Academia and Scientific Pomp
Cicero once commented that it was impossible for any two members of the College of Augurs to pass one another in the street without bursting into laughter. Any well educated member of the academic elite - so long as their self-aggrandising megalomania is kept in check - realizes that the same can be said of ’scientists’. In many ways scientists are becoming the priestly class in our society supported by a complicated scaffolding of esoteric knowledge. The primary function of the scientific cultural institutions we are taught to revere is not to disseminate reality to the masses, but rather to comfort the uneducated. Upon joining the academic world as a researcher one of the first things learned is that the intellectual giants are just people who haven’t a got a clue about anything even in their own field. The difficulty becomes admitting that because we are enculturated in such a way that we rely on the institutions we create in order to make sense of our world. Here I’m referring to my own culture because trying to assign that same ‘need to know’ about the world to other groups opens a whole other can of theoretical worms. In many ways the institutions of science have replaced the ‘churches’ and organized religions although many would be infuriated by the idea. It is plain to see if you take a look at even the last five years of publication in any academic journal. Ideas that were seen as foundational and well constructed have been assaulted and turned over. Apparently, depending on who you ask, the human genome consists of only 1/3 of the number of genes originally predicted before the mapping began over a decade ago. One of the results is that the function and operation of ‘genes’ has become increasingly difficult to pinpoint. Even an agreed upon definition of the term is impossible to find and it has only become a way of speaking to the public (the uneducated masses seeking comfort) about ’scientific’ discoveries. Only a few months ago the BBC ran a segment on obesity and a ‘fat gene’ was referred to. It takes no fewer than 3 or 4 alleles to make up your eye-colour. How many do you suppose it takes to affect your body weight? Even the once deterministic view of genetics made popular in the 80s has been abandoned by prominent science, but the wholly incorrect view of genes being ‘responsible’ for anything is held onto like a safety blanket by the public. If the venerable ’scientists’ can’t define it, what intellectual right do laypeople have to use it in common discussion? As was mentioned previously, chemotherapy is used as a treatment for something thought of as a flaw in a cell’s genetic sequence that tells it to stop dividing. There is no guarantee whatsoever that this is the only or even the primary cause for cancer. The line between genetic and environmental influence is continuing to blur as genetic research carries on. So, if we can’t define gene and we don’t really know what cancer is - why it starts, exactly how to stop it, etc. - and the treatments we use are only effective a % of the time (another easy to understand example of the intellectual fallacy - if we actually understood it, we should be able stop it 100% of the time) then what does that say about the ‘ivory tower’. Once you’re there you realize that the people in it - the ’scientists’ - really are like Cicero’s members of the College of Augers. The majority of the population is akin to children asking what the stars are made of. The child doesn’t care what the answer is so long as it is delivered with authority and provides some comfort that their world is understood. If we can understand it, we can control it. Therefore, in many ways science has become the place to turn for those who refuse to believe in the divine or don’t want to participate in organized religions, but still desperately want to sleep at night believing in something. The word ‘belief’ is, itself, a historically specific Christian development suitable for another discussion. So, ’scientists’ throw on the white lab coat, speak with an authoritative voice, and whisper into the ears of the populace that they are safe and ‘mommy and daddy love them’.
Posted in Everything Else, Philosophy, Science |
March 30th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
You can believe in the answers and still recognize the fact that each ‘answer’ can only inevitably arouse several more questions. You can have faith in the answers you do find without the need to cling to them desperately when a better one comes along without being foolish, for often even the wrong answers point us in the right directions. You can believe in science without needing it to give you ‘truths’, and only enjoy the possibilities it presents. And you can study science if only for the wonder it invokes, knowing full well that the truth today is only a stepping stone to the truth of tomorrow. You can enjoy science without placing blind faith in it as those who follow religions seem to do, and so for me, science is hardly comparable to religion, a force used to blind the masses to the suffering of their existence. Science is in its infancy and yet we’ve been to the moon, we talk over vast distances through the air itself, we access information stored around the world with a few strokes of our fingers. That already we can do so much only makes me all the more amazed. I do agree we know so little right now, but if we’ve done all this with so little, just imagine, in time, what we will do when we know even more of the truth. And you know, I love science, and I love it all the more because it shows me just how little this world is understood.
March 30th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
It’s not that there is anything wrong with science. It is the institutionalization of science that is the problem. Using terms like ‘belief’ and ‘truth’ underscores the argument that science is made religious and the process philosophical. If you ask nearly anyone in North America why they are a certain way you will almost inevitably get a response with the word ‘gene’ in it. However, for that person - and indeed for the scientists that study genetics - might as well refer to faeries and spirits. Without a real understanding of what is implied by saying that something is ‘genetic’ or that gravity is a ‘force’ the average person is imply substituting the language of religion with the sacred language of science. In that way, science is institutionalized as a religious system (in the anthropological sense of the term religion with all debates about the definition left for another time). Therefore, the argument stands that for the average population the words used by scientists might as well be those used by priests and ‘faith’ in the institution is taught to us at a young age. The ‘church’ of science is alive and well and it will not likely hand over its control any time soon. Terminology like ’scientific heresy’ has been used to reproach scholars who criticize scientific hegemony making the institutions themselves eerily similar to the Medieval Church (from which much of the structure of scientific institutions replicates its form).
March 30th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Your opening remark is troubling.
While your post clearly is about the social and cultural pedestal that we have place “science” upon, some of your remarks suggest an attitude that all scientific research is futile. An attitude I know you don’t actually subscribe to…
What is radiation? How did we wipe out small pox? How do these new-fangled computer boxes work? There are some questions we do have answers to.
There are some, however that we don’t, and we won’t. If you’re looking God here, you won’t find him. Why are the laws that govern the universe seemingly predisposed to giving rise to life? We don’t bloody know. Weak/Strong anthropic principal? Fuck off.
But I’m getting off topic here.
My point is that while there is too much “faith” placed in the white lab coat, thats no reason to belittle the machine of scientific progress.
And in closing, ninjas. :P
March 30th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
I would only point to a few of a large body of historic examples where people have guided the outcome of some equation without actually understanding exactly how or why it functions (and then only functions a % of the time). Atomic power has long been explored and is still not completely understood. We can cause a nuclear chain reaction with devastating consequences, but recent developments in unified theories and submolecular physics indicate that there are far more complicated (indeed complex) processes at work. The discovery of antibiotics was followed by many generations of scientists trying to understand how they function and we still do not completely understand it. That is a poignant example because the discovery was made and the treatment applied long before serious and rigorous investigations were pursued. Professional computer programmers create software that does unexpected things and does not always function. If a computer program that never changes can function differently even some infinitely small % of the time then the creator does not completely understand the system they have engineered. So, simply because we can cause something to happen in a somewhat predictable way, there is no reason to think we have actually understood the system. That is what is meant by scientists having no real answers. They have educated hypotheses supported sometimes by probabalistic studies.
March 30th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Semantics :P