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Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military, 1945-1975
In the decades following World War II, American scientists were celebrated for their contributions to social and technological progress. They were also widely criticized for their increasingly close ties to military and governmental power--not only by outside activists but from among the ranks of scientists themselves. Disrupting Science tells the story of how scientists formed new protest organizations that democratized science and made its pursuit more transparent. The book explores how scientists weakened their own authority even as they invented new forms of political action.
Drawing extensively from archival sources and in-depth interviews, Kelly Moore examines the features of American science that made it an attractive target for protesters in the early cold war and Vietnam eras, including scientists' work in military research and activities perceived as environmentally harmful. She describes the intellectual traditions that protesters drew from--liberalism, moral individualism, and the New Left--and traces the rise and influence of scientist-led protest organizations such as Science for the People and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Moore shows how scientist protest activities disrupted basic assumptions about science and the ways scientific knowledge should be produced, and recast scientists' relationships to political and military institutions.
Disrupting Science reveals how the scientific community cumulatively worked to unbind its own scientific authority and change how science and scientists are perceived. In doing so, the book redefines our understanding of social movements and the power of insider-led protest.
Drawing extensively from archival sources and in-depth interviews, Kelly Moore examines the features of American science that made it an attractive target for protesters in the early cold war and Vietnam eras, including scientists' work in military research and activities perceived as environmentally harmful. She describes the intellectual traditions that protesters drew from--liberalism, moral individualism, and the New Left--and traces the rise and influence of scientist-led protest organizations such as Science for the People and the Union of Concerned Scientists. Moore shows how scientist protest activities disrupted basic assumptions about science and the ways scientific knowledge should be produced, and recast scientists' relationships to political and military institutions.
Disrupting Science reveals how the scientific community cumulatively worked to unbind its own scientific authority and change how science and scientists are perceived. In doing so, the book redefines our understanding of social movements and the power of insider-led protest.
- GenresScience
328 pages, Hardcover
First published January 7, 2008
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May 11, 2018
4 stars for content, 3 stars for readability--this was not a light read, it was very much an academic look at the history of science activism in the mid 20th century. But I found it very interesting, especially to think about the applications to the current resurgence of science advocacy/activism happening today.
The book focused on three case studies: the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, a Quaker-led and inspired group that focused on the moral individualist choices scientist should make when it comes to their work; CNI (Committee for Nuclear Information) which focused on being a 'neutral" arbiter of information with regards to nuclear radiation impacts on humans; and Science for the People, a radical advocacy group that focused on dismantling systems of oppression and encouraging science that was for "the people" rather than the systems and institutions in our society. Each were fairly distinct yet built off of each other in their approaches. SSRS (oh yeah, get ready for acronyms, because this book is FULL of them) was never an advocacy group, they were more of a discussion-based group that wanted to provide support for individual scientists as they grappled with the moral choices in their work. I don't know if there's an equivalent group today that's not explicitly religious, it's a very odd group in the realm of American nonprofits. CNI was not an "advocacy" group in the way we might think of today, but they were political in that they did not believe the government was providing accurate information to its citizens so they stepped up to play that role. Science for the People is the most interesting group of the bunch and fits most squarely within the other radical groups that popped up in the late 60s/early 70s like Students for a Democratic Society. Science for the People was heavily decentralized and never very large (none of these groups were ever very big at all), but they used their positions at universities and in scientific societies to disrupt regular scientific practices to push for change.
Which would I like to see more of today? Clearly my bias lies with Science for the People, although they had many flaws. But I wish there was more awareness that especially in this day and age, we need to learn from the lessons of CNI as well—there’s no such thing as a “neutral arbiter of information,” especially in the age of alternative facts.
