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Title: Science as Anarchy Author: Matilde Marcolli Language: en Topics: anarchism, science, Paul Feyerabend, epistemology Source: http://anarchotranshuman.org/ Issue #2,
"Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is
more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its
law-and-order alternatives"
— Paul Feyerabend, "Against Method"
People who swear by quantum physics and pursue its consequences in all
domains are no less bound politically than comrades fighting against a
multinational agribusiness. They will all be led, sooner or later, to
defection and combat.
— The invisible committee, "The coming insurrection"
Authority suffocates the creative drive of science. Trust no one,
destroy personality cults, dismember individual mythologies! The
bureaucrats are the scientist's worst enemy. They poison the ground
where science takes roots. Where bureaucracy is allowed to exist science
will die. Bureaucracy cannot be argued with, only destroyed. A more
subtle and much more difficult form of authority to confront is that
which emerges internally to science: the cults of personality that grow
like weed around the nicer achievements of research have the sole effect
of suffocating their creative momentum, transforming a fluid and
genuinely innovative impetus of ideas into a rigid and oppressive force
that prevents new ideas from developing away from an accepted orthodoxy
of establishment. There is no room in science for personality cults.
Boycott conferences: they are but thinly disguised temples consecrated
to the cult of this or that fetish, aimed at reinforcing mob thinking,
pledging alliance to one or another master. No gods no masters! Do not
allow anybody, on the basis of "reputation" alone to confidently preach
others about things they in truth know nothing about: having a valuable
specific expertise does not confer to anyone universal authority. Always
question anyone's assertions, no matter how loudly and emphatically
pronounced. Everybody has equal right to existence and should be
guaranteed equal room for expression. The validity of results is decided
by careful scrutiny not by appeal to authority principles.
Such are the slogans of our imaginary manifesto of the anarchical
scientist, or of the scientific anarchist, you choose. However, having
said this, one needs a more careful reflection on why hierarchical
structures still survive and thrive within the scientific community. Why
do so many scientists fall so easily prey to the temptation of
personality cults? Why do they welcome the imposition of authority which
is so seemingly extraneous to the functioning of scientific thought? Why
do they form gangs that marginalize and attack those members of the
community who refuse to accept the proclaimed sainthood of this or that
famous name?
Perhaps a good place where to start such a reflection is a little known
booklet called "The tacit dimension", which contains the text of the
Terry Lectures delivered at Yale in 1966 by physical chemist turned
philosopher Michael Polanyi. The booklet has been recently republished
by the University of Chicago Press. While I certainly disagree with many
of the conclusions of the book and with the overall tone of Polanyi's
reflections, it still does contain some very important insights
precisely on the problem of structures of authority within the
scientific community. The point that Polanyi stresses in his public
address is the background of hidden, implicit knowledge, difficult to
pin down and describe precisely, which plays a crucial role in the
advancement of science. He starts by recalling Plato's Meno paradox, by
which it is seemingly impossible to identify precisely the question one
wishes to investigate if one does not already know what one is looking
for. Formulated in more modern terms than in Plato's original dialog,
this refers to that very important component of scientific progress
which is not solving a well known problem, but finding the problem one
wishes to solve, in such a way that it is interesting, doable, and
likely to have a significant impact on science. We all know from the
very start of our careers how difficult it is to resolve the tension
between finding a problem that is doable and interesting and that has
not yet been solved by someone else. In Polanyi's words, the modern
version of Plato's paradox is the following:
It is commonplace that all research must start from a problem. Research
can be successful only if the problem is good; it can be original only
if the problem is original. But how can one see a problem, any problem,
let alone a good problem? For to see a problem is to see something that
is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not
comprehended particulars. The problem is good if this intimation is
true; it is original if no one else can see the possibilities of the
comprehension that we are anticipating. To see a problem that will lead
to a great discovery is not just to see something hidden, but to see
something of which the rest of humanity cannot have even an inkling. All
of this is commonplace; we take it for granted without noticing the
clash of self-contradiction entailed in it.
