Should Anyone Care about Scientific Progress?

1. Introduction

When two men took me on a stretcher from my bedroom to the hospital, I was delirious and grateful. When the doctor wheeled me into the operating room and handed me along the way an Informed Consent form, I signed it. When I asked about my odds of recovery from the impending back surgery, he mumbled something about a 50/50 chance of making it, a 50/50 chance of ever walking, and a 50/50 chance of walking normally. Even with 12.5% odds, I submitted to the anesthetic. For years, I have been wondering how I relinquished my critical faculties and trusted a stranger, Dr. McNally, to decide my fate. Was it faith in his magical powers or in the scientific apparatus that undergirded a 13-hr operation? Would I consider it “scientific progress” if I were told that nowadays (some 30 years later) this operation takes 2 or 3 hr in an outpatient facility? Or is the issue not the shortened duration of the surgery but the heightened odds given to the efficacy of the surgery? In short, what yardstick is relevant in such cases to make any claims about progress, scientific, technological, or human?

Perhaps it is not faith in science as such that diminished my critical engagement years ago, but fear—or both. The emotional toll (and a divorce) is not accounted for in the logic of progress, because some philosophers of (natural) science have been equating problem-solving with scientific progress as much as with the expansion of knowledge about Nature writ large. Sigmund Freud ([1928] 1961, 6) replaced religion with science as having both “power and coercion” in modern civilization and infused the relation between humans, nature, and science with an emotional dimension. According to him, “the principal task of civilization, its actual raison d’etre, is to defend us against nature” (Freud [1928] 1961, 15). The fear of the “forces of nature,” for Freud, is akin to a “state of helplessness,” and therefore reminds him of a child’s fear of their parents. In his words, “one had reason to fear them, and especially one’s father; and yet one was sure of his protection against the dangers one knew” (Freud [1928] 1961). Does this learned behavior of the child, finding the father both dangerous and protective, continue into adulthood, finding, as I did, the surgeon both terrifying and a savior? “In the same way,” Freud continues, “a man makes the forces of nature not simply into persons . . . but he gives them the character of a father” (Freud [1928] 1961, 17). This personification is pushed even further: “He turns them into gods,” rendering human comprehension of natural forces even more problematic, perhaps ineffective. While religion and religious beliefs remain in the realm of “illusion” for Freud (as he explains as well elsewhere ¹ ), “scientific work is the only road which can lead us to knowledge of reality outside ourselves” (Freud [1928] 1961). It is the road we ought to take instead of continuing to believe that religion can explain the mysteries of nature: the road offers “not only immediate relief,” but also a “mastering of the situation” (Freud [1928] 1961). Freud inherits the faith in and promise of mastering nature left by his predecessors since the Age of Reason, though he jettisons along the way Francis Bacon’s cautionary quip: “Nature to be commanded must be obeyed” (Bacon [1620]/1985, 39). ² What would a Freudian “mastering of the situation” look like? Must we have faith in our ability to master nature or at least in the methods by which such mastery can purportedly be accomplished?

Steven Pinker (2018, 10) has become one recent exemplar of such faith in science, popularizing the progress thesis. ³ Summarizing the standard “methods of science” as including “skepticism, fallibilism, open debate, and empirical testing,” Pinker anchors these methods in what he calls “Enlightenment institutions,” which include markets (Pinker 2018, 12). For him, so long as capitalism is framing scientific activity,

problems are solvable. . . [W]e can solve them if we sustain the benevolent forces of modernity that have allowed us to solve problems so far, including societal prosperity, wisely regulated markets, international governance, and investments in science and technology. (Pinker 2018, 155; italics in the original)

With dozens of graphs and plentiful statistical data, Pinker (2018, 385ff) ties the notion of “human progress” to science and presents its practitioners as battling the conservative right (who worry about the erosion of religious and traditional values) and the progressive left (who worry about reductionism, determinism, and the catastrophes brought about by science). In defending science against its detractors, ⁴ Pinker ties the “growth of prosperity in human history” (Pinker 2018, 80) to “the application of science to the improvement of material life” (Pinker 2018, 81), evident for him in the Industrial Revolution, increased productivity, and the growth of wealth (and a decrease in poverty and inequality, Ch. 9). Having causally harnessed the growth of wealth under capitalism to scientific applications that give rise to human “flourishing,” to speak of progress is to speak of science, and to speak of science is to speak of the merits of capitalist production that ensure its forward movement. Lest one be still unclear about Pinker’s (2018, 39) perspective, he opens his chapter on “Progressophobia” with the lines:

Intellectuals hate progress. Intellectuals who call themselves “progressive” really hate progress. It’s not that they hate the fruits of progress, mind you: most pundits, critics, and their bien-pensant readers use computers rather than quills and inkwells, and they prefer to have their surgery with anesthesia rather than without it. It’s the idea of progress that rankles the chattering class—the Enlightenment belief that by understanding the world we can improve the human condition.

