List B
My colleague is, I believe, writing a list of books that have not changed his life, so while he is doing that I will go ahead and do the dull boring plodding literal humourless N&C I had in mind, which is partly an adaptation of my own list and partly a reaction to a new one as well as partly a reaction to Norm’s reaction. See how dull I am? Sigh. My colleague is the one who gets to make all the jokes around here, while I just trudge along, saying tedious flat-footed obvious things all the time. It’s so unfair.
Yes sure enough, there’s his list now, and it made me shriek with laughter. You see how unfair that is? I mean, what, was I behind the door when they were passing out the twisted senses of humour? Was I home with a cold that day? Huh? Oh never mind. Fine. I’m used to being dull and boring. Well I would be, wouldn’t I.
Okay that’s enough of that. I had someting terribly important and earnest to say. No I didn’t – I had an urge to go on messing around with the subject, that’s what I had. I felt like revising my list slightly, or making it a list of eleven. I also felt like explaining, and expanding, and urging other people to do a damn list so that Norm can have a shot at falsifying his hypothesis.
For one thing I wanted to note that I ran together the categories of books that changed my thinking, and favorites or best. Very sloppy. I meant, of course, something like: the ten books that did most to change my thinking. Anyway that list isn’t those ten books, at least not as far as I know. It’s just, as I said, some of the books that have changed my thinking quite a lot, but I don’t know how high on the meter they are.
Which raises the question of what we mean by changing our thinking. Jam Today said ‘Most books you read don’t change your mind. They confirm your opinions. That’s why you read them.’ But I see it a little differently. I don’t take ‘change our thinking’ to mean necessarily ‘turned our thinking upside down’. I think it can mean for instance augment our thinking – extend it, enrich it, add to it in some way, without necessarily causing us to have completely different opinions. A book can change our thinking simply by showing us what can be done with writing, for example. That’s a big part of the reason Hazlitt and Keats and Thoreau are on my list.
But the one I decided to add – I meant to have it in the original ten, then changed my mind for some reason, but on futher thought, changed it back again – because he in fact did do something to shape my thinking. I notice it when I read things like for instance this ridiculous article about how terrible science is and what a disaster it’s been – not just in some ways but overall. It may be partly due to number 11 that I think, when people talk that way, ‘Really? Are you sure you mean it? Do you really want to do without supermarkets and industrialized agriculture and transportation and appliances and factory-made clothes and hospitals and medicine? Really? Really? Have you ever tried living that way? Do you have any idea what it’s like? Do you really, honestly, want to grow and raise all your own food, make all your own clothes, have no recourse when you get sick? Are you sure? Or is that all just talk that you don’t actually mean a word of.’
Right, Orwell, obviously. He was good at that. He was good at nailing bullshit, stuff that people were saying because it was the right-on thing at the moment but that they didn’t actually mean. I left him off partly because he’s not always a very good writer, I’ve noticed lately. I think he’s a bit overrated now. His style could be quite tired and flat and even hackneyed. But his way of calling people on their poses has stuck with me for decades. I was addicted to the four-volume Collected Essays Letters Journalism and Shopping Lists or whatever it was called, when I was at university; read it over and over. And it did change my thinking, or perhaps prevent it from being changed too much in a fatuous direction.
So for a treat I’ll give you a little of that absurd article.
It is difficult for those of us steeped in the propaganda barrage of Big Science to even question such social norms as the mass-vaccination of children in the U.S. Mass vaccination of infants — a product of the “advancement” of technology — is such an “obvious” improvement that one rarely questions it any longer…And yet, legitimate alternative researchers are now linking childhood vaccination with a number of serious auto-immune diseases…Even so, it has been known for many years that a huge number of illnesses and deaths are “iatrogenic” casualties; they are caused by modern medicine’s normal “scientific” intervention into the disease and healing processes; more than one hundred thousand people die unnecessarily each year in U.S. hospitals of malnutrition caused by hospital diets, unnecessary pharmacological and medical interventions, and diseases contracted during their stay there. Yet still the Left promotes what can best be described as industrial medicine.
Okay – the question irresistibly arises – how clueless can you get? Has this guy ever heard of tuberculosis? (Orwell certainly had.) Cholera, typhoid, typhus, tetanus, diphtheria, syphilis, gangrene? Is he aware that a mere infection in a superficial cut could kill you before antibiotics? Does he have any idea how many lethal diseases there were kicking around in the world before about 1920? Does he not know the mortality statistics? Does he not wonder why the normal life span got so much longer in much of the world in the past century? Does he have any idea what he’s saying? So. Someone needs to have a little chat with him. Tell him for instance that antibiotics that worked against TB were developed just too late for Orwell. They were available while he was still alive, but his case was so far advanced that they didn’t do him any good. Tell him what a pleasant death Orwell had, then tell him about all the people who didn’t die of TB after 1954. Then let’s hear some more of his nonsense about ‘industrial medicine.’
