Trust the Science and Democracy Dies
We are engaged in a fight over whether we will even have politics at all
Can you feel the giddy anticipation? At last, we have a President Elect brave enough to Trust The Science! No other President Elect has ever Trusted Science like our current President Elect. A new age awaits! His courage will eliminate Covid and the Climate Catastrophe in one fell swoop.
Of course, only the stupid believe the cynical canard. We must call the “Trust the Science” mantra what it is: nothing more than a rhetorical weapon for the left. They’ve tried it before in their attempt to derail Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation with the imbecilic refrain of “Believe All Women.” Tara Reade evidently didn’t meet their standards of “All Women” (though by all accounts she did self-identify as such). Obviously, they meant “Believe All Women Who Make Politically Advantageous Accusations” but that doesn’t fit so nicely on a bumper sticker.
“Trust the Science” operates similarly but more sinisterly. It possesses more power to dupe the naive and unsuspecting. Who, after all, shouldn’t trust science? But to entrust our political decisions to “Science” and its cadre of “experts” would end the American project of self-governance, replacing national sovereignty with global “scientific” consensus.
Is Trust Scientific?
The problem with “trusting the science” begins at the semantic level. “Science” is not the proper object of trust, for science is merely the testing of hypotheses through empirical investigation. We can trust this scientific process only in a general way. Can you think of anyone who doesn’t “trust” that some knowledge can be acquired through empirical investigation? Of course not! (Unless you frequent your local Solipsist Society.) Everyone “trusts the science” in this general sense. What many should and do doubt are the specific conclusions of a given scientific inquiry, not the scientific process of empirical investigation itself.
As if the problem couldn’t be clearer, let’s not forget to note that the conclusions of a scientific inquiry are not always consistent. Scientists disagree! Consensuses change! Theories are refuted! How could we be so foolish as to put all our eggs in a basket that may fall apart the very next second? At what point scientific conclusions are “settled science” is never itself answered by science. Are we not always just one study away from overturning previous conclusions? The irony emerges: those claiming to “Trust the Science” are not very scientific at all. The scientific process itself REQUIRES us to be skeptical of all previous conclusions in our investigation into the physical world. Scientific knowledge is not deductive like mathematical knowledge, but inductive and thus ALWAYS AND FOREVER open to revision, modification, and refutation. But there’s no time to quibble when there’s power to grab. Believe what they call “The Science” or be called an anti-Science conspiracy theorist.
To the morons imploring us to “Trust the Science,” I say “Trust the History.” To offer just one particularly relevant example, consider what happened during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793. The esteemed physician Dr. Benjamin Rush, guided by the science of his day, administered bloodletting to his patients, a practice that in retrospect seems…unadvisable. It was the contemporary dilettante’s favorite founding father, Alexander Hamilton, who questioned the practice. That crazy, anti-Science kook took the advice of his own physician: a cold bath was clearly more effective than leaking blood. Rush’s biographer Stephen Fried explains how Rush believed “that anyone who wouldn’t try his methods was doing so for political or personal reasons.” Sound familiar?
But who was right, you may wonder? Is bloodletting or bathing a more effective cure for ye’ olde yellow fever? Fried tells us, “Even today, no treatment reliably targets yellow fever virus. Some recover on their own while being kept hydrated and comfortable, and the rest die.” What shall we conclude? People get sick. Some get better. Some die. We don’t really know why. The experts know far less than they claim to know. So maybe masks work. Maybe not. Maybe hydroxychloroquine works. Maybe not. These questions are far from settled. What’s clear is that blaming the victims of COVID-19 on anyone skeptical of what some scientists currently say is a fool.
The Political Meaning of Science
So it’s clear that “Trust the Science” is dumb. But it’s more than dumb. It’s dangerous. It pretends to offer irrefutable scientific answers to scientific questions, when in fact it offers dubious scientific answers to political questions.
What’s the difference between a scientific question and a political one? Science, as stated earlier, is the process of systemized empirical investigation. It is limited by what can be observed. How does a tree grow? When does water boil? What does Covid-19 do to your lungs? What is its rate of infection?
