumer
choices. An American study published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences found that “conservative individuals were less
likely to purchase a more expensive energy-efficient light bulb when it
was labelled with an environmental message than when it was unlabelled.”
Today’s capitalist society means that many of these insights are coming
from business-oriented research on marketing and organizational
behaviour. Leftists shouldn’t shy from studying these insights,
discarding the useless ones, and adapting the helpful ones.
The scientifically minded do not automatically gravitate toward the
political left. Partly because of the influence of Science A (authority)
and Science B (business), many scientifically minded people assume that
to be scientific means to be neutral, to reserve judgment, to refuse a
stance even on the most critical issues of the day. In fact, science
says no such thing. Scientific objectivity means being conscious of
biases within a given framework and acting to minimize them while
testing claims against evidence. It does not mean having no opinion and
no point of view (or, for that matter, accepting a given framework
without question). In fact, in the book Descartes’ Error, the
neurologist António Damásio calls on studies that show rational
decision-making is impossible without emotions.
In the case of climate change, we have an overwhelming and nearly
unprecedented scientific consensus, with all the authority Science A can
bring combined with all of the knowledge that Science C has been able to
generate. But without major political change, elites are able to
continue on a path of greater fossil fuel use and escalating climatic
rupture. As with other issues, vested interests direct policy by
proactively controlling the direction of science (Science B), using
media and government agencies to attack the credibility of scientists,
their reputation, and their morale, and hiding or confusing the
information available to the public. Facing this kind of resolute
political opposition, an approach, a strategy, and a set of political
principles must be chosen. Science itself cannot provide these things.
This becomes clear when we consider two different approaches to
combatting catastrophic climate change. For many mainstream
environmentalists, the path has always seemed clear. We live in a
democracy, after all. So, first, we convince enough people that the
climate problem is serious. We demonstrate that the technology is
available to solve it without sacrificing most comforts and
conveniences. Then we convince our leaders to make the necessary
technological and policy changes, and if they don’t, then we elect
leaders who do. Many of those who make economic decisions aren’t
elected, it’s true. But they, too, can be convinced by rational
arguments. Business leaders meet with environmentalists regularly. If
parts of the planet become uninhabitable and there are a series of
climate-related catastrophes, that would be bad for business, the
argument goes. So even captains of industry will come along with the
right arguments and proposals.
In 2014, as oil and gas production continues at a breakneck pace in
Canada and the U.S., we have more than enough evidence to know that such
an apolitical approach of lobbying and persuasion has failed
disastrously. The basic nature of the system we live in isn’t
democratic. It’s a system that takes the elements of life – nature,
land, water, energy,
cultures, and peoples – and converts them into commodities for profit
and control. The system has its own logic. If you are a player in it,
you have to follow that logic. You have to take what you can grab – for
most people it’s their own lives – and turn it into money. If you’re
excluded from the system, you’re excluded from the very means of
survival. If you’re excluded and you try to get the means of survival
for yourself or your loved ones outside the system, you will be met with
violence. Profit, accumulation, and economic growth are more than
dominant ideas: they define capitalism as a system of relations.
Thus, for a stabilized atmosphere, we are going to have to defeat some
very powerful people and institutions in the process of liberating
ourselves – and science – from the dictates of profit. Success in this
struggle will require all the tools of social change: organization,
communication, demonstration, and experimentation with different
actions.
The intelligence that drives scientific inquiry is a profound human
capacity, but science alone can never tell us how to act. It cannot
provide principles, even though it can help us to act within them once
we have them. For this reason, science will never be enough to do
political battle with conservative movements or powerful corporations.
For that, people have to find moral guidance from other human capacities
and other cultural resources: art, literature, philosophy,
relationships, and even, in its proper place, religion. In the fight for
a just and sustainable world, there can be no substitute for organized
political struggle – a fact scientists themselves increasingly
recognize.