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It flabbergasts me when science journalists don’t aggressively pursue questions of social or environmental impact. If you are reporting a researcher who is devving tech with obvious externalities, do not throw softballs. One of the most disordered aspects of science as an institution is the whoring for grant moneys and the lack of accountability for externalities. It falls to journalists to hold science to account. When engineer Alice says her tech can be used for some lovely medical application, but will also immediately ream out privacy will-he-nil-he, by jingo make her wrestle with it! When scientist Bob goes full Oppenheimer, make him face his responsibilities! The “gee whiz” tone of most sci/tech reportage should alarm and disgust us.
Covid has been a massive example of the failures of public science literacy. Resistance to vaccines based on skepticism or mistrust of science as an instution are firm and widespread. So much has been said. But few amongst the intelligentsia are willing to lay that partly at the feet of the organs of science and medicine. I am.
When the science to technology pipeline is so manifestly mercenary, so obviously beholden to the interests of power, is it really a wonder that even the reasonably science literat amongst us may harbour mistrust? Primary school teachers for generations have painted a rosy picture of science as process, a process of awesome discovery from hypothesis to conclusion. Yet the reality is far more often a battle of ideologically invested egos between competitors for grant moneys. And these moneys are at the whims of power elites, from faceless bureaucracies to military gangsters to reckless private tyrannies of capital. The sad and sober fact is that when viewed as a field of power play, one gets a far more judicious view of science as institution.
One is in danger of becoming even more jaundiced if one takes a look at the feckless figleafs of accountability built into the process. Ethical strictures and oversight structures are scattershot globally and locally, a few mere decades old in most cases. The single overarching principle of accountability governing what is researched and what tech is developed is not a responsibility to the commonweal, but accountability to financial power elites. These classes decide the shape of our future, not scientists per se and certainly not the public interest.
I cannot help but yet conclude that science is a thoroughly mercenary magisterium.
If such jaundice infuses someone like me, who turns up the radio and sits down to take in a good science report, can we really blame the less diligent for their noncompliance with the dictates of public health regimes? Such regimes are deeply ensconced in alien power structures. I personally agree that antivax conspiracy theories are laughably stupid. That is patent. But one doesn’t have to understand the nuts and bolts of CRISPR to reasonably hold suspect a shadowy and alien magisterium accountable to no one but Monsanto. I would rather agree with my fellow lumpenproles that Monsanto is the very devil. Why should they trust a Big Pharma who just jacked up their insulin prices 1000 fold to make a vaccine? Why listen to Pharma’s sorcerers who say, “just take it for your own good, plebe”?
We want science education to advance over the suspicion of power, to pursuade people along the lines that the product is good when the process may be ugly or even evil. And yet the face of science education in the USA is still Bill Nye, a palpably doddering fool whose sycophantry toward gene cartels belies the attitude of smug superiority which inflects virtually all science education of “the unwashed masses”. The scientistic enthusiasts and humanistic believers are unlikely to win wider conversion with their factional bigotries, natch. But far more concerning are the magisters themselves, whose socially inept waffling between condescension to the elementary and argot laden obfuscation now imperil global health.
I consider these issues often, stimulated by far more than Covid as context. And yet for years all I have are questions.
How is it that scientists and engineers are not instructed in public education? You make a big discovery and suddenly are getting interview requests. You publish in Nature. It’s your ticket to the big time! How in bally all are you not schooled in explaining what a codon is with concision and attention to how your work impacts the public? This is failure in the education of scientists.
How in grim Hades are ethics not yet a basic and unavoidable part of the scientific process? I don’t mean an informal afterthought or paperwork nuisance when one wants to experiment on sentient critters. I mean, taught from the second form science fair as a necessary contingent to ANY scientific question or development. We should demand no more Oppenheimers. No more giddy advances turned to apocalyptic regrets. This is of course a political failing as much as scientific. But if science as institution does claim to guard the good by power of reason, it must rigorously subscribe to ethical demands with as much ferocity as it debates questions of discovery. Maybe moreso. Science must be at the forefront of demanding ethical and moral commonweal. This all the more when medicine and ecology are on the line. How are scientists not unionized in accountability to stakeholders, so they can say “no” to power with solidarity?