It is the last sentence of this quote that I wish to dwell on: will a greater understanding of the forces of nature necessarily bring about an improvement in the conditions of human existence? Has he read no Freud? In his Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud laments the fact that despite the progress enabled by science, humanity is still not enjoying its fruits, or if it is, this enjoyment “has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction.” ⁵ Pinker repeats “progressives hate progress” a few more times in the book to mock leftist critics, the “chattering class,” who are both on the wrong side of history and hypocritical because of their enjoyment of progress’s bounty. And yes, surgery is always the go-to procedure that science PR agents promote, eliciting the replacement of the dread and impotence of the past with the miracles of modern medicine. Practitioners who operate within any paradigm that reflects the “maturity” of a field are by definition, according to Thomas Kuhn ([1962] 1970, 10-11, 36), “expert problem-solver[s],” be the problems theoretical or practical, in the physical sciences or medicine. But is the capitalist system the only economic system that would promise the success of mature science? Is Pinker confusing the necessary and sufficient conditions of capitalism when writing about scientific progress?

Critics of the progress of science and technology (or as some have called their conjunction, technoscience; Lyotard 1993, Ch. 4) have viewed technoscience as being both effective and dangerous, clearing the tangled web of (religious) superstitions and inflicting pain. So, the questions that inform this investigation are not so much about the methods that allow for progress or the growth of knowledge (using the criteria of historians and philosophers of science), but about the conditions under which such progress is said to be attained. Ensuring the fulfillment of these conditions, as explicitly stated by the scientific community, may exact a price from society, one not measured in economic or financial terms alone, but in broader terms of the cultural commitments to a specific set of ideological pronouncements. ⁶ As I hope to illustrate, the claim for the (methodological and sociological) progress of science hinges on two interrelated conditions, competition and autonomy, both of which have the ideological sanction of (capitalist) neoliberalism, for which they are convenient banners. Before I turn to the details of the dual capitalist mythology of competition and autonomy, I would like to briefly consider another philosophical condition that relates to the understanding of science. The appeal to the divine has characterized the scientific enterprise since its modern phase of development: unlike the contemporary pretense of conflict between science and religion (the Scopes Trial of 1925 in Tennessee), historically, scientists attempted to glean the wisdom of God and uncover the secrets of Nature (as Nietzsche observed nearly a century and a half ago). The appeal to the divine helps to explain the Freudian move from the father to God (through science) when speaking of the fear and protection associated with “forces of nature” and helps explain what George Canguilhem (1998, 313) sees as Victor Hugo’s use of “a religious vocabulary into the service of a secular idea [of progress].”

2. The Conceit

Most discussions about the progress of science presumed that science embodies in its very practice the ongoing growth of knowledge, the ever-increasing body of demonstrated truths, as an “infinite process of human perfectibility” (Canguilhem 1998, 314-15) where progress, perfectibility, development, and advancement are used interchangeably. One wonders, though, if the growth of knowledge is necessarily progressive, and if so, in what way. ⁷ The answer has been in the affirmative since Bacon and right into the 19th century (with a Hegelian sense of World Spirit guiding history in a positive direction), collapsing in effect growth and progress. As Canguilhem (1998, 316) reminds us, though, once the notion of progress shifted from the 18th century’s notion of the “enlightenment of darkness” to the 19th century’s notion of heat (both in the chemical and physical sciences), the possibility of its own exhaustion belied a potential for “decline.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau seems to be ahead of his time in suggesting that historical progress was neither clearly teleological nor morally neutral (since the price of epistemological progress was moral regress or even outright decay). In his words, “If cultivating the sciences is harmful to warlike qualities, it is even more so to moral qualities” (Rousseau [1750] 1964, 56; see also 62ff). ⁸

