[Peace-discuss] Undemocratic science

[C. G. Estabrook]

    Wednesday, May 30, 2007
    Regression on the Left
    David F. Noble

Sometimes the Left is its own worst enemy, particularly when it uses its 
enemy’s tactics to silence internal dissent. In response to recent 
challenges to the current crusade against global warming, this dogmatic 
tendency of the left, here rooted in a naive scientism, has resurfaced 
with a vengeance. In its resolute repudiation of corporate “deniers,” 
the left has allied itself wholeheartedly with the “advocates,” adopting 
a stridency intolerant of doubt or dissent. Those on the left who dare 
to disagree are instantly denounced as deluded or, worse, deniers 
themselves. Perhaps most importantly they are accused (by Justin Podur 
in his response to challenges by Denis Rancourt, David Noble, and 
Alexander Cockburn) of launching “an attack on science,” of adopting an 
“anti-science tone”, and taking “anti-science positions.” George 
Monbiot, admitting his own scientific incompetence, repeatedly derides 
Cockburn for not grounding his dissenting views upon the allegedly 
irrefutable foundation of "peer-reviewed scientific journals," for only 
then, he avers, could we be sure "that they are worth discussing." The 
source of this new orthodoxy is an exaggerated reverence for science, 
which has in fact marked socialism since its inception, when supposed 
scientific verities served as the antidote to religion and 
religion-based power. Among the earliest socialists, for example, the 
followers of atheist Robert Owen, turned their devotion from God to 
steampower: “science was heard and the savage hearts of men were melted; 
the scabs fell from their eyes, a new life thrilled through their veins, 
their apprehensions were enobled, and as science spoke, the multitude 
knelt in love and obedience.” The so-called “scientific socialism” of 
Marxism followed this furrow for over a century. But such primitive 
faith in science has long since been powerfully challenged on the left, 
by fifty years of sustained critical analysis of, and direct 
confrontation with, the social construction and political realities of 
presumedly objective scientific enterprise. It is thus indeed 
remarkable, and alarming, how readily the left regresses into reflexive 
reliance upon its formative substitute religion.

 From the late nineteenth-century on, the professionalizing practice of 
science was increasingly monopolized by a privileged elite and harnessed 
to the pecuniary ends of corporate capitalism, both subverting whatever 
liberatory potential it might ever have had. But periodically there have 
emerged popular challenges to this class-bound institutionalization of 
science. Taking the United States as a prime example, following the 
First World War and throughout the 1930's there was continuing criticism 
of the nefarious military uses of science, the corporate command over 
the agenda of science, and the private monopolization of the patented 
fruits of science. World War Two constituted a pivotal moment for this 
popular challenge, with its unprecedented government-sponsored 
mobilization of the nation's scientific resources for the war effort. 
For the first time, and forever thereafter, the taxpayer became by far 
the major source of funds for scientific endeavor, through a new system 
of government contracts and grants. And, in a democracy, if the taxpayer 
was paying for science, the taxpayer would have to have a degree of 
control over the content and agenda of science. Indeed, corporate and 
scientific leaders had in the past eschewed public support of their 
activities precisely for that reason, out of fear that reliance upon the 
public purse would bring with it public interference and oversight. Now, 
however, the scale of the financial support available made it too good 
to refuse, or ever give up. The problem was what to do about democracy.

During the war the problem was solved through military security. Under 
wartime pressures, the direction of science was vested in a civilian 
agency but dominated by leaders of the elite academic and professional 
institutions with close ties with major corporations. The chairman of 
the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), Vannevar Bush, 
an official of MIT and a director of Raytheon and AT&T, was the 
embodiment of this elite assemblage. Predictably, the lion's share of 
contracts and grants went to the elite private universities and the 
largest corporations, along with patent rights to the most lucrative 
inventions. But by the middle of the war, just when the privileged few 
had begun to plan for the postwar continuation of this largesse, those 
left out of the arrangement and opposed to the wholesale corporate 
subsidy it entailed, had begun strenuously to object, and to propose a 
more egalitarian and democratic peacetime scientific establishment. Led 
by New Deal senator Harley Kilgore they put forth a plan for a postwar 
National Science Foundation that emphasized lay control over science and 
political accountability. It was to be headed by a presidentially 
appointed director advised by a board whose members would include 
citizens representing consumers, labor, and small businesses as well as 
large corporations and scientists. The agency would let contracts to 
firms and universities on an equitable basis and would retain public 
ownership of all patents. Kilgore envisioned the new agency as a 
democratic means to socially responsive science.