Wow, classic piece of rhetoric masquerading as analysis, well found. I particularly like the use of industrial psychology as an example of the capitalist presuppositions of science, may as well have called classical economics a science and used that!
“Capitalism’s undialectical science cannot solve the problems its own system has imposed on us partly because it doesn’t want to and, more importantly, because it is incapable of even asking the right questions.”
I went on quite a reference trail trying to find out what claims liek this might actually mean after reading a book by Sandra Harding making claims like that, but never actually found any evidence, only circular references back to the original author.
“Leading fascist scientists understood [the]…inherent politics…for example, physicist Werner Heisenberg…“Uncertainty Principle” around the thesis that “natural science does not simply describe or explain nature. It is part of the interplay between nature and ourselves; it describes nature as exposed to our method of questioning.””
You can always spot this kind of thing because people are always ‘demonstrating’ and ‘showing’ things without any examples or clues being given as to how they went about doing it or what the evidence for these propositions actually is.
But this is even more egregious becaue it calls on the uncertainty principle and fascism in the same breath.
“even genetic engineering and the development of biotechnology …in actuality were environmentally and socially devastating.”
See, this analysis is so true we can speak of things that are obviously (to us) going to happen as examples of why these sorts of things are going to happen.
“as radiation from nuclear power plants, nuclear weapons testing, the mass application of toxic pesticides, and the huge amount of antibiotics in animal feed create today’s epidemics of cancer, AIDS and other immune-compromising syndromes”
AIDS?! Ok, crackpot alert at this point.
“More than 70,000 U.S. workers have been killed on-the-job this past decade”
Quite probably a large proportion in the building industry, just like the UK. Now we’re not even close to having our facts and argument have anything to do with each other.
I could hardly read the article you referred to without screaming. This is about exactly what is wrong with the “left” or what goes for it today. Yes, most of the left – at least the Marxist variety – has the same Enlightenment roots as liberal capitalism, and it has been the demise of the left that they have forgotten it, and have gone with either reactionary green utopias like that of EarthFirst and the deep ecologists, or with postmodern navel-staring.
Perhaps the writer of the article should pay a visit to the many places in the world where people have been liberated from the evils of modernity, electricity, science and modern medicine, to see what paradise they live in.
PM – you’re right of course that once the AIDS epidemic is connected with antibiotics in food, one has left the realm of rationality.
I’m glad a Note was posted about that article because I think it really merited closer attention and discussion. Yes, I found the raging anti-science stuff ridiculous, but rather than just dismissing him, I tried to think about what he said, and I think there were some fascinating points made before he veered off into crazy extrapolation.
Why do the majority of people distrust science? (Or do they?)
Scientific-sounding claims can be co-opted and used against people who are not skeptical enough. Claims can be a powerful tool in the hands of any powerbase. True science is apolitical, but that has never stopped it from being used for political purposes. Darwin did not create nor support so-called ‘Social Darwinism’ but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a real ideological weapon for some time. People don’t instinctively distrust ‘science’ but real scientists have left their work to speak for itself. Unfortunately, there are people willing to interpret it (like they do with the Bible) for their own purposes.
Do you really trust the giant pharmaceutical firms?
Real breakthroughs in vaccinations have saved billions of lives. However, that good is being squandered by corporations. Do you think they just might be making attempts at lucrative first-world inconveniences rather than third-world killers?
The point is that the representatives of actual scientific effort to the vast majority of people make it seem like it is business; business as in motivated for profit. ‘Big Science’ is what he is attacking, not the scientific method. Joe Potato isn’t reading Ernst Mayr interviews, he’s watching a Pfizer ad. Almost all ‘environmental science’ is filtered through one or other propaganda machine- by the time it reaches a citizen it is chock full of bias. Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics.
Science in the West is not value-neutral. As it is practised, it is practised as capitalist. The decisions about who gets money, what money is allocated for, what gets promoted are all based on profit. It still works, of course. We are just far more likely to get Ridalin than Darwin. Science workers have been co-opted. There is nothing in the scientific method that explains where one should apply it, so it has been applied to reinforce the power base and to make money. We need to accept and admit this. People are scared that scientific advances will be unethical, money-grubbing and dangerous because that’s how they’ve been put to use in the past. New DVD players aren’t going to trick us into not recognizing that quality of life is on the decline for the past 30 years.