While Rousseau’s concern was associated with the pernicious moral effects that the advancement of the sciences and arts would bring with them, Friedrich Nietzsche acknowledged three main reasons for supporting the scientific enterprise: understanding God, its utility, and loving “something unselfish, harmless, self-sufficient, and truly innocent”; these reasons, though, were, in fact, “errors.” ⁹ Nietzsche’s critique of the sciences of his day is twofold. First, the scientific edifice is constructed by “magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches” on the shaky foundations of promises about the unknown, promises that were never delivered. ¹⁰ Second, having faith in science as representing nature accurately (without errors) is in fact a “lie at any cost” because it demands blind faith more than rational or empirical verification. For Nietzsche, this way of knowledge formation is comparable to the “need for the lie” that Paul’s teaching displays in biblical verses. The Paulinian formulation of Christianity, as far as Nietzsche ([1889/1895] 1968, 175) is concerned, is what established the church as we know it. Just as the Bible is based on lies (about God and Jesus, about miracles and prophecies), so is science (about nature and its law). Incidentally, a century later we find James Baldwin (1962) repeating the same negative sentiment about Paul when he calls him “mercilessly fanatical and self-righteous,” responsible for a particular genealogy that is not faithful to Christ’s message. Whether Nietzsche calls “all science” a “bizarre conceit,” ¹¹ accuses science of making “common cause” with “herd instincts,” ¹² or says that “scientific integrity is always ruptured when the thinker begins to reason,” ¹³ it is clear that for Nietzsche science (just like religion) remains suspect. ¹⁴ Its rational claims for certainty hinge on an appeal to faith, ¹⁵ the kind that is used by religious institutions. In his words,

you will have gathered what I am driving at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we seekers after knowledge today, we godless anti-metaphysicians still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by a faith that is thousands of years old, that Christian faith which was also the faith of Plato, that God is the truth, that truth is divine. But what if this should become more and more incredible, if nothing should prove to be divine any more unless it were error, blindness, the lie—if God himself should prove to be our most enduring lie? (Nietzsche [1882] 1974, 283) ¹⁶

Instead of seeing science and scientific progress as merging human and divine knowledge, Nietzsche argues that to model the scientific enterprise on the religious would reduce them both to a lie, a lie about God as well as truth. The lie, though, is covered up by persuasive rhetoricians who present their wares in convincing ways, appealing to what their audiences may want to hear, preying on their fears and offering reassuring promises. Twentieth-century philosophers of science present the scientific community in the most appealing ways, as if they were PR agents (rather than critics). I would suggest here that their explanatory models or philosophical investigations approximate the three modes of persuasion outlined by Aristotle in his Rhetoric. ¹⁷ According to him, there are “three means of effecting persuasion,” and those who are

in command of them must, it is clear, be able (1) to reason logically, (2) to understand human character and goodness in their various forms, and (3) to understand the emotions—that is, to name them and describe them, to know their causes and the way in which they are excited. (Aristotle 2004, 10)

Contemporary students of rhetoric have translated Aristotle’s means of persuasion into the respective categories of logos, ethos, and pathos. ¹⁸ In the present context, it seems that methodological questions associated with scientific inquiry would come under the category of logos, questions about human character and the norms by which the scientific community ought to organize itself would come under the category of ethos, and that any emotional appeal to practitioners and observers of science would come under the category of pathos. Combined, these three modes of persuasion bring to life what science means to the public as well as what makes it an appealing pursuit for curious minds.

As for the logos of the scientific enterprise, students of science evaluate the historical record of the progress of scientific knowledge methodologically. Some hold a cumulative view that inductively records scientific progress step by step (Butterfield 1957; Cohen 1985), as if each generation of researchers stands on the shoulders of the giants who came before them to see farther than their predecessors (Merton [1965] 1993). Others focus more carefully on the improved level of problem-solving (new paradigms) that each group of scientists are able to master (Kuhn [1962] 1970). ¹⁹ Still others claim that the growth of knowledge happens when bold conjectures (hypotheses) are proposed, tested, and ultimately refuted (Popper [1935] 1992, 1963). ²⁰ Methodological questions about the progress of science may seem esoteric outside the philosophy and history of science, yet they command certain ritualistic value for members of the faith and perhaps even for the agnostics who might be converted to believe in the legitimacy of science. Scientific progress with methodological foundations also bolsters faithful disciples, like Pinker, who focus exclusively on the fruits of what Kuhn calls “normal science” (the routine operations of scientists within prescribed paradigms) so easily observed in daily life (when technoscience is the standard-bearer of how to measure progress). ²¹ Enclosed like their religious counterparts in insulated communities, their devotion is complete, their defenses against heretics vicious, and their redemptive promises hark back to Christian notions of salvation. ²²