Some quotations from the book that I found to be particularly enlightening:
Chapter 3, Scientists as Moral Individuals—“It would be sad if the SSRS ever imagined that it had all the answers. With everchanging circumstances the way forward will also change. We must become known for our approach to problems rather than for our answers to them. “ (O. Theodore Benfrey, “The Task Ahead of Us,” 1953)
CNI, Pugwash, the AAAS Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare, and other science groups stood apart from the SSRS in advocating the social responsibility of science, not of scientists. This distinction, though seemingly small, is important for understanding why the original goal of the SSRS—to encourage scientists to take personal responsibility for their work—remained outside the mainstream of new political currents in science between 1957 and 1963. The concept of “science” comprises a range of ideas and activities, including knowledge, the methods by which it is made, the people who make it, the ideals associated with it, and the materials that are used and produced by it. The new liberal thinking situated the responsibility of “science” not in individual choice but rather in the group itself. That does not in any way imply that individual scientists ought to behave in particular ways, only that the institution has a specific role or duty to society. This means that responsibility for some aspect of science—what that means was not clear in the calls for “social responsibility”—could be given to representatives of the collective, or as the Columbia University philosophy professor Charles Frankel remarked in a 1959 debate, to no one at all. “When you talk about collective responsibility,” he said, “you are saying that no one in particular is responsible.” The notion of collective or “social” responsibility also reinforced the idea that scientists were morally unified. The SSRS position, by contrast, left no doubt that scientists differed in their perspectives on the proper relationship between scientists and the military.
Chapter 4: Information and Political Neutrality.
Just as knowledge was packaged as a bit of information divorced from its makers, scientists were treated as conduits of information divorced from their social locations. Individual scientists need not have partisan motivations to participate in CNI’s activities, since action was couched in terms of collective duty rather than individual choice. The idea of duty was not unfamiliar to scientists; it was used as a basis for explaining their participation in the Manhattan Project. Just as in that project scientists had a special task to complete by virtue of their technical skill, so, too, according to CNI, scientists had a special duty to promote democracy, based on a rare but important set of technical skills.
Underlying this role is a particular vision of political decision making, in which the pubic makes decisions on the basis of rational deliberation and facts, rather than ideological or moral preferences. It shares with the liberal view of how political decisions are made the notion that there is such a thing as “the public,” the generic citizenry that is the basis of democratic political practice. Citizens’ decisions, in this view, are filtered upward to representatives, who take these views into account when deciding on various politics. By providing citizens with information and envisioning them as rational actors, CNI challenged the idea that “the masses” were inherently irrational. When public participation is circumvented, according to CNI, democracy is undermined. Information provision could restore democracy by allowing citizens, not just the government and its experts, to participate in decision making based on reason.
Chapter 5: Confronting Liberalism
The divisions between the students and the faculty—and the lack of clarity about exactly what March 4 was about—came into bold relief as a result of the March 4 announcements in Science and the New York Times. The original plan for March 4 was that it would be a day of protest in which students and faculty would stop work to discuss issues of public political concern. The story in Science, however, suggested that organizers had more radical goals by calling the event a one-day “strike,” much to the consternation of some of the faculty. For some of the faculty, a “strike” implied an association with labor and communism,; for those who had lived through the red-baiting of the 1950s, such associations were to be avoided. Taken in a larger context however, the interpretation of the event as a strike by the Times and Science can be seen as one of the many attempts by journalists to understand this novel form of action among scientists and the uncertainty the organizers themselves felt about the meaning of the event. Other journalists, for example, called the event “a research stoppage,” a “form of protest,” a “research strike,” a “practical and symbolic expression of apprehension by scientists,” and a “convocation.”
…
Since few faculty were eager to make the kinds of demands for immediate institutional changes in the relationship between MIT and the military that SACC was calling for, and there was now considerable ambiguity about the nature of the event, faculty who were involved in planning for March 4 decided to form a separated group, called the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS was composed of 48 faculty from many disciplines, but the majority were physicists and engineers. Many of the physicists who were actively involved in the planning for March 4 and who later joined UCS had been involved in the post-World War II political debates about the control of atomic energy and the place of science in public life, and so were not unfamiliar with the process of criticizing the government. Francis Low, a member of UCS, distinguished UCS from SACC by saying that UCS was “willing to go slower. We have the same concerns but it’s a difference of activism and style.” UCS was interested in “how to apply our fantastic technical aptitude to solving our fantastic technical problems—poverty, undernourishment, urban decay, the breakdown of transportation, and environmental pollution.” While SACC and UCS might agree on the problems that needed to be solved, UCS members were more interested in solving existing problems through technical advising than in making fundamental changes in social institutions or the university itself.