This democratic proposal alarmed Bush and his elite academic and 
corporate colleagues who formulated a counter proposal, for National 
Research Foundation (later, also called the National Science 
Foundation). Central to this plan was an agency that guaranteed 
professional rather than lay control over science, was insulated from 
political accountability, and gave its director discretion over the 
awarding of patent ownership. In essence, the Bush agency was designed 
to guarantee public support for scientists – and, indirectly, for the 
corporations they served as well - without public control, a regime of 
science run by scientists and paid for by the taxpayer. The two 
proposals for a postwar agency were debated in Congress for several 
years after the war. Kilgore's bill was backed by President Truman. The 
Bush bill was passed by a Republican-controlled Congress in 1947 but was 
vetoed by Truman, who stated, "the proposed National Science Foundation 
would be divorced from control by the people to an extent that implies a 
distinct lack of faith in democratic processes." In 1950 a compromise 
version of the Bush bill was passed and signed by Truman, now once again 
under (cold)wartime exigencies. The new agency included a 
presidentially-appointed director but a board composed only of 
scientists committed to continuing the comfortable patterns established 
by the OSRD during the war. As a bulwark against democratic oversight 
and lay involvement in the awarding of scientific contracts and grants, 
the agency adopted a new mechanism of exclusion: "peer review." Only 
peers - fellow privileged professionals, whatever their unacknowledged 
ties to commercial enterprise - could be involved in deciding upon the 
merits and agenda of science.

Peer review was a relatively novel concept. Editors of journals had in 
the past, at their own discretion on an ad hoc basis, referred 
manuscripts to anonymous reviewers before publication to aid them in 
their decisions, but this would now become required and routinized into 
standard practice. Peer review certainly had its benefits, such as 
credibility (peer review as PR), convenient credentialling (no need to 
read it if it has been peer reviewed), and consensus-building (through 
mutual back-scratching). But it also had its costs, such as prior 
censorship (by interested parties), and, especially, the coercive 
encouragement of conformity. If peer review served to immunize science 
from democratic scrutiny and intervention, it also imposed a measure of 
like-mindedness upon the scientific community itself, mistakenly 
celebrated as consensus. Invariably, this tended to narrow the scope of 
respectable discourse and, hence, of the scientific imagination, 
inbreeding often entailing a degree of enfeeblement. A safeguard against 
error, it might also eliminate eccentric approaches and illuminating 
mistakes, often the key to significant discovery. And if intended to 
insure that only correct papers were permitted to be published, why then 
the need for the community of science at all? Peer review before 
publication would suffice to guarantee that only the truth prevailed. 
Such perils of peer review were early detected and condemned by the 
physicist Albert Einstein, after his arrival in America. Having 
submitted a co-authored paper to the journal Physical Review, he was 
dismayed to learn that it had bean sent by the editor to an anonymous 
reviewer. "We had sent our manuscript for publication and had not 
authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed," an irate 
Einstein wrote the editor. “On the basis of this incident I prefer to 
publish the paper elsewhere.” Einstein never again contributed to that 
journal. In Germany he had published in a journal edited by Max Planck, 
whose editorial philosophy was “to shun much more the reproach of having 
suppressed strange opinions than of having been too gentle in evaluating 
them.”

Despite its defects, peer review became the hallmark of the exclusive 
scientific establishment (and, eventually - and disastrously - of all of 
academia), and for a short while the hegemony of the elite remained 
relatively secure. But it did not long remain unchallenged. By the late 
1950's growing concerns about the abuse and misuse of science and its 
deleterious effects, both intended and unintended, focused increasing 
attention on the responsibility of scientists, ultimately crystallizing 
into something new: criticism of science itself. Campaigns against the 
atomic and hydrogen bombs, nuclear power, radiation, pesticides and 
other petrochemicals, as well as pollution and environmental 
degradation, thus gave rise to unprecedented scrutiny of scientists 
themselves and, eventually, to critical studies of the historical, 
social, political, and cultural context, and epistemological framework, 
of western science.