There are those who are more interested in the norms and conventions that ought to guide and might at times characterize the way the scientific community operates. Their attempts to legitimate those operations is analogous to the mode of persuasion appealing to an ethos insofar as they simultaneously codify a way of behaving among scientists and appeal to norms that should guide human conduct. Robert Merton ([1942] 1973, 270-73) famously identified four features of the “ethos of science”: “universalism,” “communism,” “disinterestedness,” and “organized skepticism.” ²³ Sociologists of science have explained scientific progress in terms of the adherence of its practitioners to these ideals in contradistinction to other communities and their norms.

I want to focus here on the third mode of persuasion, pathos, as examined by Michael Polanyi (1946) when observing the scientific community. ²⁴ Instead of reviewing Kuhn’s view of the docile, indoctrinated scientist who is productive in solving problems or Popper’s view of the heroic scientist who has the courage to propose falsifiable conjectures, Polanyi’s view of the behavior of scientists is more focused on and brings to mind the emotional appeal Aristotle describes in the context of rhetoric. For Polanyi, “personal knowledge” or what he also calls “tacit knowledge” is the kind of knowledge that cannot be transmitted through textbooks or guiding principles. The personal dimension of scientific research, writes Polanyi, “commits us, passionately and far beyond our comprehension, to a vision of reality.” One wonders if he is talking about the fervent ideals of religious zealots or about the lifeworld of scientists; perhaps the one has turned into the other, wearing a white lab coat where the other wore a monastic brown or black robe. The epistemological (and highly socialized) commitment of scientists, according to Polanyi ([1958] 1964, 64), is accompanied by an emotional one: “Like love, to which it is akin, this commitment is a ‘shirt of flame,’ blazing with passion, and, also like love, consumed by devotion to a universal demand. Such is the true nature of objectivity in science.” Unlike Nietzsche ([1901] 1967, 59), who finds that “A certain frugality of desire makes possible our scientific curiosity and severity,” Polanyi celebrates the epistemological in emotional and moral terms. For him, personal devotion is complete, consuming, and invigorating: a faithful passion or the passion of the faithful fuels scientific progress. He also speaks of scientific “connoisseurship” as the “art of knowing,” a skill that “can be communicated only by example, not by precept.” The connoisseur, by definition, exhibits a facility in taste and discernment that transcends the bounds of guidelines, and therefore cannot offer the didactic lesson the community of scientists might expect from Kuhn’s portrayal. The connoisseur of science will see the light, the truth, perhaps even God. For Polanyi, this added dimension of the personal commitment to and faith in the scientific enterprise is not ancillary; on the contrary, he says, “the art of knowing has remained unspecifiable at the very heart of science” (Nietzsche ([1901] 1967, 54-55). Instead of solid facts and clear methods of discovery and analysis, we find a messier, personal conviction, reminiscent of religious faith.

It is more appealing to think of Polanyi’s scientists and their passion and love of science, no matter their numbers, than to think about the seven million scientists who constitute the community of scientists in the United States (Occupational Employment Statistics 2017). Academic scientists differ from their commercial counterparts even though both groups are funded by the same government agencies and private interests (Greenberg 2007). Moreover, all scientists, including those working for government agencies—from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Federal Department of Agriculture, whose task is to protect the public from health hazards and regulate unscrupulous corporations—receive the same training and therefore are unlikely to be critical of the cathedrals where they were ordained. Their behavior and personal integrity resemble that of Catholic priests who are loath to fracture the cloistered foundations on which their careers are built, being shielded from external scrutiny. As Daniel Greenberg has aptly written, “true believers are fervent in their faith and uncomfortable with or even hostile to external scrutiny,” encouraging matters of faith to go on unchallenged. This means, Greenberg continues, that “outsiders, at least in tolerant lands, politely refrain from critical inquiry and commentary that might be regarded as disrespectful.” (Greenberg 2001, 2). This polite “refrain” allows science to receive a free pass from those who fund it; a moral duty to fund science is accompanied by the epistemic duty to accept whatever scientists say, as if they are speaking, using the Catholic term, ex-cathedra.

