Abstract
Blinded by Science is divided into two sections. Part I, in effect, presents a sociology of knowledge, engaging the two areas of science that appear in the title of the book. The theme of this engagement is what the authors call a ‘thought style’, that is the mode of thinking they contend characterises the claims made about human beings in these areas of science. Over three chapters, discussion in this part historicises the thought style, providing an account of biological science as part of modern social history; discusses the areas of science in question themselves (that is, their precepts, theories and methods); and presents an argument about the attraction of brain-based explanations of human problems today, considering why efforts to find a biological basis for what is ‘wrong’ with people are so prevalent. Part II builds on these initial chapters, and develops the themes through six chapters that commonly consider the project of ‘fixing real people’; that is, how the thought style discussed works its way through and out in policy initiatives and policy-related research programmes. The developments covered here will be familiar to readers of CSP as, broadly speaking, the project of Early Intervention, and give the book its obvious relevance for us.
This book forms part of an increasingly well-developed critique of Early Intervention in Britain that both attacks the notion that social ills can be solved this way and re-focuses attention on the detrimental effects of this project for privacy and intimate life (see also Gillies et al., 2017; Macvarish, 2016). It adds a particular scope and depth to this work, however, which is in part at least an outcome of the authors’ combination of backgrounds in neuroscience and social work, and their having thought and written together over many years.
Likely least familiar to CSP readers is the discussion in both parts of the book of ‘the science’; what those working in epigenetics and neuroscience do, what the science is predicated on, and how it operates to create the sorts of understandings of contemporary experience associated with it. This discussion is written in a way that is accessible but not dumbed down, and is not crassly ‘anti-science’.
Indeed, the commentary here can be read as a powerful account of how science is threatened when claims about ‘what we know’ (the ‘is’) and ‘what we should do’ (the ‘ought’) run far ahead of what is plausible as far as the former is concerned, and become directly connected to the latter through programmes and policies. Science, as the authors show, becomes as much as anything its antithesis (that is, profoundly unscientific) when it starts to abandon the demand for constant reappraisal, reconsideration and, most of all, loses its insistence on the uncertainty of ‘what we know’. Science, the authors show, can become deeply anti-humanistic when hitched to the ‘ought’. In this book, the authors term this ‘the dark side’. They rightly see darkness in developments including the Named Person Scheme in Scotland, in ‘forced adoption’, and in the very everyday way the experience of the pregnant woman is dominated by messages about the risks of what she ingests, does or feels. In all these instances, ‘what science shows’ has become the justification for making the lives of parents (and ‘pre-parents’) the subject of new levels of monitoring and intervention that can be both anxiety-provoking at best and at worst authoritarian.
A feature through the book is the use of what the authors call ‘exhibits’, that is examples of various sorts used to detail and illustrate the thought style. These include an examination of the diagnostic criteria for autism and ADHD in Part I. In Part II, there is detailed analysis of particular policy documents (including those authored by the MPs Iain Duncan Smith, Graham Allen and Frank Field, which initially made the case for a new drive for Early Intervention). Here the authors organise the discussion in part around a detailed account of the policy documents’ footnotes. This makes for captivating reading, illustrating very clearly one theme of the book overall, which is the gulf between the actual or ‘journal’ science and what has come to be taken as ‘what science says’.
The exhibits examined also include a detailed review of contributions from other academics. There is an important section that considers the highly influential work of the economist James Heckman, and one about the foetal programming hypothesis as initially developed by Barker. Also very striking, when it comes to other academics, are the accounts of instances where the authors became subject to direct and pointedly hostile criticism from colleagues. The arguments of advocates of Early Intervention, these revealing instances suggest, are far too infrequently subject to public exposure and debate, and much more of this is needed.
If readers of CSP have found the arguments made by the authors of this book in this journal and elsewhere thought-provoking, they will find reading this book fills their minds with masses of thoughts and new questions. Those who have not come across Wastell and White’s work previously, but who have any interest in developments in family policy, broadly defined, will be glad if they take the time to read and think about the challenging case made in these pages.