Jan 23, 2018 01:53 AM
http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_arti...hulman.php
EXCERPT: . . . Psychologists who conduct the experiment describe these respective behavioral patterns as secure and anxious-ambivalent attachment. The latter is the product of inconsistent parenting, neglect mixed with intrusive attention. The child’s inability to depend reliably on its parent prevents the growth of the child’s independence. The vacillating parent creates a vacillating child, pulled one moment by neediness and the next by wariness, in a simple harmonic motion of dysfunction.
Whatever the merits of this tidy theory on its own, it’s a useful metaphor for thinking about the relationship today between the public and that vast body of knowledge, work, and authority we monolithically call “science.” Our conversations about science are dominated on one side by those who reflexively distrust broad swathes of it as corrupted by groupthink, corporatism, or global governance conspiracy, and on the other by those keen to distance themselves as far as possible from the first group, to label any deviation from scientists’ opinions as paranoia, “denialism,” “anti-science.”
We seem to be facing a slow-brewing crisis of scientific authority even as we hear ever-more-eager paeans to science. Though these attitudes of defiance and deference might seem at odds, they are each dysfunctional stances toward scientific authority, mutually reinforcing and commonly opposed to the empowering independence science is supposed to sustain. Both attitudes suggest a kind of infantilization. That our science popularizers are heaped with the greatest praise when they “destroy” some crank or declare that they “F***ing Love Science” speaks to the peculiar exaggerations of our emotional involvement. Seldom do our conversations resemble the dispassionate, evidence-based discourse science is said to perfect.
One common story is that this conflict is a societal one, between factions with sharply divergent affinities for science—left versus right, secular versus religious, technocratic versus traditionalist. But there is little stability as to which side proclaims itself pro-science and which the bold challenger to an ideologically exhausted establishment. The capitalist conservative who is skeptical about climate change may have no trouble tarring his environmentalist foes as anti-science for opposing nuclear power. The coastal bobo who sees creationism in Texas classrooms as a harbinger of a new Dark Age may be contributing to keeping childhood vaccination rates in his city below those of Third World countries, owing to beliefs the Texas parent regards as voodoo.2
But the notions of anti-science and pro-science attitudes do seem to gesture, however problematically, toward something unsettling about the interminability of these debates. When we carefully lay out the seemingly definitive conclusions of a decades-long research program and our opponent just shrugs, we are left genuinely baffled, and the indignant charge of “anti-science” does not seem unreasonable. The bafflement only doubles if we find ourselves on the receiving end of such an argument, at odds with the apparent scientific orthodoxy on some matter and on the defensive against the charge of crankery. The counsel that science decides matters of fact instead of value does not adequately account for this disquiet—for disputes about value still end up being fought largely on the battleground of facts. Sometimes it really does seem that we are all entitled to our own facts, although we know this can’t be.
[...]
Science, as we are often told, has its special authority precisely because it is ruthlessly indifferent to the dictates of politics, religion, and brute preference. Paradoxically, this makes science a powerful political ally. But its power depends on public trust, and this trust is poisoned by the way science has become weaponized in political debates.
A key feature of these debates is that they invoke science not just to bolster the political legitimacy of one side but also to deny the political legitimacy of the other. Succeed in attaching one of the labels anti-science, denialism, paranoid, irrational, or culture of fear to your opponent, and you elevate yourself as calm and rational while tarring your foe as a troglodyte whose opinions do not even deserve a hearing in enlightened company. This invocation of science reduces it to an instrument of political power—the very abuse this rhetoric claims to combat.
More significant than the erosion of scientific trust, the weaponization of science is profoundly illiberal, and so undermines the political process itself. It betrays a cynicism about the capacity of open debate to secure proper resolution of political disputes. What gradually takes the place of open debate is a power play to exclude our opponents as legitimate participants in the political process, usually by labeling them foes of reason.
[...]
Finding our way out of this morass will require shifting the way we think and talk about the relationship between science and politics. To use Sarewitz’s language, we are immersed in worry about the politicization of science when we should be worried about the scientization of politics....