In 1962 Rachel Carson, mother of the modern environmental movement, 
published Silent Spring, her landmark expose on the dangers of 
pesticides. Carson's enormously influential book, serialized in the New 
Yorker, directly and courageously challenged the then sacrosanct 
petrochemical industry and the complicit scientific establishment that 
supported it. Carson had no Ph.D. and her work was not peer-reviewed. 
That same year 1962 Thomas Kuhn published his equally influential 
critical study of the history of western science, The Structure of 
Scientific Revolutions. Introducing the concept of scientific "paradigm" 
and "paradigm shift," Kuhn argued that scientific theories were not the 
product of some detached, disinterested community of truth-seekers, but 
of more familiar social and cultural forces and contexts, which tended 
to encourage conformity and discourage dissent and bold departures. 
While Carson's work heightened ecological awareness and propelled the 
environmental movement into popular focus, Kuhn's work, wittingly or 
not, opened the pandora's box on the politics of science, giving rise to 
troublesome questions about supposed truths and paving the way for 
popular challenges to the authority of the expert. The convergence of 
these developments was epitomized by the audacious efforts of “ordinary 
housewife” Lois Gibbs and her neighbors in the Love Canal community of 
upstate New York, who came to their own independent, and correct, 
conclusions about the dangers of the toxic waste dump in their midst, 
rejected the dismissive reports of state and federal scientists and, 
ultimately, after gaining national media attention and taking federal 
authorities hostage, succeeded in their demands for subsidized relocation.

Throughout this period, the left newly informed by ecological and 
feminist sensibilities, belatedly came to understand that the verities 
of science and technology were in fact contingent, like everything else. 
Scholars and activists on the left played a major role in opening up and 
exploring this newly revealed realm of power and ideology. Their efforts 
implicated science in the depredations and deformations of corporate 
capitalism, and, at the same time, disclosed a more expansive and 
emancipatory understanding of the range of scientific possibilities, of 
alternatives, of different kinds of science, of a "science for the 
people." By the late 1970's, however, with the launching of a broad 
corporate counter-offensive against government regulation, in the name 
of competitiveness and marked by a strident reaffirmation of faith in 
science (renamed “innovation”) and the authority of experts, this new 
critical comprehension of the nature of science came under sustained 
attack for being “anti-science.” The corporate agenda and corporate 
propaganda dominated the terrain and the discourse for a decade and a 
half, marginalizing the left and drowning out its new critical voices. 
Ultimately, the corporate message congealed into a single word, which 
hinted at a unified corporate-controlled world: "globalization."

Alas, to the delight of the dialecticians, this unity invariably 
elicited its opposite, the “anti-globalization” or “global justice” 
movement. Erupting worldwide in the wake of the Zapatista rebellion 
against neoliberalism, this new movement took aim against all 
manifestations of the corporate agenda as well as its institutional and 
ideological foundations. Once more the critical voices re-emerged, 
amplified, against the ravages of capitalism, the market, and the 
corporation. And here again science and technology came under critical 
surveillance and challenge, with a particular focus on genetic 
engineering and genetically-modified organisms. As Rachel Carson had 
confronted the petrochemical industry and its scientific penumbra so now 
activists confronted agribusiness and the so-called “life science” 
industry and their academic attendants, exposing the error of their ways 
and, in the process, the politics of science.

In the midst of the corporate globalization movement, the giants of the 
oil and gas industry, fearing a threat to their soaring profits, 
launched their campaign of denial against the spectre of global warming. 
At the height of the anti-globalization movement, other corporate 
players, seeing new profit-making opportunities in the same spectre, 
launched their opposing campaign of advocacy and alarm. (For a fuller 
discussion, see my article "The Corporate Climate Coup.") Meanwhile, in 
the face of mounting repression, a war on terror, corporate cooptation, 
and the need to divert energies into an anti-war movement, the global 
justice movement eroded. With the dissipation of that movement, its 
critical revolutionary voices were once again marginalized, along with 
its radical critique of science. In remarkably short order, debate 
within the left on the issue of climate change became a mere reflection 
of the orchestrated duel between corporate rivals, deniers and 
advocates, shorn of any radical substance of its own. Regressing 
instead, in apparent disarray and desperation, to the false securities 
of its former innocence, the left has all but abandoned the field on its 
own terms, avoiding any confrontation with power. Relying now upon the 
weapons of the left's erstwhile enemies to defend their own witting or 
unwitting complicity, its mainstream mavens, ever protective of their 
respectability astride the corporate wave, condemn and dismiss the 
remnant of critics of science as “anti-science” and disregard dissenting 
arguments on the grounds that they have not been subjected to “peer 
review.” In light of such a dismal display, it is perhaps time for the 
left once again to put science in perspective, and aside, and return to 
the revolution.

Historian David F. Noble teaches at York University in Toronto. His 
latest book is Beyond the Promised Land (2005). Like all of his other 
publications, this article has not been peer-reviewed.