Why People Distrust ‘the Science’
By pitting science against nature and human experience, we rob it of its moral power
Our common sense and felt experience contradict too much of what we’re being told by scientific authorities. That’s a problem. Research scientists’ willingness to play along with industry and accept grants to prove the benefits of tobacco or corn syrup doesn’t encourage us to place more trust in them either. If those arguing in favor of vaccination enjoyed more public credibility, for example, more people would see the logic and ethics of taking a minute risk in order to benefit our collective immunity.
Instead, we get a population increasingly distrustful of scientific evidence, whether it’s about the low correlation between vaccines and autism or the high one between human activity and climate change. People fear that science misses the big picture, misrepresents reality to benefit its funders, or demands we follow counterintuitive and disempowering instructions.
The unemployed coal worker doesn’t want to be retrained to build solar panels for a company thousands of miles away, owned by venture capitalists aligned with progressives screaming about climate change. He wants to create value the way his parents and grandparents did, by digging up the local resource right under his feet. Environmentalism feels like a cruel trick or an international conspiracy, and the patronizing tone of those who “know better” doesn’t convince him otherwise.
By disconnecting science from the broader, systemwide realities of nature, human experience, and emotion, we rob it of its moral power. The problem is not that we aren’t investing enough in scientific research or technological answers to our problems, but that we’re looking to science for answers that ultimately require human moral intervention.
When science is used as a defense against nature rather than as a way of engaging more harmoniously with it, we disconnect ourselves from our moral core. We lose connection to the flows of vitality that animate the whole of life. This degrades the social, emotional, and ethical fabric from which we draw our strength, establish our priorities, and initiate positive change.
Just like corporatism, religion, and nationalism, science fell victim to a highly linear conception of the world. Everything is cause and effect, before and after, subject and object. This worked well for Newton and other observers of mechanical phenomena. They understood everything as having a beginning and an end, and the universe itself as a piece of graph paper extended out infinitely in all directions—a background with absolute measure, against which all astronomical and earthly events take place.
Everything in material reality can be isolated and measured against these invented backgrounds, but the backgrounds don’t actually exist. They’re a convenient way for applied scientists to treat different parts and processes of the world as separate and independent. But they’re not. There is no backdrop against which reality happens. An object doesn’t sit anywhere absolute in space; its position is entirely a matter of its relation to every other object out there.
Like a dance where the only space that exists is defined by and between the dancers themselves, everything is happening in relationship to everything else. It’s never over, it’s never irrelevant, it’s never somewhere else.
That’s what forces science into the realm of morality, karma, circularity, and timelessness that prescientific people experienced. There’s ultimately no ground on which a figure exists. It’s all just ground, or all just figure. And humans are an inseparable part.
This was section 78 of the new book Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff, which is being serialized weekly on Medium. Read the previous section here and the following section here.
