There is a rightful place for sciences? (Hint: No)
Science as a social institution had a long history from the beginning of its western history. This historical evolution based on Renaissance with Bacon and Descartes and was propagated through the expansive imperialism of Europe countries during centuries 15th to 20th, expanding this institution around the world. But, professional science as we understand today was shaped only during the 20th century. Before that only a reduced elite of intellectuals, most of them white European men was the protagonist of this social institutions. They were known as natural philosophers. The relationship between science and state comes from that times. Starting with the founding of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom, and the consequent expansion of this model in Europe and then in America, the nascent states assigned a special role (both in politics and in the budget) to science.
Natural philosophers had a very different position about the social role of science than the current researchers. In that times, science was not only a way to understand reality, also was understood as a powerful tool to enrich, economically and culturally the states. Darwin is a global trip on the Beagle is a particularly good example of this. As Dominique Pestre describes on Science, Political Power, and the State, this social function had a boom in the quantum mechanics. This exceptional group of people positioned themselves not only as researchers who changed our way of seeing the world but as advisors of the future of humanity. In part, this explains the pop influence that builds even the image of Pauli, Bohr, Heisenberg, but especially Albert Einstein in global imaginaries about what is a scientist.
Nevertheless, World War II transforms science’s role. The American expansion of research in biomedicine, the development of nuclear and space science, among other developments of “Big Science” started a major social transformation between science and State. During next decades extraordinary success happened as extinguishing diseases by medication or developing technologies capable of communicating globally through the satellites. But also, the failures were more specular: cases of Hiroshima, Bhopal or Challenger or the controversy of insecticide DDT generated on the communities reluctance to the social consequences of research. The morality associated with the scientific change for public opinion, as well as for the importance that the government assigns to researchers in Westerns and Wests societies.
The transformations of science continued, having new manifestations of local and global success and failure. The construction and development of CERN (where the birth of the current civil internet is recognized), as well as the projects of great science in observatories, energy, and industrial production, turned out to have cultural and environmental impacts around the world. In each country today, there are different positions of what science means, not only for the states but its citizens. This diversity of opinions is what gives space today to fervent YouTubers who claim science, while lectures about the Flat Earth, the anti-vaccine movement, and other anti-scientific groups occur.
So, Is there a rightful place for science in contemporary societies? The truth is, no. There are many spaces, which with different validity and relevance push political, social and cultural agendas concerning science. Each of them takes the most convenient fragments of the recent history of knowledge to strengthen their discourses and positions because, like any other social institution, science is subject to its context. In a recent editorial, the president of AAAS, Rush Holt calls to push a role of social validation of his work to the scientists. The current movements of citizen science, open science and STEM education point to the same thing because the current challenges of science have changed. They are no longer the times of Descartes, Darwin or Einstein, but the truth is that while there is a tradition of thought, we must always discuss what the rightful place for science in our societies is. Today is just a new episode in that story.
