4.) The Mask of Neutrality
By MARTIN REZNY
Missed the first part of this series about scientism? Go back.
In both natural and social sciences, scientists would like to believe that what they’re doing is entirely neutral and therefore not subject to a critical emotional or transcendental examination. It’s important to understand this stance is entirely a choice, an arbitrary and not in any way scientifically substantiated position. You cannot prove that an action is neutral objectively, because that’s a matter of subjective experience, of intention and perspective.
Which is exactly why some scientists may even be able to entirely disregard it, but officially, scientific authorities are concerned with the ethical dimension of research. However, they’re the least equipped people to understand the immaterial implications of their works because of how eager they are to objectify and rationalize. One of the core beliefs in science is that learning more is good. Saying science is neutral is a rationalization already, a dodge.
If it was good, that would require having an unscientific theory of what “good” is, which is a complication, and it would also make it easier to argue that it can be bad. Leaving it neutral simply facilitates lack of necessity for closer examination of the ethical dimension. On a personal level, any individual scientist can get himself off the hook: “I will only discover the facts, and let the politicians and the people do with them as they please.”
But it’s precisely the existence of this feedback loop, of the science’s authority and of the scientistic agenda, that make the pursuit of any particular kind of knowledge a fundamentally moral (or immoral) act. Doing science has consequences because it affects people’s beliefs, politics, and economy, it can even include statements about identity, and in the case of weapons or technologies of control, it can directly and literally destroy lives or the world.
Science is not neutral. It’s a choice of priorities based on subjective values. Performing or pursuing it has very real consequences, and scientists who don’t engage in philosophy, politics, art, or religion to question and temper their scientific worldview and actions are irresponsible. After all, the ancients of the most scientific tradition have seriously explored this issue with stories like that of Pandora, Prometheus, or Icarus, and those are far from irrelevant today.
To give an example from my primary field of study, political science, the researchers of the currently dominant empirical/analytical school are not very concerned with later use of their findings. Assuming there’s any use at all, which is rather questionable, the only attempted use that I know of in my country was to advise the then ruling party on how to tweak the electoral system so that it ensures the smaller parties will get crushed in the upcoming elections.
And I’m not talking about a researcher discovering something and then some third party misusing it, it was the researcher in question himself who was eager to advise the party on this “reform”. Ironically enough, the reform totally backfired, which means that not only was the intention ethically questionable, but it was also irresponsible to mislead people by implying that the theory was sound. The tweak superficially did work as advertised, but helped only the medium-sized Communist Party in the next elections by decreasing the amount of mandates of smaller parties and thus mostly diminishing the right wing coalition potential.
To make it even more absurd, when the recent crisis in Ukraine was beginning, I’ve heard one of my former teachers belonging to this group of academicians say, when pressured for a prediction, that it is not the point of political science to make predictions. Oh really? And here I thought that precisely that is the point of all science, period. Silly me.
So, not only would they try to reduce politics to numbers of seats and chambers, not only are they happy to abuse it to help the powerful stay in power, not only would they mislead everyone by making it look like they know how to design a political system so that certain concrete results get accomplished, but they also don’t actually feel like their “scientific” theories need to have any predictive power whatsoever. And that’s still not all.
Shortly after I finished my studies there and decided to steer clear of all that nonsense, I’ve learned that they decided to exile the last vestige of asking some questions about what they’re doing, the political philosophers. They were moved from the Faculty of Social Sciences to the Faculty of Arts, because of course. They don’t need any pesky philosophers there to cast doubt on their glorious positivism. Stupid philosophers, with all their dumb unscientificness.
However much I’d like to believe this is an isolated example, I highly doubt it. Political science is easily corruptible by its very subject matter and all the related vested interests and biases, just like economics, and as I’ll write about it in one of the next parts of this series, there are serious ideological movements even in sciences like psychology or astronomy. Not to mention all the natural sciences that directly impact large scale policies or technologies. Do you know a science truly exempt from money, politics, or ideology?
Wanna read the next one about the conservative bias of science? Click away.
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