— Michael Polanyi, "The tacit dimension"
I have quoted this text extensively since here I do agree with Polanyi's
conclusion that the Meno paradox is the origin and justification for the
survival of hierarchical structures of authority within the scientific
community. However, while the author welcomes the permanence of such
structures I personally, as anarchical scientist and scientific
anarchist, call for their prompt and irreversible dismissal. To
understand why the problem so clearly outlined in the text above can be
seen as the justification for the persistence of power structures, one
can again recall the experience that all of us scientists have faced, of
how difficult it is to navigate precisely that part of the scientific
enterprise: finding one's way through Baudelaire's "forest of symbols"
and perceiving hidden structures before they can be organized into
precise statements and rigorous arguments. This process is uncertain and
frightening: one can easily end up investing an enormous amount of time
and energy developing an idea that turns out to be a red herring. One
can easily corner oneself into a blind alley by chasing some fleeting
ghosts that appear to promise rewarding results only to vanish into
one's own scientific twilight. It is no wonder that most people are,
more or less openly, scared of this perspective. That is what creates
the wish for the savior, the hero that will come to the rescue of the
lost voyager, pointing to the right path across the wilderness. It is
fear that instills in humans the worship of authority: it was the
lurking shadows in our ancestral darkness that generated religions, and
it is the uncertainty and dangers of the road that make courageous
explorers turn into sheepish followers. Some scientists appear to be
especially good at spotting patterns, at sniffing out where the
interesting stuff lies buried. They see the hidden connection that
escaped detection even though it was under everybody's eyes. Naturally,
due to the fears just described, others prefer to group together in the
crowded space surrounding the people who appear to know where they are
going, so as not to risk losing one's way in the forest. By doing so
they sanction and contribute to create a hierarchy structure, a cluster
of power and authority bestowed upon a person who is invested with the
task of deciding for others. This is extremely dangerous, in my opinion
(not in Polanyi's one and that's where we profoundly disagree) because
people voluntarily relinquish their own authority over themselves, and
in order to justify their own weakness they readily impose their chosen
god on all those others who would have happily continued to wander
around their own voyage of exploration without delegating it onto
anybody else to set the course for everyone.
Instead of blindly delegating to others to make decisions as to what is
interesting, new, and relevant, it would be much more useful to try to
better understand what it is that gives to certain people a better
feeling for the hidden dimension, a better compass to navigate uncharted
waters. I come back to precisely this point in the next chapter of my
imaginary manifesto.
Before getting to that, I still want to make some remarks on why I
consider that figures of authority should have no place in the
scientific enterprise and why I think that the latter is in essence a
perfect model of a society organized on the basis of anarchist
principles. I would like to quote again an interesting passage from the
same source:
I would call it the "principle of mutual control"... each scientist is
both subject to criticism by all others and encouraged by their
appreciation ... This is how "scientific opinion" is formed, which
enforces scientific standards and regulates the distribution of
professional opportunities. It is clear that only fellow scientists
working in closely related fields are competent to exercise direct
authority over each other, but their personal fields will form "chains
of overlapping neighborhoods" extending over the entire range of
science.
— Michael Polanyi, "The tacit dimension"
It is hard not to see in this structure of diffuse and self organizing
power, this decentralized form of authority by consent and mutual
collaborative criticism an echo of the anarchist vision of the communes
as basic diffuse organizational principle of the society, with the
"chains of overlapping neighborhoods" of competence connecting them into
a larger organizational form, built from the ground up, from
collectives, communes, loose associations, coordinated into an emergent
large scale correlational principle which is self regulating and does
not need the imposition of nation states, gods or masters. The natural
functioning of the scientific community is based on the principle of
peer reviewing as the basis for establishing the validity of scientific
results, on the anonymous unpaid voluntary work of the large number of
referees who donate their time to the purpose of contributing to the
collective functioning of the community, to the advancement of what we
call science. This is the best historical realization of the
self-structuring principle of society that the anarchist movement
predicted. It is strictly incompatible with the idea of a proclaimed
figure of authority who dictates the canons of truth.
