Equality by lot

This is part 2 of a translation of an op-ed by Camille Ferey in BibliObs. Part 1 is here.

Analyzing the legitimate reasons for criticizing science

If the ideological dimension of the cleavage between rationalism and populism has been clarified, there remains a real phenomenon behind it. There exists a mass of untruths (lies and errors) whose effects on humanity are deleterious: climate-skepticism, historical denialism, anti-Darwinism and various kinds of conspiracy theories. But there is a pressing need to analyze the real causes of these untruths rather than to attribute them to the mental dysfunction of idiots: democracy cannot be defended by being anti-democrats.

The foremost of these causes is a political one: the process of scientification of politics and technicalization of democracy. Liberal capitalism largely subordinates collective decisions to mathematical economic models that are presented by a stratum of “experts” that are linked to power as eternal truths. In this way, presenting political choices as scientific ones, a rhetoric that was widely used in the management of the COVID19 pandemic (the decisions, said Edouard Phillipe, are not political, they are scientific), exposes science to skepticism from that point on whenever choices prove to have negative consequences. How can we believe, for example, the irrefutability of economic laws after the 2008 crisis? Dismissing any critical reflection of a technical-scientific vision of politics, immediately branding such reflection as mistrustful and irrational populism, and eliminating from public debate a set of subjects under the pretext that they are matters of science, thus contributes directly to putting science in doubt.

Another cause, this one sociological, can explain the lack of confidence in science. As history and sociology show clearly: no science is neutral in the sense that it may be produced by an observer with no characteristics and no purpose. Science is produced by scientists and if the scientists all belong to the same social class or to the same group, their products will necessarily be affected. And so, the fact that over the centuries scientists were men can explain the great delay in research about feminine sexual organs as well as about certain diseases such a endometriosis, which afflict only women.

If today women are slowly gaining ground in science (even if with much difficulty, for the scientific establishment is barely opening up and renewing itself), this is not happening with regards to the working class due to the length and uncertainty of the path leading to a career in research (being inversely proportional to the ridiculous sums and the small numbers of the scholarships available). Therefore, as science is going to be done by the wealthier classes, it will necessarily to some extent be done for the wealthy. Objectivity and neutrality grow from pluralism and equality. Without those, as the philosopher John Dewey wrote in 1927, “a class of experts is inevitably so removed from common interests that it becomes a class with private interests and private knowledge, which in social matters is no knowledge at all. [The Public And Its Problems, p. 207]”

Finally, the economic organization of the scientific establishment greatly contributes to the legitimate suspicion toward its products. The mode of production of knowledge does not avoid the general logic of the accumulation of profit of our economic system. The increasing private financing of scientific research removes choices of investment and priorities of research from democratic discussion, even as science takes an increasingly important part in our lives, determining how we live, die, eat, reproduce and move about.

On the other hand, public money continues still to finance research massively, notably in the form of financial gifts, but with a total lack of transparency. This is a situation which facilitates the appropriation by the private sector of profits generated by discoveries. An example: pharmaceutical work was slowly privatized over decades by liberal governments, as shown by Pauline Londeix and Jerome Martin, the co-founders of the Observatory of Transparency in the Politics of Pharmaceuticals. The system of research, development, production and distribution of health products, common goods largely financed by public funds, is therefore literally monopolized privately thanks to the patenting system. Furthermore, the private sector eliminates research position which are, again, largely financed by public funds, and continues to hand out billions in dividends to its shareholders while refusing to produce its products locally due to “cost” considerations. How can confidence in such a non-democratic situation be demanded?

Do not restore trust in science. Make science worthy of trust

These observations, rather than leading to skepticism, should lead us toward transforming “mistrust” into criticism. In a democracy, all institutions should rest their authority on their legitimacy rather than through enforcement. Science is no exception to this rule. Therefore to be legitimate science must be the object of criticism – that is one of the fundamental principles of democratic legitimacy. It is therefore through an effective criticism of science, and not through an authoritarian enforcement of its certitudes, that we may hope to eliminate untruths.

Such a critique must first consist of a collective decision about the boundaries of science’s authority: which questions are within those boundaries and which are part of different regimes of truth and values, as important for lawmaking as science is. The COVID19 crisis has shown that strictly scientific advice and warnings are merely parameters, along with economic, social, cultural, even religious dimensions, all of them being communal. It is therefore the democratic community that is to decide what is the proper place of science in public life.

For that, the directions of research have to be planned in a transparent way and submitted to democratic deliberation. Organized this way, it planning would allow to reintroduce democratically the question of the values which science must be strictly subordinated to, in order to serve collective emancipation and happiness rather than private interests. Furthermore, all the products of science must be considered as common goods that may not be appropriated privately. Scientists must be independent of all industry and political relations, in particular through strengthened legal and financial protections.

Finally, each area of application of science must be open to counter-expertise. If we want to give science power, counter-powers must be given as well. To do that, all the studies upon which political decisions rely must be made public. The crucial role of counter-expertise required and realized by the citizens in numerous political and social struggles, from the death of Adama Taroré to environmental struggles through the struggle against the AIDS epidemic, have shown how the critique of science has been a major democratic tool. Citizen science movements have also shown how wrong is the image of the ignorant public led by the Enlightened. This should lead us to recall that, contrary to the anti-democratic vision of Queen Science, knowledge is not a virtue but a right.

A justified political critique of science is therefore a critique of its institutions: their financing, their transparency, their accessibility, their representatives and their impact. Furthermore, giving an account for our present situation through the prism of an opposition between the forces of rationality and irrationality is profound negation of the idea of criticism, an essential ingredient of democracy. Because science is not simply a matter of truth and falsehood. It is also, even if this displeases the ultra-rationalists, a matter of values, as Albert Camus sharply asserted in the aftermath of Hiroshima. We must be living in our own imaginations, he would say, to believe that science is above the violence and the madness of this world.

Filed under: Academia, Press, Sortition, Theory | Tagged: science |