With this theological conceit in mind and its claims to privilege science, I would like to move to the neoliberal conceit, where competition and autonomy are said to undergird economic growth and ensure the growth of knowledge. What informs this parallel conceit is the desire to win support from the public. The scientific community is as likely to use the rhetorical tools of religion as those used by neoliberal champions, deploying any persuasive gambit that would guarantee the widest appeal. With the advent of Big Science (the Cold War of 1945-1989), the conceit of science as the conveyor of truth and defender of the frightened faithful (that Nietzsche decried and Freud analyzed) is amplified. President Eisenhower’s warnings of the military-industrial complex brought to public attention the circumstances that have made science a partner of the state. ²⁵ National security claims allowed corporate and military elites to control the political system already in the Gilded Age (Mills 1956), were amplified during the Cold War, and remain as pronounced today (Kuhner 2014; Lessig 2011; Mazzucato 2014). To use a textbook economic (rather than religious) framework for a moment: the scientific enterprise consists of production (in terms of methods of inquiry and the organization of the scientific community), distribution, and consumption. As we saw above, production growth—in this model, a hallmark of microeconomic theories of capitalism—is essential for progress.

This is old news, ²⁶ at least as old Jean-Francois Lyotard’s ([1979] 1984) “Report on Knowledge”: knowledge production is commodified and depends for support on the state; and this “relationship between economic and State powers” is a threat. ²⁷ Lyotard writes about the repercussions of the transformation of knowledge under conditions of capitalist competition and the globalization of trade (Lyotard [1979] 1984, 6) and presciently noted that knowledge production under competitive regimes would blur “knowledge and ignorance,” and predicted, “as is the case with money,” that this would also blur the difference between what he called “payment knowledge” and “investment knowledge” (Lyotard [1979] 1984). This blurring would affect how knowledge is used, for what purpose, and by whom. The contemporary label of the “knowledge economy” and its power grab (by corporations and the state) were anticipated by Lyotard: “Scientists, technicians, and instruments are purchased not to find truth, but to augment power” (Lyotard [1979] 1984, 46), he wrote in his report. Empirical data are culled with an eye on their financial potential rather than from intellectual curiosity or potential public benefit.

The symbiosis of financial interest and political power is not limited, of course, to Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex; it extends beyond national security concerns to the way both Big Pharma and the university are organized to produce knowledge and extract profit. (Greenberg 2007; Mirowski 2011) For Lyotard (just as for the Frankfurt School), there is a vicious, deliberate cycle of legitimation at play:

this is how legitimation by power takes shape. Power is not only good performativity, but also effective verification and good verdicts. It legitimates science and the law on the basis of their efficiency and legitimates this efficiency on the basis of science and law. (Lyotard [1979]1984, 47)

Instead of appealing to a transcended authority (God or Nature) for legitimacy, the scientific-political-academic enterprise is “self-legitimating.” Few critics in Lyotard’s time imagined the realities of collusion (between the neoliberal state, the military apparatus, and academic researchers) prevalent in the 21st century. ²⁸ Among them is the notable development of the Global Positioning Systems for which American citizens have paid twice (once through taxes to the Department of Defense and a second time through fees to their network carriers), as well as the proliferation of surveillance and artificial intelligence systems whose development seamlessly moves from the private to the public sectors of the economy (Farivar 2018). The most they could have envisioned was the growth of Big Science in the form of the coordination of multiple research centers and the extraordinary funding (primarily by the state) it required (as was the case with the Manhattan Project during World War II and the Human Genome Project of the 1990s). ²⁹

Likewise, science critics could envision what has become a standard claim by students and leaders of the scientific community: that two conditions make scientific progress possible. Though the economic-political-industrial-military-academic complex has grown in size and power (about $476 billion spent on R & D in 2013, according to UNISEF), it still maintains that competition and autonomy are necessary for success. ³⁰ In what follows, I examine each condition and the myths surrounding each, in turn.

3. Competition

Competition is indispensable for growth in market capitalism. Since competition and competence share the same etymology, I propose to consign the social Darwinist variant of competition to a secondary position (Hofstadter [1944] 1992). ³¹ How wonderful it would be if market participants’ motivation to strive for success were anchored in competence rather than in the destructive features of competition at any cost (promoted as “creative destruction” by Joseph Schumpeter, 1942). Competition is said to be the engine that drives capitalist growth and produces an ever-greater accumulation of wealth. When the capitalist marketplace extends to the scientific community ³² and the production of knowledge (Berman 2012, 2014; Brown 2015; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), the ideals of “communism” (in Merton’s sense) are too easily compromised. ³³ Who would want to share their ideas and findings if they must also compete for funding? Who would want to cooperate when playing a zero-sum game? But, are we still competing at all? As most capitalist markets have proven since Karl Marx’s warnings, monopoly tendencies halt competition altogether. And since Big Science has a monopoly on research and development, why are we still praising competition? It would seem that the very notion of competition as applied to the scientific community is nothing but a myth. Perhaps it would be helpful to differentiate competition between and within labs and paradigms.