Politics, on the other hand, deals with questions of how we ought to live together.
Aristotle begins his work Politics with this simple observation: “Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good.” The pursuit of a collective good must first begin with asking what the good is, and this is done not through empirical investigation but through deliberation. Political answers are not founded on observations, but on reason.
The American project is an attempt to found a polis upon the first principles that “all men are created equal.” Thomas Jefferson wasn’t summarizing the latest scientific research, but making a declaration of a truth attained self-evident to reason. That a polis could be established on such a philosophical proposition was put to the test during the Civil War, even though the science of the day asserted that blacks were inferior to whites. Had Lincoln “Trusted the Science” the “new birth of freedom” would have been stillborn.
Aristotle explains that political communities naturally form because humans have “the power of speech,” which is “intended to set forth the expedient and inexpedient, and therefore likewise the just and the unjust.” As man “alone has any sense of good and evil, of just and unjust, and the like,” the “association” of men “makes a family and a state.” The purpose of the state is for achieving the “good life,” not mere survival. How to structure our laws and customs to best achieve that good life is a question to which all rational people have a right. In other words, scientific experts need to stay in their lane.
If, then, the foundation of our political community is our ability to deliberate on what is just and unjust, to let Science subsume all political questions is to relinquish part of our humanity, our natural right to work towards obtaining what we think is good. This is made plain by the fact that Science actually CANNOT answer questions of what is just and unjust. We don’t pose the question of whether murder is good or evil in a laboratory but in the arena of human discourse.
Or to offer a more pressing example: Science may one day perfectly tell us Covid-19’s rate of infection, but it cannot and never will tell us what is worth sacrificing in order to curb infections. Should we value physical health over every other human concern? Is it better to keep everyone isolated to stop the spread of a virus or to risk infections so that we can visit dying relatives, attend funerals, celebrate births, strengthen our familial and communal ties, and gather in worship of our God? Look not to science, but to your conscience. Trust not the experts, but the light of reason.
How to Save Science
Science and Politics are not opposed to each other when they are properly ordered. Politics, which deals with questions of obligation, must logically precede science, which concerns itself only with the observable universe. In other words, no scientific inquiry can ever conclude that we ought to be scientific. But politics, in its quest for the good life, can guide us in what we investigate scientifically and how we ought to apply the results of those investigations. Science serves the good of the polis, not the other way around.
C.S. Lewis observed that “You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.” And so the left claims to “trust science,” but without first grounding science in philosophical principles, they soon lose science as well.
For all their protestations to trust the science, the left quickly reveals they don’t actually care about science. Sure, we’re threatened with global extinction if we don’t trust the science of climate change, but we’re then shamed for listening to the science of biological differences between the sexes. And don’t you dare look into the science of statistical analysis revealing anomalies in the 2020 election. Oh, how painful is the irony: If we were to trust the science of statistical analysis, Mr. “Trust the Science” himself would not be inaugurated: the numbers just don’t add up.
More tellingly, they cannot abide scientific inquiries into the relationship between race and IQ. The philosophical among us know that racism is wrong because all people share the same substantial form and that skin color is but an accidental quality. An empirical investigation into race and IQ poses no threat to overturning a principle founded in philosophy. But the unphilosophical among us cannot abide such an empirical inquiry because human equality cannot be demonstrated empirically.
They denounce racism not because it violates a philosophical presupposition about human equality but because it is politically advantageous. Along with “Trust the Science” and “Believe all Women,” “Black lives matter” is yet another three-worded dagger in the left’s assault on our American way of life. These effective weapons should never be mistaken for genuine convictions. Despite their shrieks for “social justice” and to “follow the science,” those who wield this rhetorical arsenal have proven to be indifferent to justice and to science. What they want is power.
We are not engaged in ordinary politics, the collective deliberation about the good life. We are engaged in a fight over whether we will even have politics at all. Will we maintain our national right to deliberate on how we ought to live together, or will we trust those jangling the keys to the false kingdom of Science?
