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“Doubt is our product,” a tobacco executive wrote in a 1969 memo to fellow tobacco executives, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
Democrats, in turn, seemed terrified of offending evangelical swing voters, preferring instead to either out-conservative the conservatives or avoid discussing science and technology altogether.
After the war, this feeling—that our scientific ability had outstripped our moral and ethical development as a society, perhaps as a species—was not limited to physicists.
Since scientists couldn’t be bothered with civics, democracy continued to draw its elected leaders primarily from the humanities,
science came to be seen as a part of “the man”—the corrupt, jingoistic, largely white and male cultural elite about which Eisenhower had warned the nation, dominated and corrupted by business interests too closely aligned with government in a sort of neofascism.
But the science of biocomplexity and ecology—of how the process or tool will affect and be affected by its broader context, from the human body to the environment—lags behind.
Following this rejection, and Sagan’s failure to secure tenure at Harvard, scientists developed a new term: the Sagan effect. One’s popularity with the general public was considered inversely proportional to the quantity and quality of one’s scientific work, a perception that, in Sagan’s case at least, was false. He published, on average, once monthly in peer-reviewed publications over the course of his thirty-nine-year career—a total of five hundred scientific papers. More recent research suggests that scientists who engage the public tend to be better academic performers as well.
This backlash is not related to lower education levels or economic status. On the contrary, according to a 2004 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in the United States, unvaccinated children tend to be white and to have upper-middle-class, college-educated parents who express concerns about the safety of the vaccines.
In both, the dominance of Western white culture, that one great emerging “universal,” became the bogeyman, and in postmodernism it became conflated with science.
Postmodernists (for now, let’s use this term to mean the academics whose fields end in the word “studies,” such as science studies, gender studies, and the like, and their intellectual allies in the philosophy of science, as well as in journalism, politics, and literature) took issue with these claims of science on principle, arguing that they are based on unexamined assumptions of the Western white male-dominated culture that created modern science. In effect, they sought to pull the rug out from under science and objectivity.
Postmodern thinking mistakenly focused on scientists as a group of some particular background rather than on science as a process of ideas, as something anyone can do regardless of their group.
What could that experience be? The only possibility is the student’s membership in a political identity group—racial, gender, sexual orientation, disability—that is different from the teacher’s.
Thus history is no longer the search for what really happened, but rather the victor’s interpretation as seen through the lens of power and oppression, and it bears a cultural and political focus.
Reading the classics is no longer required because they are sexist and racist and not germane to today’s political realities.
They also ignore the plethora of science information that is freely available on the Internet.
They did not purport to be scientific. But journalists and the public didn’t seem to notice that distinction.
the not-unjustified suspicion of government scientists left over from a history of unethical experiments on the public;
skilled science communicators to signal to the audience that this is something different, science-based, more serious.
That’s not to say there are no values in science—there are values in what scientists choose to study, and in how they apply or use the results. There are values implicit in the process, including integrity, honesty, humility, self-examination, and doubt. But the process of science is values-free on the questions under study, as it was designed to be, and that is how it can claim to create objective knowledge that is independent of our values systems.