For Kuhn ([1962] 1970, 8), “Competition between segments of the scientific community is the only historical process that ever actually results in the rejection of one previously accepted theory or in the adoption of another,” and this process ensures progress. It seems that “segments” represent paradigms here, and that paradigms compete in the sense of “competence” (being more reliable in solving puzzles). A similar answer comes from Imre Lakatos (1970, 155) (the Popperian) as well:

The history of science has been and should be a history of competing research programmes (or, if you wish, “paradigms”), but it has not been and must not become a succession of periods of normal science; the sooner competition starts, the better for progress.

In his sense, scientific progress is fueled by competition: the greater the competition between research programs or paradigms, the better are the methodological results (as more hypotheses and theories are tested, falsified, and revised). In this account, scientists within paradigms can still follow their calling (pathos in Polanyi’s sense) and their professional responsibility (ethos in Merton’s sense) while maintaining the neoliberal logos of progress (competing with scientists who work in other paradigms). With this in mind, the tension between collaborating scientists on one level and the competing paradigms on another can be diffused: neoliberal PR can gloss over communist or cooperative behavior and recast everything in terms of competition.

The tension between competition and cooperation is resolved in microeconomic theory by suggesting that within firms there is a great deal of collaboration, while between firms there is a great deal of competition. The scientific community seems to have modeled itself, or at least its presentation to the outside funding world, in these standard economic terms. However, even if this PR campaign convinces the public, and even if the public has faith that indeed healthy competition advances science, might this not encourage unbridled competition at all costs, the kind associated with Schumpeter’s emphasis on “creative destruction”? Might this not lead to short cuts and fraud, falsification of data and misrepresentation of research results rather than to the “destruction” of old techniques to make room for new and improved ones? Defenders of the faith have an answer: competition motivates (incentivizes in contemporary parlance) individual scientists (and their sub-communities) and prevents stagnation. But, as some critics suggest, there are numerous negative impacts of heightened competition. Among them, four stand out: first, there is inefficiency and waste, with “duplication of efforts”; second, there is “greater secrecy” and a decrease in sharing of materials among scientists and groups; third, there are multiple instances in which “sabotage competitors perform biased peer review, and engage in questionable research practices” in order to secure funding; and fourth, vicious competition may steer “some young people away from careers in science” (Fang and Casadevall 2015). If one adds to these the corrupting effects of ideological zeal and corporate funding preferences, the potential for misleading omissions and outright fraud increases substantially. ³⁴ Concerns over fraud in science have a long history, dating back to Charles Babbage in the 1830s (Babbage [1830] 2013). For him, there were four kinds of scientific fraud: “hoaxing” (inventing something), “forging” (recording something that never happened), “trimming” (eliminating outliers), and “cooking” (selective reporting of data). Though Babbage was concerned to bring the British community of scientists to a level of funding and regulation similar to the one enjoyed at the time in Germany, his catalog of fraudulent behavior continues to inform us to this day (Sassower 2015, Ch. 1).

4. Autonomy

The second condition for scientific progress is said to be the unbound autonomy of the scientific community. The chutzpa, though, is to expect an indulgent state and its corporate sponsors to subsidize the scientific community without supervision or regulatory controls. Perhaps the model here is a frightened and alms-offering public that paid priests their dues, monks and nuns their keep, and bought along the way indulgences. The fearful public of today supplements its faith in priests (getting them to heaven) with an insurance policy, one that would make sure they live healthy and long lives. The new priests enjoy their privileged position as the Freudian fathers who love and protect their children, their flock. Looking back to the “gentlemen of science” who subsidized their own research and found it a matter of honor to remain independent, ³⁵ contemporary scientists long for the freedom of a glorious past and imagine unlimited funding without the demands of a watchful state, or what Kuhn ([1962] 1970, 164) freely admits, as “the unparalleled insulation of mature scientific communities from the demands of the laity and of everyday life.” Yet this “insulation” differs structurally and institutionally from the independence enjoyed by the gentlemen of science. In the present, the scientists are as much aware as their sponsors that they are accountable and that their sponsors are responsible to their constituents or shareholders. Here is where state representatives and corporate officers alike hold onto the myth of autonomy. Yet state representatives, unlike corporate officers, must have a different responsibility in questioning this myth (and also the myth of competition). Should the political apparatus suspend its democratic principles (transparency, accountability, majority rule, and open-ended critique) when it gets to the internal workings of the scientific community? ³⁶

