William Gillis - Science as Radicalism

Its no secret that good portion of the left today considers science profoundly uncool. A slight affinity with it persists among a majority, but few asides of scorn by the continental philosophers influential in the contemporary leftist canon see spirited response and sciences most prominent champions remain dated historical figures like Peter Kropotkin and lise Reclus. Indeed theres a lingering whiff of technocratic stodginess and death that the word science has never quite shaken. Those leftists most most associated with it have a tendency to either be authoritarians looking to legitimize near-fascist narratives, or doe-eyed activists enchanted by saccharine visions of self-managed bureaucracies and The Meeting That Never Ends. To a great many who identify as radicals science appears in our lives primarily as a place our various enemies habitually retreat to conjure the authority their shoddy arguments couldnt.

Taken in this light as a sort of nebulous divinity spoken of with explicit capitalization and the occasional flourishing exclamation mark Science! often strikes like a character in the tales we encounter throughout our life, gradually accumulating a jumble of associations and personality traits. Tales that are almost uniform across our society. Everyone knows the high school story of Science! in rough terms: The belief that the entirety of our reality can be divided up into little atoms and facts. Gleaned from numbers, brutally harvested, and then locked into little jars. Except the story goes its never quite capable of successfully reducing us to these accounting sheets; all it succeeds at is calling for xenocidal policies, unleashing catastrophes, and, in its insane pursuit of infinite knowledge (ie domination) over nature, consuming everything and everyone in its wake. Science! is surely just another way of expressing the logic of empire and capitalism. Science! is a religious institution that brokers no alternatives. Science! is nuclear weapons, GMO killer seeds, animal testing, bulldozers, nazi medical experiments, Jurassic Park, and Christopher Columbus. It may have some more anodyne faces, but the affair as a whole is inseparable from destructive hubris and cold inhumanity.

Once youve seen this pattern or narrative its all too easy to fit everything into it.

Chances are you dont directly experience science in your everyday life. But you do encounter its glossy logo incessantly. In the news stories trolls cite against you to prove something about gender roles. In the stickers on giant technological devices. If its not sneering Dawkins fans telling you Science! says theyre right then its the horror tales repeated incessantly by a fearful popular culture. Weve watched thousands of movies moralizing about playing god by seeking understanding, to the point where we just assume such cinematic mistakes are a realistic thing that totally happens. Someone says the Large Hadron Collider could create a blackhole and we partially believe them because like weve seen this movie before and further we immediately leap to our Hollywood notion of a blackhole where it eats the earth (rather than immediately evaporating into hawking radiation). Theres literally a terrorist organization trying to murder graduate students over a fear (grey goo) they admit they dont understand at all. But again, weve seen this movie.

Okay, sure, scientists may occasionally manage to poke their heads through the media wall and point out that pollution is happening or that actual neuroscience doesnt see back patriarchal narratives, but thats clearly just them cleaning up after their colleagues, their own mistakes, their own colonizer logic. So many terrible people cite science as a justification there must be something to it. And who could deny that ozone depletion and deforestation wouldnt have happened in the first place if we werent making pencils and measuring devices for those scientists to scribble down their findings. (Dont talk to us about scale or ridiculous differences in orders of magnitude! Numbers remind us of how much math class sucked and any reference to scale proves its just a matter of degree. And anyway all of industrial society surely depends entirely on all the rest of it! Its a package deal!) Even if Science! has good parts, it surely also has a Dark Side and dare not be let free to its own desires. At best its a tool capable of some good (if tightly enslaved) and much evil (if embraced for its own sake). But if it is just a tool its totally the masters tool. And at worst? At worst Science! is an insane power fantasy of our rulers that has motivated and facilitated the enslavement of the entire world.

Science! is in short accepted on face value. It is taken more or less as what we see called Science! almost everywhere. An unlucky few of us are granted closer experience, stumbling into soul-sucking engineering jobs for companies or academic sweatshops, specializing in what boils down to optimizing a single widget. Science! is on the nametag. Science! is on the diploma. Science! is on our report. Science! is how our paymasters excuse the damage our widget causes in military or economic application. Science! must surely be this.

You can tell I think this is all patent nonsense. A similar intentionally misattributed and surface-deep tale could be told about Anarchy from the newscaster desks to the Hot Topic stickers.

Yet the pull of such narratives are all consuming. And like any good tale, they typically have a wide enough array of moving parts to make any attempt at thorough critique prohibitively involved. Even if you were to examine every association, assumed causation, repeated lie, and misattribution its unlikely someone enraptured by this narrative would be able to hold it all in their attention at the same time. Theyd always feel confident you hadnt addressed enough. And in the face of such complexity, they might as well default on whatever bundle of associations they already have. In any case this narrative is dressed up as a critique of something presently in power what? do you oppose critiques? are you defending those in power?? surely the status quo needs no more defenders!

As with conspiracy theories, if you hold a believers nose to the tricks or holes in their tale theyll sincerely retort that surely every other possible story depends on equivalent slights of hand. Time and time again I hear from hip radicals the same derision with science dressed up as enlightenment: All models are wrong, its just that some can be useful self-deceptions. If everythings equally just a myth, equally ungrounded, or politically suspect, you might as well settle on whatever seems like it would be the most useful story given your psychology and context.

Among other peculiarities I have the dubious distinction of having been raised by a true believer in Christian Science. If youre unfamiliar with the religion think less Scientology than a cranky first-wave feminist sort of Mormonism. Which is mostly just to say a distinctly 19th century American invention with a tenuous Christian genealogy, conservative aesthetics, and some weird twists into philosophical idealism.

Christian Scientists are most notable for their unique response to the problem of suffering in the presence of an omnipotent god: they respond by disbelieving in suffering. Indeed they disbelieve in the entire material world and sometimes even logic or math. Its one of the cutest tricks in the history of religion and philosophy and I feel bears some horrified appreciation. Theres an organized religion in our world with hundreds of thousands of followers founded on an explicit version of immaterialism that would do even George Berkeley proud. If you break your back or are imprisoned by a rapist you can cope by denying that any of that actually exists. The entire material universe in fact is a vicious lie, an error caused by the mistaken thoughts of mortal mind. There is only God and Her love, everything else is a shared delusion, a consensus reality. Thus, if youre in suffering, disassociate. If you face obstacles, work harder at convincing yourself theyre not a problem. If youre privileged, bask in the knowledge that you must be doing something right as a matter of character. Its basically The Secret for 1880s housewives.