Viewpoint

Bad Mouthing Science

Dr Bob Brockie

Scientists of New Zealand! Do you feel the world has turned against you? That science is being graded and your expertise dismissed? Sense that the public is not just apathetic about science but actively opposes it?

Join the team. Scientists throughout the world are feeling the heat of a powerful and very successful anti-science ideology. We all know that the bomb, thalidomide, Bhopal, Chernobyl etc. turned people off science in droves, but that turning away is only part of the picture. A school of mostly Continental intellectuals is doing much more damage to science.

A strong anti-scientific philosophy has long flourished on the European continent led by scientist-turned-mystic Blaise Pascal and Jaques Derrida, who claimed that "general and abstract ideas are the source of the greatest errors of mankind". Frederik Nietzsche was horrified to realise that science had demystified the world, robbed us of our gods, and our humanity and had left the human psyche floating above a gaping, empty, meaningless abyss. He argued that we should abandon this dangerous science altogether and turn to art and mythology for direction.

The exploration of this mental abyss has continued the preserve of continental philosophers -- Kierkegaard, Marcuse, Heidegger, Sartre (there are hundreds of them) -- all generally set against science, but Michel Foucault is doing the most damage these days.

Foucault argues that scientists are the willing tools of bureaucrats, capitalists and colonialists who use science to transform humans into objects, the better to control and exploit them. He writes "Science is the increasing ordering of all realms under the guise of improving the welfare of the individual and the population ... a strategy with no one directing it and everyone increasingly enmeshed in it, whose only end is the increase of order and power itself". Leading US sociologists Collins and Prince liken science to the Jewish monster Golem -- out of control and engulfing everything.

Foucault has been joined by the literary theorist Derrida who argues that the same word or sign means different things to different people, that words or signs have as many meanings as there are people to use them. We are all prisoners of language so it is impossible to talk objectively, let alone argue rationally. Foucault and Derrida's ideas have swept through the world of linguistics, literary criticism, history and sociology like a firestorm and are now the prevailing orthodoxy underpinning the humanities.

This kind of thinking goes under a variety of impressive names -- "neo-existentialism, "structuralism", "post-structuralism", "hermenuetics", "deconstructionism", "post-modernism", "post-positivism" etc. These factions are the life blood of the humanities. Over the last 30 years, their ideas have been picked over endlessly in journals of history, art and sociology. No review in the Times Literary Supplement or the New York Book Review is complete without a genuflection to Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida. Collectively, these thinkers have come to be known as "relativists" because they believe that all knowledge, understanding and language is relative to one's point of view, so there can be no absolute knowledge or discourse about anything.

These people think we should throw away all previously formulated vocabularies, rules and canons, re-construct new ones and in the process, re-invent ourselves. Post-modernists claim their ideas have liberated and inspired artists, architects, historians and political activists, so why not liberate science?

Relativists are deeply offended by the scientists' claims to objective knowledge and their appeal to facts. To them a "fact" is an incoherent notion and an impossibility. They argue that scientists do not work in an intellectual vacuum. Like everyone else we have careers to build, reputations to preserve or enhance, influence to acquire or extend, egos to protect, skeletons to hide, loyalties to our countries, societies, class, religion, race and gender, which shape our thinking.

The relativists argue that the rules of science are merely a cosy set of conventions devised by scientists to prop up their own interests; that Nature is not a factor in scientific knowledge and has nothing to do with scientific agreement; that scientific argument is only a matter of negotiation between scientists; that science is a threat to democracy; expert opinions are usually prejudiced and scientific medicine as a whole is incompetent (see, for example, Paul Feyerabend).

The relativists claim that science is just one 20th-century mythology among many with no privileged status in the world of knowledge, and should be treated on the same footing as all the other world mythologies, ancient and modern. One of the political goals of the relativists is to knock science off its perch and have it supervised by laymen. They urge everybody to look for hidden power messages in all scientific statements and be constantly skeptical of scientific experts purveying "hegemonic discourse" and "objectifying presentational rhetorics linked to neocolonialist-imperialist agendas".

Since Nietszche's time, most Continental philosophers, and especially French philosophers, have dismissed science as a pernicious, dangerous and dehumanising activity, and scientists as "unreconstructed" child-like fools beneath philosophical contempt (quotes on request!). Their message has been taken up by the "Edinburgh School" of Bloor and Barnes and in the US by Richard Rorty, among many others.

Some relativists, such as Ginsberg, claim that the laws of logic are a male patriarchal creation designed to oppress women; that by killing Mother Nature in the 17th century, Descartes "masculinised" science; that women are not born female but they learn to become female; that madness and AIDS do not have organic origins, but are cultural "constructs" dreamed up by old men in white coats who want to observe and control patients.

These guys argue that all discourse happens in cultural, social or disciplinary "contexts". All domains of discourse are of equal value and it is wrong to set one above or against another, or to judge one another out of context. In challenging superstition, or in trying to supplant myths or error with objective fact, arrogant, insensitive scientists commit the sin of "de-contextualisation" -- otherwise known as political incorrectness.

Our situation has not been helped by Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn argues that science is riddled with subjectivity, proceeds erratically and capriciously, and that most scientists are in the thrall of old ideas and resist new ones.

Scientists come away from Kuhn's book with the uncomfortable feeling that he is not talking about the science we know and practice. His critique has not made the slightest difference to the direction or practice of science. On the other hand, the humanities take Kuhn very seriously, citing him more frequently than any other author in the 70s and 80s. People in the arts and humanities come away from Kuhn believing that science is corrupt, subjective and irrational, and has been so discredited that it is, in fact, dead!

Thinkers who have looked into the relativists' ideas find they are self-contradictory, nihilistic, hypocritical, self-absorbed, and promote complete moral paralysis or abdication.

You might think this ontological claptrap would flourish only among philosophically-minded Continental undergraduates -- but no! Through American intermediaries, relativism has reached our shores and many leading New Zealanders now embrace this silliness, believing that rational and irrational views are equally valid, that we must support myths, though knowing them to be untrue, cruel or unjust, and that we need superstition, not science, to live by.

Relativism, it now seems, is the prevailing dogma among many New Zealand educational institutions. John Hinchcliff, President of the Auckland Institute of Technology, for example, put it like this in a recent Metro interview [March 1995]:

The desire for balance and objectivity belongs to a failing Western/Cartesian theory of knowledge ... what we really need is the subjectivity that existentialist writers talk about -- the subjectivity of truth, where you intuit premises and then argue through your argument logically and passionately.

It's a worry!

Dr Bob Brockie is a Research Associate with Victoria University's School of Biological Science.