Between distrust of science and scientism

Distrust of science is an ascendant trend of our times. No, after years of being an obstacle to environmental improvement and health protection has suddenly become a possibly existential threat by impeding progress to control or mitigate climate change and rational discussion of environmental health issues. Rejection of critical probing when the results are inconvenient, a tolerance for “alternative facts,” and an ahistorical and partisan-grounded attitude toward public issues are all manifestations of this trend, which is particularly severe and relevant in our field, the environmental health sciences.

Which would have been preferable to manage climate change: a managed transition to a sustainable economy over a number of years or a last-hour, emergency deployment of uncertain, risky, and planet-changing geoengineering solutions that very well might not work and are guaranteed to have unintended consequences? The choice is being taken away from us as every year of inadequate response brings us closer to a tipping point in the climate crisis, if we are not already there.

The issue of climate change is one clear example, but the much older issue of evolution and creationism shows that rejection of integrating frameworks, while accepting obvious facts, is not a new social trend. There are very many people in the United States who believe, in good conscience, that the fossil record was created within a short time by a higher being and does not reflect the long process of the evolution of species, which is the fundamental integrating principle of modern biology.

Much has been written in these turbulent months on the decline of confidence in the scientific enterprise and in science as a way of knowing (The two are distinct. An analogy is that it is possible to abjure the church while embracing the religion). This crisis of confidence, manifested perhaps above all by the failure to accept climate change as a human-made catastrophe, is perhaps thrown into sharper relief by the success of science and technology in shaping our contemporary world, but the seeds of discontent are ancient and have only been sprouting anew.

There is a context to this trend. There once was a set of ideological pillars that supported modernity: classical liberalism (with its emphasis on individual rights and responsibilities), collective obligation for social improvement, economic and social justice as an aspiration, and acceptance of objective or demonstrable validity in the material world, represented by science. This shift has been most obvious in American federal government policies under the still-new Trump administration, but it extends far beyond North America and Europe; distrust of the science has become a global phenomenon.

It is important for us in science to understand that what some people are referring to as the “war on science” is not just the ascendancy of ill-informed opinion and ignorance, although there is plenty of that. Most of the people who throw doubt on science as a “way of knowing” are smart, and many are even well educated. What we are seeing is a rejection of objective reality, a denial of the idea that the material world operates by rules and interactions that have nothing to do with faith, morals, values, or politics. The guiding idea behind this denial is that science is no more than a way of ordering the world that favors people with technical knowledge and technocratic power, and so the order of the material world as perceived by science can be upended just as any social order can be upended and the social construct revised. If one believes that objective reality is just a matter of opinion, then one can solve a lot of problems by denying verified reality. Just make up your own rules about how the world works and force it on everyone and you will prove yourself right. Of course, there is a downside to this, like being wrong and finding, too late, that rejection of objective reality and science resulted in failure to prevent rampant preventable infectious disease, catastrophic climate change, a filthy environment, dangerous workplaces, and another generation locked in an economy built on last century's technology.

As scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians (the STEM disciplines), and advocates for a better world achievable through STEM, we naturally see the positive in the scientific enterprise (true facts and richer understanding of the material world) and only grudgingly acknowledge the negative (“facts” presented in isolation without context and the attitude that human values are of secondary or no concern). However, we need to face the reality that much of the current dissatisfaction with science is of our own making.

We have a problem in science with overreach (think neurobehavioral profiles of political inclination), oversell (think dietary recommendations), irreproducibility (a particular problem in behavioral sciences), and intemperate speculation (grand theories of everything in physics that capture the public imagination but not the reality).We have pushed onto the public the idea that science is the only acceptable way of knowing and then failed to deliver on matters of conscience, values, and compassion, because science cannot address those things. It can only fulfill or thwart them. The public and its political leadership in recent years have pushed back with doubt, confusion, reluctance, disbelief, and mythologizing. Our response has not always been constructive when we have insisted on technocratic solutions, ignored social complexity, battled with faith, offended those with sincerely held beliefs, and made the case for science mostly as an economic engine for nifty products rather than as a font of creativity with unpredictable benefits.

But there are dangers on the other side as well, and these are not so often discussed.

Scientists today see themselves as defenders of the search for what is demonstrably true in the material world. This is admirable and would be entirely benign if it did not lead too easily to overreach: to the attitude sometimes called “scientism.”

Scientism is the assumption that science and literal objectivity holds all the essential truths needed for managing human behavior and societies, the doctrine behind what is sometimes called “technocracy.” Scientism all too easily eclipses human values because of its apparent, and misleading, aura of certainty. Scientism at its extreme is indifferent to values in the search for objective truth about the material world. Its error is that the scientific enterprise is sometimes misconstrued as a moral system in itself, above values and justified in revealed truth only the scientist can see. Without balance from values and history, scientism tends to favor grand theories applied to reorder human life, such as the Communist “New Man,” which rested on false observations of human behavior and selective interpretations of history as a social science, or eugenics, the darkest chapter in the book of scientism and its abuses.

The defense of assumed truth becomes oppressive when the truth that is assumed is incorrect or incomplete. False beliefs often come wrapped in scientific language and “sciency” (the word comes from comedian Stephen Colbert) explication. The evaluation of science is difficult and allows ample room for mistakes, distortion, and misrepresentation. Therefore, scientism, behind its veneer of objectivity, paradoxically lends itself uncritical acceptance of “sciency” explanations and theories too easily swallowing the latest junk science if it sounds good. Scientism also assumes prerogatives of the elite class or priesthood that makes “scientism-scientific” decisions. Because scientism marginalizes broader social and human values, this social stratification by scientific talent and merit is as dangerous as any other form of elitism and represents a compelling argument for the continued relevance of democracy in a technological age.

Scientists and technologists are not a breed apart. They are motivated by the same incentives as other talented people, varying in the weight given to motivations as people in other fields: honor, ambition, reward, mastery, curiosity, power (over things and people), and only in some fields and sometimes, such as now, wealth and material success. We are different perhaps in only one way, which is that scientists desire and fully expect to be right about truth in a material world that can readily prove them wrong on the facts.

As scientists we need to respect the limits of science. Science is about the material world, not morality or values, with one big exception: science values objective truth.

Science is not value-free, in that it places the highest value on demonstrable truth, in which “demonstrable” means reproducible, literal, accurate, and not falsified. Science and technology empower values by guiding action on things that we feel matter, such as health, decent living conditions, and the proper use of power. But science and technology are not omnipotent. There are things we not only do not know but of which we cannot conceive.

This is more than a defining characteristic of science. It is also a moral compass, a secular lodestone that binds every scientist in the same mission. We in the environmental health sciences may see some of these issues more clearly than others, but they are broad and constant across the scientific enterprise.