The only genuinely democratic venue for scientific communication is the
written word. Unlike the spoken interactions, which are entirely
dominated by relations of dominance and subservience, by prejudices and
prevarications, the written communication is non-aggressive, open to
everybody equally, and not colored by personal bias. The internet
archives are open to anyone to post results and read other people's
results: no written paper screams louder than others, none prevents
others from speaking, none is allowed a greater room for expression at
the expense of all others. Within the context of written communication,
nobody can disrupt another person's presentation with continuous
interruptions, nobody can use their position of authority to suppress
others. Beware of critics of the written word, because they are usually
motivated by the fear of losing a dominance position gained through the
continuous practice of verbal aggression. The collectivity of books is
the best antidote against the cults of personality and the worship of
authority figures. The scientific mind thrives in the plurality of
opinions, in multitude. Books are our best weapon in the fight for self
expression and freedom from the oppression of authority. The broad
landscape of human knowledge is humbling, and precisely this humbling
effect is what protects us from the monsters of the ego, what makes us
free to think and enjoy being part of that multitude of thoughts, each
of us a dwarf, collectively a giant. The humbling vision of our own
individual place in the vast aggregate that constitutes human knowledge
is what sets us free to be truly creative and not driven by narcissism
and self indulgence. Truly creative and original thought is such
precisely because it feeds on knowledge, on the common heritage of
mankind, on the experience of our shared collective mind.
This second installment of my imaginary anarchical scientist's manifesto
brings me back to the question of the "tacit dimension" and an attempt
to understand that special quality some people seem to have that makes
them able to see structure where none is apparent, to have a more
developed intuition for where things seem to go, where the hidden spring
of water lies in the apparent desert. Instead of leaving this mysterious
quality lingering unexplained on the verge of a semi-mystical
interpretation, as Michael Polanyi does in his lectures, I would like to
put forward a simple explanation and refreshing explanation: this
special talent, so envied that people are ready to invest it of an aura
of embodiment of divine (and therefore unquestioned) authority, has
mostly to do with the degree of connectedness. Once again, those who are
able to see farther are those who are able to climb upon the shoulder of
giants, which is to say, have the broadest and more diversified
knowledge. In other words, instead of worshipping a naive cult of
personality of people with an undeniable strong sense of intuition,
cultivate within yourself that same capacity by broadening your
horizons: reading books, not necessarily immediately relevant to one's
own current research topics but bordering on other "overlapping
neighborhoods" of the map of scientific knowledge, is the most important
activity for a scientist!
Those famous scientists who, like Feynman, scorn the reading of books
have evidently suspicious motives: at the personal level they enjoy
having created a niche for a cult of personality, with a court of
followers constantly engaged in the pleasing of their personal ego, thus
betraying the fundamental spirit of science as a collective. Naturally
they fear the one thing that has the power to dethrone them. They fear
books and encourage others not to read them simply because books provide
a liberating vision of the broad landscape, they restore proportion,
they deflate egos. Books provide all people, equally and democratically,
with the same opportunity to acquire a broad landscape of knowledge,
sufficient to guide their own path, with no further need to hide behind
the worshipping of figures of authority to whom decisions of
intellectual worthiness are constantly delegated. People who have been
cast into this role rarely reject it. More often than not, they adapt to
it with complacency because it flatters the ego. Naturally, they begin
to fear the loss of this supremacy role. So beware of the motives behind
the behavior of people who enjoy a position of authority and have
started to fear the true democratic, collective, and anonymous life of
the scientific commune.
The true nature of the "hidden dimension" is the dimension of reading,
the broadest form of interconnectedness of the human race as a whole and
the only real sustaining structure for an ideal society based on a
loosely connected network of anarchist communes. The written word is the
only form of communication that crosses barriers of time and space,
cultural divides, conflicting sociological structures. An enterprise
like science, which is by its very nature transcending all divisive
aspects and which constitutes the true unifying force of the human race,
can only benefit from a form of communication that is also by its very
nature inclusive and decentralized, democratic and anti-authoritarian,
and which provides us with a diffuse network of knowledge, a safety net
which is the only guiding light to find the path of progress hidden
within the forest of symbols.
"As a humanist, I love science. I hate superstition, which could never
have given us A-bombs."