Chapter 6: Doing “Science for the People”
In exposing the rifts among scientists and extending the range of moral and political factors that shaped knowledge production and use, Science for the People made it difficult to treat scientific knowledge as distinct from the power relations that produced it. SftP never claimed that there could be no such thing as truth about the natural world. It claimed that in the search for understanding the patterns that structure the natural world, power relationships shape the choice of problems and their interpretation. SftP did not suggest that politics ought to substitute for appeal to the material world and the patterns that scientists had identified in it, but rather that the values and beliefs of scientists, their sponsors, and those who used science ought to be included in debates about the veracity and social value of scientific claims.
The book focused on three case studies: the Society for Social Responsibility in Science, a Quaker-led and inspired group that focused on the moral individualist choices scientist should make when it comes to their work; CNI (Committee for Nuclear Information) which focused on being a 'neutral" arbiter of information with regards to nuclear radiation impacts on humans; and Science for the People, a radical advocacy group that focused on dismantling systems of oppression and encouraging science that was for "the people" rather than the systems and institutions in our society. Each were fairly distinct yet built off of each other in their approaches. SSRS (oh yeah, get ready for acronyms, because this book is FULL of them) was never an advocacy group, they were more of a discussion-based group that wanted to provide support for individual scientists as they grappled with the moral choices in their work. I don't know if there's an equivalent group today that's not explicitly religious, it's a very odd group in the realm of American nonprofits. CNI was not an "advocacy" group in the way we might think of today, but they were political in that they did not believe the government was providing accurate information to its citizens so they stepped up to play that role. Science for the People is the most interesting group of the bunch and fits most squarely within the other radical groups that popped up in the late 60s/early 70s like Students for a Democratic Society. Science for the People was heavily decentralized and never very large (none of these groups were ever very big at all), but they used their positions at universities and in scientific societies to disrupt regular scientific practices to push for change.
Which would I like to see more of today? Clearly my bias lies with Science for the People, although they had many flaws. But I wish there was more awareness that especially in this day and age, we need to learn from the lessons of CNI as well—there’s no such thing as a “neutral arbiter of information,” especially in the age of alternative facts.
Some quotations from the book that I found to be particularly enlightening:
Chapter 3, Scientists as Moral Individuals—“It would be sad if the SSRS ever imagined that it had all the answers. With everchanging circumstances the way forward will also change. We must become known for our approach to problems rather than for our answers to them. “ (O. Theodore Benfrey, “The Task Ahead of Us,” 1953)
CNI, Pugwash, the AAAS Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare, and other science groups stood apart from the SSRS in advocating the social responsibility of science, not of scientists. This distinction, though seemingly small, is important for understanding why the original goal of the SSRS—to encourage scientists to take personal responsibility for their work—remained outside the mainstream of new political currents in science between 1957 and 1963. The concept of “science” comprises a range of ideas and activities, including knowledge, the methods by which it is made, the people who make it, the ideals associated with it, and the materials that are used and produced by it. The new liberal thinking situated the responsibility of “science” not in individual choice but rather in the group itself. That does not in any way imply that individual scientists ought to behave in particular ways, only that the institution has a specific role or duty to society. This means that responsibility for some aspect of science—what that means was not clear in the calls for “social responsibility”—could be given to representatives of the collective, or as the Columbia University philosophy professor Charles Frankel remarked in a 1959 debate, to no one at all. “When you talk about collective responsibility,” he said, “you are saying that no one in particular is responsible.” The notion of collective or “social” responsibility also reinforced the idea that scientists were morally unified. The SSRS position, by contrast, left no doubt that scientists differed in their perspectives on the proper relationship between scientists and the military.