Why do scientists seldom discuss issues of power which taint their institutions? If “Reason” guides the hands of this magisterium, as the scientistic believers claim, then surely a good faith mandate of conscience be to plainly discuss the problematics of power. People pick up on the duplicity and complicity, if only by intuition. When the DOD funds your project looking at neural nets, say, don’t try to put a happy face on it by claiming it will only work to the public good through medical application. You’re getting paid like a whore, so be honest about it. People see through this shit. If you claim to have a conscience as a scientist, start demanding that moneys be allocated with rigorous demands for accountability to research. Even moreso to technological development and production! It’s not enough to join the Union of Concerned Scientists and mumble worries in back rooms to fellow researchers. Get out and push, dash it all.
Science is a political and economic force. And such forces are inherently dirty. We all must quit pretending otherwise.
The forgoing may seem to unjustly lay the failings of our era at the feet of researchers. Naturally, our failures are catholic in scope, and most especially a failure of leadership from ruling imperial elites. The oligarchs are psychotic parasites who don’t care if even their own blood’s children have a planet to inherit. But I cannot help but underscore the engines of science as a bottleneck toward responsibility to commonweal. There are deep anthropological reasons why none of the finger wagging climate researchers through the decades managed to flip the switch of conscience as well as young Greta Thunberg.
Primo amongst these is the way scientists have ceded the public space. Yes, Degrasse Tyson and David Suzuki, &c. But these tend to talk with the usual suspects, the usual science fans in the usual fora. Of all scientists who aim for public intellectual engagement, I can only think of Jane Goodall as having walked the talk when it comes to connecting the scientific magisterium to others with profound good effect. She shows up to church chataquas with her chimp dolly and no one can’t love Jane Goodall. She’s a Titan.
The planet is now boiling to a point when even the most insensate allistic human can feel the impacts. The climate refugee crisis is beginning to pick up. Climate scientists have been warning of this for decades. And those of us nerds who listened and read IPCC reports and remember studying supercomputer climate change forecasts in the 90’s appreciate them! Perhaps it is asking too much that the scientific magisterium as a whole would rebel enough to overturn the imperial mandates of petrochemical “civilization”. They grub for public sector grants whilst the oiligarchs can barf out billions in propaganda with little thought.
But science can and must do better. We don’t have any choice now. Scientists have political power they do not use, whether out of apathy or ignorance I cannot say. But anyone who has worked in ecology or conservation must note how often scientists engage only with their narrow fiefdoms of study with little energy directed toward issues of greater context. It’s a pity.
Regarding the antivax nutjobs, Sinosphere Shufei says: these demented scum are now a global health menace, a fetid Petri dish roiling with SARS mutations which may yet kill millions. Hogtie them and force them to get the jab. This is what government’s monopoly on violence is for.
Anglosphere libertarian Shufei rejoins: yes, vaccines are necessary, but their reluctance is born of endemic social decay sociopolitical and siloization. Until that is cured, nothing will change. Measures of force only harden resentful oppositions. There are serious privacy concerns and bad precedent implications in coercive policy measures like “vaccine passports”.
Chomsky’s formulation of libertarian socialism is that “structures of power must justify their existence or be abolished”. It’s the only articulation of anarchism for which I’ve ever felt unalloyed agreement. Does the Covid emergency demand authoritarian policy on the basis of commonweal justification? I’ll leave that answer to those with more political sway…
But when scientific regimes do not deal with such questions plainly and publicly, the result is public alienation and perhaps the unwitting abetting of unjust authoritarianism. Not once have I yet heard a media science journalist or public medical researcher deal justly with the concerns of privacy in Covid response policy. I’m eagerly and greedily vaxxed. But do I want to reveal private medical information will-he-nil-he to coercive organs of state or corporations? I daresay not! Once measures like mandatory vaccination or “vaxports” are made precedent, they will be very hard to roll back. And the mission creep will be off at a run. How much longer until the passports include the flu or pneumonia? When will they be mandatory for any public excursion? Something cops want to see as you take an evening paseo?
The critical missing piece of the social discussion of such policies are scientists. Too many pass the buck with “we just discover stuff; it’s up to others what to do with it”. Only the benighted could buy such an argument, see it as anything other than a bad faith mollification of conscience.
I didn’t mean this rant to ramble on so long. But since so many on Smolnet work in infotech fields, I do hope that it might goad one or two patient readers to take up these issues with your colleagues. Such is the importance of being earnest, if not quite justification for gratuitous internet blither. But such are the worries one wrestles as fall still lags behind the equinox and empires crumble.
I think of Arthur and Merlin, and wonder wither the Merlins go. Merlins disappear right when Camelots fall. It’s a sort of shadow mythos seldom commented upon. We’d often like a Doctor from Gallifrey to herd us against folly. Myself, I’d settle for them to stay and lend a hand.
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