— Kurt Vonnegut, "Armageddon in Retrospect"
“The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated
within the collapse of civilization. It is within this reality that we
must choose sides. ”
— The invisible committee, "The coming insurrection"
Since so much of the interpersonal relations within the scientific
community are based on aggression, let us stop pretending that we are a
peaceful lot. One may begin to wonder, if the whole point becomes that
of perfecting the art of war and confrontation, why not to just go over
openly to those who do that for a living. Perhaps, instead of agitating
our pacifist banners on the front, while continuing to to think in terms
of tactics and battles in our daily practice of human interactions
within the community (competition, priority claims, verbal aggression)
we should just sell off completely to the military and to the financial
sharks of capitalism and start acting out openly the true nature of a
scientific community we idealize in words and revile in acts. It is too
easy to start feeling that all feelings of love, passion, affection,
dedication only weaken our stance, because they only make us more easily
vulnerable to attacks, and that rage remains the only successful
motivation for the pursuit of scientific discoveries, an all
encompassing, all consuming rage. Perhaps what we see happening within
the scientific community is just an enactment of a deep truth about the
human nature that brings people to choose aggression over cooperation,
the same justification that is used over and over to justify the
existence of capitalism as an economic system. If this were truly the
case, then perhaps the making of the atomic bomb should be regarded as
the greatest scientific achievement of mankind, precisely because it
gave mankind the means for total self-annihilation. However, there is an
alternative to being forever locked in the grip of this war/aggression
mentality. There is the possibility of cooperation, of a shared common
good, one that transcends the individual egos and their primal needs for
recognition.
The early days of psychoanalysis tended to depict the ego as the healthy
rational mind and the unconscious as the realm of the "monsters of the
id". Far from being the case, the ego is the tyrannical monster that
enslaves our creativity, our potentials for invention, and hijacks it at
the service of its own infinite narcissism. The unconscious is the realm
of the mind that supplies us with dreams, with ideas, with beauty.
Narcissism is the worse enemy that stands in the way of the development
of durable interpersonal relations based on true mutual understanding,
on the capacity for listening and appreciating another person's mind, of
sharing knowledge, thoughts, ideas, in other words, of what we usually
call progress. The narcissistic needs of the ego are infinitely
regressive and they stand in the way of all forms of creativity, but
most of all of science, which is by its very nature a very humbling form
of self awareness, which confronts us with the magnitude of reality and
the insignificance of the personal ego.
The fact that the science functions primarily as a collective enterprise
and as a self-correcting process which is de-localized and largely
anonymous is important in preventing the monsters of the ego to
undermine its achievements. As a simple and concrete example, although I
myself blog about my life as a scientist, I am profoundly skeptical of
the growing tendency to hijack the nature of scientific discourse away
from its natural venue, which is that of peer reviewed professional
publishing and divert scientific discussions into the public blog arena.
The danger is to create an atmosphere of ideological pressure, where the
validity of scientific theories is no longer established by the careful
work of that delicate structure of voluntary refereeing process that
self-regulates the functioning of science as a collective. Exposing
science to blog discussions means to leave it open to statements of
authority and personality cults, to the violent impositions of those who
are the loudest, the most outrageous, the most vitriolic acrobats of the
blogosphere, with no respect for that careful, silent and invisible, but
very crucial self-regulatory mechanism which is the essence of the
scientific commune.
Blogs play a very important role as grass-root journalism, as a place
for the type of political discourse that is otherwise excluded from the
business controlled media. I think they contribute essentially to
healthy forms of debate within the society, but they may not constitute
the best place for scientific debate itself. The difficult
self-correcting process by which science improves itself is too delicate
a dynamical equilibrium to be given in the hands of those people whose
main intent is to show off the size to which their egos (and
occasionally other equally irrelevant parts of their anatomy) can be
inflated. It may be a good idea to reserve the blogging skills of
scientists to create a venue for a healthy, if animated, discussion the
sociological, philosophical, and political aspects of the scientific
community and keep the discussion of science itself where it belongs, in
the natural environment in which it flourishes, the scientific commune
and its diffuse, invisible, collective, anti-authoritarian power
organization.
I remain reasonably optimistic though about the basic and deeper
functioning of the scientific community and its self-correcting
mechanisms, and I believe that probably over time those blogs whose sole
purpose is to promote one's ego will die out and the ones that have a
honest focus on a more balanced discussion of actual scientific
information will survive and possibly become integrated into the
accepted modes of scientific debate.
“We are not depressed; we're on strike. [...] From then on medication
and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation.”
— The invisible committee, "The coming insurrection"