The grand narrative of scientific progress in terms of competition (and growth) and autonomy (and success) fits well into the logic of late capitalism (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018). Philosophers of science have traditionally foregrounded the growth of knowledge and minimized the economic context of scientific inquiry. But since the age of Big Science, such an oversight is impossible: science is expensive and requires the allocation of resources only governments and large corporations can afford (most often disbursed in the name of national security, a code-word for warfare and for any government decision that should not be challenged). The financial commitments associated with science (big and small) take on a specific historical turn when state investments (grants) yield private returns (intellectual property rights for individual scientists, academic institutions, and corporations). Perhaps that is why we are so fond of Silicon Valley’s mythology of success stories that start with garages and basements but which actually require raising millions of dollars and depend on an “entrepreneurial state” that provides the infrastructure (Internet, satellites) for such adventures (Mazzucato 2014).

The scientific community perpetuates the myth of autonomy as a way to get what it wants with as little supervision as possible. Given the institutional pressures of government representatives and corporate officers, the scientific community has its own mythology about its prowess and potential genius to ward off interference. If left alone, as the saying goes, the sky is the limit! The expectation to be left alone (freedom from outside pressures) is accompanied by a belief that pursuing intellectual curiosity yields optimal results. Nietzsche already warned us decades ago about this line of argument:

Do you really believe that the sciences would ever have originated and grown if the way had not been prepared by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches whose promises and pretensions first had to create a thirst, a hunger, a taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more had to be promised than could ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all might be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge. ( Nietzsche [1889/1895] 1968, 240; italics in the original)

What is at stake is not simply being duped into believing that “hidden and forbidden powers” could be attained, presumably to fix the disasters of previous technoscientific feats, but that more is always promised than “could ever be fulfilled.” Contemporary technoscientists seem to follow their predecessors, the magicians, alchemists, astrologers, witches, and priests, seducing their benefactors to pay in advance for promised gifts that never materialize. (Think of the debates over Genetically Modified Objects that started with the Lysenko Affair in the Soviet Union in the 1930s.) ³⁷ Perhaps technoscientists, despite their mystifying vocabularies, devotion, and promises of salvation are nothing but geese who lay golden eggs, as Isabelle Stengers suggests. But can the public trust the scientific community and grant it the immunity from scrutiny that no one else who receives public funding enjoys? Perhaps what is required, argues Stengers, is not a greater pressure from state actors and corporate officers but a greater understanding by the public of what science is all about (to better assess the viability of its promises). Following Bruno Latour ([2012] 2013), she promotes “‘public intelligence’ (intelligence publique) of the sciences” as a means by which to bridge the cognitive divide between experts and laypeople (Stengers 2018, 4).

Instead of focusing on the scientific community and the ways in which it garners public support (with its PR apparatus), Latour and Stengers focus on what the public ought to do. If you are worried about the cloistered scientific community, become more engaged, more “intelligent” about science. Ironically, this shift in focus puts the onus back on the public by offering scientists additional protection from scrutiny and absolution from explaining themselves. ³⁸ Scientists, according to this logic, may feel even more shielded from any demands whatsoever: state regulators are always a few steps behind scientific knowledge (recall the Great Recession and the lack of understanding by banking regulators of investment banks’ “derivatives”), corporate sponsors care only about results no matter the methods (think of the business models used by Big Pharma), and the public is left to wonder what is at stake for it. According to Stengers, the scientific goose “thought her eggs were indispensable, and valuable enough to save her from the imperatives of competitive flexibility,” perhaps overplaying her hand, perhaps presuming too much about the value of her contributions, and now she finds herself in a bind. Whether admitting it or not, golden egg–laying scientists, she continues, are trapped in a “symbiosis between science and technical-industrial innovation” that “has now flipped into a straightforward relation of capture” (Stengers 2018, 74). Despite protestations of autonomy, scientists are beholden to funding agencies, be they state or corporate-controlled, as if in captivity.

