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Business — Health — History — Politics — Science

The Fraught Relationship Between Science and Power

,   and  Reproduced with permission
6 min read

Toby Rogers
Toby Rogers has a PhD in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

I would like to start a conversation on the relationship between science and power. By “science” I mean the field of study (trying to figure out how the world works) and the people doing the studying (scientists, and, in an earlier era, priests and philosophers). By “power” I mean the ruling elite and the set of ideas, laws, and structures that allow them to exert control over society. This is just a kernel of an idea that I would like to expand with your help. Here are my initial thoughts:

Science and power have always gone together. It works by a sleight of hand whereby the rulers claim that they are closer to God and their scientific advisors give them legitimacy by being able to predict things in the natural world.

The relationship is fraught. Science needs power to convert ideas into wealth. Power needs science in order to stay in control of the population. But I doubt the two camps like each other very much. They both think of themselves as superior to the other. But one cannot survive without the other so they are stuck in an uneasy marriage throughout history. They are united though in their contempt for the peasants.

Grossly oversimplifying here:

The rulers of ancient Egypt, the Aztecs, Incas, and Mayans drew their power from an alliance with astronomers. [Scientific focus: the heavens, but really, the growing seasons.]

The Roman Empire from the engineers. [Scientific focus: the earth.]

The Middle Ages witnessed an alliance between the ruling class and allopathic medicine with the help of the church. [Scientific focus: the body.]

The British and US empires depended on the mastery of shipbuilding, gunpowder, metals (for cannons and steam engines), and then later, electricity, chemistry, and physics. [Scientific focus: the elements.]

The emerging biowarfare empire is an alliance between the ruling class and the fields of genetics/virology. [Scientific focus: RNA and DNA.]

But then there’s a twist. In every era, the scientists who are in league with the ruling elite become “The Science” (the official story about how the world works). But good science almost never comes from the insiders. The biggest breakthroughs in the history of science usually come from the outsiders, rebels, and iconoclasts. So there’s a paradox here in that proper science often dies when it makes an unholy alliance with the state.

Even more important, in every era, ordinary people often have a better understanding of science and medicine than the official gatekeepers. So, working through the examples from above:

Peasant farmers in ancient Egypt and what is now Central and South America surely knew the heavens quite well (they stared at them every night) and also could predict the seasons as well as any astronomer (based on their first-hand knowledge of the land, soil, and plants). While giant stone pyramids are impressive political achievements, people usually knew the movement of the sun from watching sunrise and sunset as measured against landmarks on the horizon.

Others will know the Roman context better than I do. And maybe it doesn’t fit the model that I’m describing? But if, for example, the Romans had better ways of using the insights of ordinary people in building roads and aqueducts please let me know in the comments.

In the Middle Ages, natural (folk) ways of healing were vastly superior to official medical practices. This is why the common people sought out natural healers and midwives. The popularity and efficacy of these healers posed a threat to existing power structures and so throughout the Middle Ages, natural healers were called witches and burned at the stake.

The great breakthrough of the British and US empires was the development of liberalism that created a new class of people, bourgeois entrepreneurs, who fueled technological innovation in shipbuilding, munitions, metals, and then later, electricity, chemistry, and physics. Liberalism and empire also created leisure time (for the entrepreneurial class) and economic rewards for innovation (for white men).

In our era, parents have always known better than most doctors about how to care for their children based on the intuitive bonds built from shared genetics, the power of intuition, and the fact that they spend all of their time together.

So, in every era, there is “The Science” (or whatever it was called at that time). But “The Science” is rarely any good. As a result “The Science” is always in a battle against wisdom from below, indigenous knowledge, and independent scientific efforts that are usually better (more predictive) than the official narrative.

But even here there is a twist. Stalin took the idea of “science from below” too far with the promotion of Ukrainian peasant farmer Trofim Lysenko to the highest ranks of Soviet science and millions of people starved to death because his ideas were over-applied. So that might suggest that anytime science becomes enmeshed with the state – whether that is science from above or science from below – things go sideways and the result is a pause or regression in scientific development. Lysenko’s theories would not have survived long in the free market of ideas – it was only the backing of the Soviet state that turned them into a 25-year societal nightmare.

Now we have a new problem which is that the biowarfare industrial complex has not just merged with the state but overthrown it in a coup d’état. That’s what Covid is. Today “The Science” is performing ridiculous junk science and engaging in very profitable genocide throughout the developed world. So “The Science” has become totalitarian and hostile to science and life itself. That’s quite a turn of events in the long relationship between science and power!

So if one were designing a syllabus for a course on “Science and Power” what should be on it? What books, articles, podcasts, films, and videos provide the most insight into the relationship between science and power? (I know there’s an entire field of Science, Technology, and Society studies. Yet in my experience too often they pull their punches and are deferential to science in ways that distort reality and leave society vulnerable to the predations of corrupt scientists and doctors.)

Here are the resources that I have gathered so far:

Scientists and doctors arguing about the scientific process:

Rebels and iconoclasts who follow the money:

Court cases that reveal the relationship between corrupt science and power:

Alternative ways of seeing and knowing:

Some historians, anthropologists, and sociologists weigh in:

There are some wonderful resources on these lists and yet I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of this topic. For example, I don’t have much information on the relationship between science and power in antiquity. Furthermore, military spending often drives scientific and medical advancement yet I have no resources on that topic.

What books, articles, podcasts, films, and videos would you add to these lists to illuminate the complicated relationship between science and power?

This article was republished by the Brownstone Institute from the author’s Substack.


Published under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

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