MORE: http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_arti...hulman.php
EXCERPT: . . . Psychologists who conduct the experiment describe these respective behavioral patterns as secure and anxious-ambivalent attachment. The latter is the product of inconsistent parenting, neglect mixed with intrusive attention. The child’s inability to depend reliably on its parent prevents the growth of the child’s independence. The vacillating parent creates a vacillating child, pulled one moment by neediness and the next by wariness, in a simple harmonic motion of dysfunction.
Whatever the merits of this tidy theory on its own, it’s a useful metaphor for thinking about the relationship today between the public and that vast body of knowledge, work, and authority we monolithically call “science.” Our conversations about science are dominated on one side by those who reflexively distrust broad swathes of it as corrupted by groupthink, corporatism, or global governance conspiracy, and on the other by those keen to distance themselves as far as possible from the first group, to label any deviation from scientists’ opinions as paranoia, “denialism,” “anti-science.”
We seem to be facing a slow-brewing crisis of scientific authority even as we hear ever-more-eager paeans to science. Though these attitudes of defiance and deference might seem at odds, they are each dysfunctional stances toward scientific authority, mutually reinforcing and commonly opposed to the empowering independence science is supposed to sustain. Both attitudes suggest a kind of infantilization. That our science popularizers are heaped with the greatest praise when they “destroy” some crank or declare that they “F***ing Love Science” speaks to the peculiar exaggerations of our emotional involvement. Seldom do our conversations resemble the dispassionate, evidence-based discourse science is said to perfect.
One common story is that this conflict is a societal one, between factions with sharply divergent affinities for science—left versus right, secular versus religious, technocratic versus traditionalist. But there is little stability as to which side proclaims itself pro-science and which the bold challenger to an ideologically exhausted establishment. The capitalist conservative who is skeptical about climate change may have no trouble tarring his environmentalist foes as anti-science for opposing nuclear power. The coastal bobo who sees creationism in Texas classrooms as a harbinger of a new Dark Age may be contributing to keeping childhood vaccination rates in his city below those of Third World countries, owing to beliefs the Texas parent regards as voodoo.2
But the notions of anti-science and pro-science attitudes do seem to gesture, however problematically, toward something unsettling about the interminability of these debates. When we carefully lay out the seemingly definitive conclusions of a decades-long research program and our opponent just shrugs, we are left genuinely baffled, and the indignant charge of “anti-science” does not seem unreasonable. The bafflement only doubles if we find ourselves on the receiving end of such an argument, at odds with the apparent scientific orthodoxy on some matter and on the defensive against the charge of crankery. The counsel that science decides matters of fact instead of value does not adequately account for this disquiet—for disputes about value still end up being fought largely on the battleground of facts. Sometimes it really does seem that we are all entitled to our own facts, although we know this can’t be.
[...]
Science, as we are often told, has its special authority precisely because it is ruthlessly indifferent to the dictates of politics, religion, and brute preference. Paradoxically, this makes science a powerful political ally. But its power depends on public trust, and this trust is poisoned by the way science has become weaponized in political debates.
A key feature of these debates is that they invoke science not just to bolster the political legitimacy of one side but also to deny the political legitimacy of the other. Succeed in attaching one of the labels anti-science, denialism, paranoid, irrational, or culture of fear to your opponent, and you elevate yourself as calm and rational while tarring your foe as a troglodyte whose opinions do not even deserve a hearing in enlightened company. This invocation of science reduces it to an instrument of political power—the very abuse this rhetoric claims to combat.
More significant than the erosion of scientific trust, the weaponization of science is profoundly illiberal, and so undermines the political process itself. It betrays a cynicism about the capacity of open debate to secure proper resolution of political disputes. What gradually takes the place of open debate is a power play to exclude our opponents as legitimate participants in the political process, usually by labeling them foes of reason.
[...]
Finding our way out of this morass will require shifting the way we think and talk about the relationship between science and politics. To use Sarewitz’s language, we are immersed in worry about the politicization of science when we should be worried about the scientization of politics....
MORE: http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_arti...hulman.php