Autonomy from this perspective undermines the pretense of competition: under conditions of blind support (or captivity) there is no need to vie for attention or even prove that one has a better solution to a Kuhnian puzzle; all that is needed, as Nietzsche already saw, and that generations of priests continue to do, is to over-promise: heaven, afterlife, salvation, transhumanism, or a cure for climate change. Autonomy itself is dispensed with when science “hands back to the State the responsibility for ‘thinking through’ the consequences [of scientific research and development]” (Stengers 2018, 80). Having relinquished the two conditions it claimed necessary for its progress, the scientific community, under the deregulation of the neoliberal state, may need to deploy a different rhetoric (Brown 2015; Mazzucato 2014). While financial capitalism enjoys the fruits of science at relatively low costs, the state is left paying for all the unintended consequences that accompany the application of scientific research (Popper 1957), and the scientific community remains unfazed. The taxpaying public ends up paying (or being abandoned) twice: once by funding technoscientific research and then by funding the cleanup of any unintended consequences. And this payment and abandonment is doubly worrisome as its burdens are unequally distributed: environmental discrimination and outright neglect and suffering are disproportionately levied against the very poor. ³⁹ If some (like Stengers and Latour) are willing to interfere with the demands associated with maintaining the conditions of progress, others remain worried: can we afford (as Kuhn suggests) to “kill the goose that laid the golden egg”? (Kuhn [1962] 1970, 96).

5. Conclusion

We are back to the fear, perhaps terror, experienced by children and adults alike when facing the “forces of nature.” Should we take a chance and ignore our “father[s]”? Who, if not scientists, would protect us? It does not help, of course, that scientists have become what Stengers termed “entrepreneurial strategist[s]” who are “on the lookout for those who might draw golden consequences from what [they have] laid” (Stengers 2018, 116). Just like magicians and priests, they, too, are no longer innocent seekers of truth, but instead self-serving, calculating manipulators who are “destroying [our] home” (Stengers 2018, 117). ⁴⁰ But regardless of their behavior and their duplicity in promising more than they can deliver or asking for protection from public scrutiny they may not deserve, it is up to science critics to demand more of the scientific community.

Traditionally, science studies critics like Latour (1987) had no problem pointing out that the baby (science) was being washed with dirty water; their mission was to clean the sociological messy water that infected the sacred baby. But since the Science Wars of the 1990s (Ross 1996), the baby has been thrown away with the bathwater. When Latour has more recently announced that his mission is “peacemaking” and that “diplomacy” is required of science studies scholars and philosophers when engaging the scientific community (Latour [2012] 2013, 2ff), he seems willing to ignore the dirty water in which the baby is still bathing. He continues the tradition of apologists whose fear of the (Freudian) forces of nature convinced them to have faith in scientific apostles come what may. Even critics, like Stengers, follow a trajectory of polite acquiescence that mollifies rather than critically engages the scientific community. The “connoisseurs”—intelligent and committed public representatives—may help translate the nuances of scientific expertise, but will they truly make the scientific community accountable to the public? ⁴¹ Admittedly, once granted a privileged position, the scientific community will not voluntarily relinquish it. Only a regulatory regime, staffed by civic-minded experts, can bring about the kind of transformation of power relations that will prevent fraud, corruption, and over-promising. This regime, to be sure, must have both political power and public support, moral authority, and social standing. In short, it would have to embody the kind of political responsibility advocated by Theodor Adorno ([1963] 1998), for example, as it applies to scientific matters of policy. It may have to solicit the legal community as well to safeguard against fraud.

In assessing the latest scientific rhetorical moves, the scientific apparatus might sadly turn out to be just as dangerous as the forces of nature from which it was supposed to protect the public. The trick, as Freud ([1928] 1961, 15) foresaw in his The Future of an Illusion, is to be “sure of [its] protection against the dangers one knew.” The menace of scientific progress, though, as he realized with the clouds of World Wars hovering over the European horizon, would seem insurmountable. The closing paragraph of his Civilization and Its Discontents argues that

Men have gained control over the forces of nature to such an extent that with their help they would have no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last man. They know this, and hence comes a large part of their current unrest, their unhappiness and their mood of anxiety. (Freud [1930] 1962, 53)

By 1939, Freud ends his Moses and Monotheism with these words: “We are living in a specially remarkable period. We find to our astonishment that progress has allied itself with barbarism.” ⁴² As the darkness of climate change hovers over our global horizon, the ominous threat of “exterminating one another to the last man” is unfortunately within reach.