The Read: Andrew Jewett, Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’ve been thinking for a long time about the status of expertise--scientific in particular, but scholarly in general--and about the question of whether our present moment actually represents some kind of break or rupture, some great intensification of skepticism and hostility towards expert knowledge. I’ve got a long rambling essay in progress that I’ve been working on for the Aydelotte Foundation that deals with this theme. So this seemed like an ideal source to help with the question of how deeply rooted our present moment is--and in what soil those roots are set.
Is it what I thought it was?
Sort of? It’s almost entirely in the mold of an older style of intellectual history, so this is about debates between scholars, public intellectuals, writers, etc., through their books and lectures and essays. I’d hoped for something a bit more like Andrew Hartman’s work on the history of culture wars.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
It’s a good guide to some key texts and thinkers that I ought to revisit and a few that I’ve long meant to read. It’ll inform what I’m working on now in useful ways.
It casts a particularly bright light on continuing disputes over the status of science and “scientism” in the academy--it might be a good book to read to shape a dialogue between faculty in the sciences and hard social sciences and faculty in the humanities, most of whom I think are unaware of the deep histories of the tensions between them.
Quotes
“Critics often declare that science eschews considerations of value, in order to blame it for doing so…And most of us, when confronted with either findings or applications that we dislike, demand that the researchers in question demonstrated their complete disinterestedness before we will take them seriously…This cycle must be broken if we are to recognize science for what it truly is: a thoroughly human practice like any other.”
“Science’s champions, like its critics, have often gone to absurd lengths to discredit worldviews they consider harmful. But here--as with religion and the humanities, for that matter--it is important to distinguish between science as a set of practices and institutions and the philosophies that have gone under its name.”
“The ongoing proliferation of federal bureaucracies, staffed by experts, represented another point of reference for those who feared that science had broken free from the chains of public morality and was steadily reshaping society in its own image. By the 1950s, political scientists had reinforced this image of a scientific and largely unaccountable state…”
“Ogburn gained additional notoriety after 1929, when he turned his presidential address to the American Sociological Society into a manifesto for scientific inquiry as a rigorously value-neutral pursuit. To become truly scientific, Ogburn argued, sociologists would need to ruthlessly “crush out emotion” and “taboo our ethics and values” in order to obtain the “pure gold” of reliable, value-free knowledge.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
In the “unfair complaints” department, I can’t help but indulge the thought that I wish this was a different kind of book than it is. It’s not just a matter of my aesthetic preferences, though--I think Jewett leaves himself without the material to uphold his conclusions. As per one of the above quotes, he ends up arguing that “science” as a concept in American public culture, squabbled over by academics, intellectuals, artists and political thinkers, isn’t “science” as a professional or institutional practice. I completely buy that but to really land that point takes exploring where the formal debates in the public sphere do or do not infiltrate or inform practice. That’s a hard project methodologically, and can’t be done across the full temporal span of Jewett’s history--it requires some more microhistorical attention to some case studies of practice, like Gerald Geison’s The Private Science of Louis Pasteur or Deborah Blum’s Love at Goon Park. But that historiography is out there--I couldn’t help but feel at a few junctures that Jewett could have put the high-level intellectual history on hold to dig into the practices and lived experiences of scientists and experts within real institutions just to see where and when (if ever) they cited any of the conceptual terrain of the public debate to justify their work, as motivation for their work, as a tool to command resources for work, and so on.
Unfair complaint #2: I also have my suspicions that the debates that Jewett is tracking were not directly constitutive of wider forms of American common sense or everyday thought about and through science, which are central to our current national conversation about whether or not we are living through some newly antagonistic relationship to scientific or expert knowledge. I suspect that “science” as it was sketched out in the debates and conversations that interest Jewett got into everyday consciousness via other routes--through the way that preachers and priests summarized or bowdlerized those conversations, through articles in Reader’s Digest or Life, through Walt Disney’s Atomic Age scientific futurism and through museum exhibitions. I suspect that the debate between Dr. McCoy and Mr. Spock across three seasons of Star Trek was a more powerful route for that public conversation to make its way into everyday thought (McCoy and Spock are very clearly citations of the history that Jewett recounts). I suspect Dr. Frankenstein (in the movies) and Dr. Benton Quest are more powerful or constitutive representatives of “science” in this sense (anti- and pro-) than anything Jewett cites. There’s a really strong relationship between the formal public culture debates he tracks and popular representations, and tracking that relationship is once again a real methodological challenge as well as something that’s hard to narrate without bloating a book to double or triple its size. But it seems incredibly important to the question of what is going on right now? How deep does the “challenge to scientific authority” really go, and how strongly felt is it along the entirety of its range?
Jewett did reacquaint me with the reasons why positivism has been a bad word in the training of humanistic scholars all the way up to the present--it’s one of those things we all knew to hiss at, like “functionalism”, without really knowing exactly what it was that we were expressing disdain for. There really were people like Ogburn in the 1920s and 1930s who embraced the caricature of science as passionless, emotionless, value-neutral inquiry that would provide a completely final, fixed and relatively simple account of human life and make human life legible to expert-informed political authority, with all the skin-crawling creepiness that vision entailed. He also reminded me that this was one point where postwar American conservatism and mainstream liberalism aligned fairly well in the 1950s and 1960s--a suspicion of “scientism” that was voiced in nearly identical terms. (Jewett cites Russell Kirk and Arthur Schlesinger echoing each other closely on this point, for example.)