Chapter 4: Information and Political Neutrality.
Just as knowledge was packaged as a bit of information divorced from its makers, scientists were treated as conduits of information divorced from their social locations. Individual scientists need not have partisan motivations to participate in CNI’s activities, since action was couched in terms of collective duty rather than individual choice. The idea of duty was not unfamiliar to scientists; it was used as a basis for explaining their participation in the Manhattan Project. Just as in that project scientists had a special task to complete by virtue of their technical skill, so, too, according to CNI, scientists had a special duty to promote democracy, based on a rare but important set of technical skills.
Underlying this role is a particular vision of political decision making, in which the pubic makes decisions on the basis of rational deliberation and facts, rather than ideological or moral preferences. It shares with the liberal view of how political decisions are made the notion that there is such a thing as “the public,” the generic citizenry that is the basis of democratic political practice. Citizens’ decisions, in this view, are filtered upward to representatives, who take these views into account when deciding on various politics. By providing citizens with information and envisioning them as rational actors, CNI challenged the idea that “the masses” were inherently irrational. When public participation is circumvented, according to CNI, democracy is undermined. Information provision could restore democracy by allowing citizens, not just the government and its experts, to participate in decision making based on reason.
Chapter 5: Confronting Liberalism
The divisions between the students and the faculty—and the lack of clarity about exactly what March 4 was about—came into bold relief as a result of the March 4 announcements in Science and the New York Times. The original plan for March 4 was that it would be a day of protest in which students and faculty would stop work to discuss issues of public political concern. The story in Science, however, suggested that organizers had more radical goals by calling the event a one-day “strike,” much to the consternation of some of the faculty. For some of the faculty, a “strike” implied an association with labor and communism,; for those who had lived through the red-baiting of the 1950s, such associations were to be avoided. Taken in a larger context however, the interpretation of the event as a strike by the Times and Science can be seen as one of the many attempts by journalists to understand this novel form of action among scientists and the uncertainty the organizers themselves felt about the meaning of the event. Other journalists, for example, called the event “a research stoppage,” a “form of protest,” a “research strike,” a “practical and symbolic expression of apprehension by scientists,” and a “convocation.”
…
Since few faculty were eager to make the kinds of demands for immediate institutional changes in the relationship between MIT and the military that SACC was calling for, and there was now considerable ambiguity about the nature of the event, faculty who were involved in planning for March 4 decided to form a separated group, called the Union of Concerned Scientists. UCS was composed of 48 faculty from many disciplines, but the majority were physicists and engineers. Many of the physicists who were actively involved in the planning for March 4 and who later joined UCS had been involved in the post-World War II political debates about the control of atomic energy and the place of science in public life, and so were not unfamiliar with the process of criticizing the government. Francis Low, a member of UCS, distinguished UCS from SACC by saying that UCS was “willing to go slower. We have the same concerns but it’s a difference of activism and style.” UCS was interested in “how to apply our fantastic technical aptitude to solving our fantastic technical problems—poverty, undernourishment, urban decay, the breakdown of transportation, and environmental pollution.” While SACC and UCS might agree on the problems that needed to be solved, UCS members were more interested in solving existing problems through technical advising than in making fundamental changes in social institutions or the university itself.
Chapter 6: Doing “Science for the People”
In exposing the rifts among scientists and extending the range of moral and political factors that shaped knowledge production and use, Science for the People made it difficult to treat scientific knowledge as distinct from the power relations that produced it. SftP never claimed that there could be no such thing as truth about the natural world. It claimed that in the search for understanding the patterns that structure the natural world, power relationships shape the choice of problems and their interpretation. SftP did not suggest that politics ought to substitute for appeal to the material world and the patterns that scientists had identified in it, but rather that the values and beliefs of scientists, their sponsors, and those who used science ought to be included in debates about the veracity and social value of scientific claims.
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