The Degradation of Public Science

How the myths of knowledge have moved from wonder to cynicism

In his 1915 essays titled ‘Travels to Alaska’, naturalist and mountaineer John Muir wrote:

…when we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.

Far less poetically, physicist Lawrence Krauss said in a 2009 lecture on his work ‘A Universe from Nothing’:

“We now know that we are more insignificant than we ever imagined. If you get rid of everything we see, the universe is essentially the same. We constitute a one percent bit of pollution in a universe . . . we are completely irrelevant.”

These two ways of perceiving reality are about as far apart as they could be. Yet they both represent a trajectory that seems to have occured in the way that public sciences have relayed to us what science means as an endeavour. In the first, science is the result of the extraordinary beauty and intelligibility of the universe, in the latter science has become a kind of tool for debunking and belittling, a lens that strips all meaning out of whatever it encounters. Krauss again tweeted in 2017:

Faith, like hope, is a human construct that simply helps us pretend that an indifferent universe actually cares what we like.

This mean cynicism represents a generation of public scientists, from the new atheist camp to many new atheist adjacent figures such as Krauss, across to other public scientists who represent views such the above. In an age of the abandoning of religious belief science in a broad sense has come increasingly to be represented as a tool for denying meaning, even in the more polite forms such as Brian Cox’s explanation that “meaning is local”, in other words we make it up for a bit then it’s gone. Even figures such as Neil Degrasse Tyson easily use science as a lens for sneering at any worldview other than his:

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.… The only people who still call hurricanes “acts of God” are the people who write insurance forms.

Yet for a writer such as Muir, who was raised in Scottish protestantism but had an ambiguous relationship to established religion most of his life, something about reality was intrinsically holy, indeed had the very aspect of revelation.

It is a perhaps a forgotten fact that the development of Western science rests both on figures compelled by this belief, and on a theology that believes the world to be both revealed and intelligible, a belief that remains entirely a belief given there is no reason to suppose our evolutionary apparatus to have any epistemological function whatsoever.

Not only that, but many of our basic reactions to reality such as wonder, awe, our deep aesthetic sense of the sheer beauty of the extravagance of all that is, remain beyond easy explanation. What does it mean that we are compelled towards truth by the beauty of reality? Why on earth would a tool using ape contain such wonder?

One answer is power. If we see science as a gigantic tool for producing technologies, healthcare, etc, its process can be seen as a clear expansion of a cynical survival instinct, but that is not why most people care about science. Most scientists, or those who are worth talking to, care about truth as a value. They believe there is something intrinsically good about the discovery of knowledge of reality, not just as a tool but for its own sake.

Yet science in the public sphere has become a clumsy vehicle with a PR problem. The swinging around of the phrase “follow the science” by about every politician and media figure for the entire of the covid pandemic, even while talking about issues that were both moral, political and ethical, is a demonstration of quite how confused we have become about what exactly ‘science’ is meant to be doing.

Part of the problem is that in the age of “debunking” that many public scientists have engaged in, an age in which meaning itself is entirely excluded from the scientific realm, science has somewhat deflated its own balloon. Since the endeavour of science is borne and nested in a profound set of meanings about what we are doing here, the deflating of these meanings leaves it in somewhat of a complicated place. “Follow the science” seems a strange cry to remember the idea that truth is far more dynamic, moral, and subjective than we have come to see it in its reductive and objective capacity in the realm of the modern scientist.

Yet part of the problem with this for the modern mind is that it involves acknowledging kinds of epistemology that go beyond the objective. Part of the reason Muir’s prose such as that quoted at the start are so compelling is because they involve a kind of poetry, they invoke our subjectivity, exalt the inherent relations between things and their staggering intelligibility, their holiness, majesty, givenness, revelation.

But such religious words invoke a sneer. Perhaps “spiritual” is as big a word as we might use today, perhaps as no more than an acknowledgment of a passing feeling. This great confusion is a reflection of the fact that science, for all of its brilliance, has never provided us with an answer to the basic human question of what we are doing here. If we instead turned to recognize that it was a sense about what our purpose might be that caused us to turn towards science in the first place, we might have a far more useful perspective: truth, beauty, even, dare I say it, love. Since in the public sphere a scientist themself becomes a mouthpiece for the representation of what science means to us, perhaps I could put it no better than Muir once did:

“I am losing precious days. I am degenerating into a machine for making money. I am learning nothing in this trivial world of men. I must break away and get out into the mountains to learn the news”