Secondly, to say that factories are an evil system does not mean proposing returning to a primitive era. Dividing up the worker into a lever-puller or button-masher incapable of producing anything on his own limits his opportunities outside of the corporate world. That’s a fact that almost every worker on the planet is aware and secretly ashamed of. We have our rock-stars and self-employed, sure, but what percentage of us are not ‘wage-slaves’? Once all the family-owned restaurants and oddball bookshops are replaced by chains am I going to be called a luddite for remembering them fondly? Am I to revel in the ‘efficiency’ of Wal-Mart at the cost of the exploitation of its workers, so long as I get cheap stuff? The writer of the article proposes that the Soviet system failed because it embraced the factory model which was inherently flawed. He didn’t say that we needed to give up on having clothes and goods, just that we needed to question the methods we use to produce them. What percentage of our populace is devoted to making food and shelter? 10% maybe? Does that mean we would have to revert to squalor to stop the crazy ride we are on or that I would only have to work 1 day in ten to secure my basic needs? If scientific techniques are being used in the work area, it is sure as hell to maximize profit at any cost rather than minimizing labor/maximizing the human experience. Am I an idealist to say it?
Yeah, it is classic, isn’t it.
Mark, sure, to some of what you say, but that’s not the case he made. His whole point is to go beyond claims about how science is used and attack the content too – the basic ‘Strong Programme’ move.
And as for how it’s used, well, again, if one is going to talk about that, surely it’s more honest not to just ignore the advantages. He talks about iatrogenic diseases and such as if modern medicine had actually caused the premature death rate to go up instead of down – and that’s just ridiculous.
PM, thanks for treating me kindly.
The prickly part is seperating pure science from actual-science-as-practised, or perhaps disinterested science from the interested variety. I do not and cannot blame ‘science’ for ills. It’s like blaming math; a worthless statement. What I meant was : The majority of organizations and people who generally pursue scientific researching and development are having their work affected by capitalistic forces which are steering things with profit-seeking rather than truth-seeking motivations.
Science as a term exists outside of humans and values, of course, but we cannot hide behind terminology.
I also didn’t mean that it was rotten to the core, but I submit that grant-seeking through the NIH depends on political issues.
My claim about environment misrepresentation is about ‘end results’; I’m not talking about the tiny populace who read Nature or even the much-eroded Scientific American. The average person gets as much disinformation as information, and I really think the groups that present it (not the scientists who research it!) always skew the data, or ‘spin it’. Even the left-wing ecological organizations present the data as they wish. Everything reported in the news requires a grain of salt. And I could be quite wrong, but my claim is that I will NEVER get unbiased facts about the environment unless I seek them out and have the capacity follow the data I can get.
Darwin didn’t report to a corporation. They never would have published his work.
Science has had its name dragged through the mud with what has been done with it. Is it any wonder people don’t trust ‘science’ when they hear about how it will help? We can talk about accurate terminology, but the practical definition is what matters to the populace.
And, yes, the article was full of awful, terrifyingly inaccurate portrayals. I don’t want to defend or even associate myself with the author, but there were some good thoughts in there that I hadn’t seen elsewhere, the sort that should end up in a ‘comments’ field.
I’m not sure Darwin’s work was exactly received neutrally by a dispassionate public. Different factions and groups in society invariably have an interest in the results of science and will fight with whatever resources are at their disposal to put their view across.
I find it hard to see that this is anything particularly to do with ‘Science’, it affects politics, religion, whatever in a society. Now in our societies (capitalist) corporations are big players in this marketplace of ideas, but under the Soviet system the government and Party also distorted ans spun scientific results for their own interests.
So I really don’t think that the difficulty for the layman in getting unbiased coverage of an issue, any issue, is a specific point about science.
As for “The majority of organizations and people who generally pursue scientific researching and development are having their work affected by capitalistic forces which are steering things with profit-seeking rather than truth-seeking motivations”
Well I agree that certain science is entirely driven by the profit motive, e.g. pharmaceutical research, but that is a question about how we incentivise science in our society. A large amount of science is obviously going to be done by companies with the intention of making money from the results, R&D if you will. But that is an inevitable result of our market system and doesn’t tel us about science specifically – we could be manufacturing essential goods for people in the third world instead of making cappuccino makers, but we don’t, it doesn’t tell us about the manufacturing process though.
But while the standard of clinical trials for drugs is very poor, to be honest this is more of a symptom of the low standard of clinical research in general, and of our weak drug regulatory systems which allow this to happen. I concede that corporate funded research can sometimes place too great a pressure on scientists (e.g. in the University sector) not to publish results that conflict with the company’s interests, and governments like to fund research which will improve the competetiveess of national industry, but again, this is very much a weakness of Universties and governments allowing these sorts of clauses to be put into these kinds of contracts and the priorities they set for funding.
“I submit that grant-seeking through the NIH depends on political issues.”
What do you mean, ‘depends on political issues’? I’m personally an advocate of the idea that science -should- be guided by political goals. This whole dispassionate seeking after the truth bollocks means that we fund far too much pointless research that is of interest to only a handful of people and helps very few, while global killer diseases are under researched because funding tends to favour sexy new (read untested and probably unreliable) techniques and diversity of topics (oh, we’ve already funded malaria research this round, sorry, no money for you, it can go to the person scanning the brain for the reading-romantic-fiction-on-a-wednesday centre).
If you mean that there are politics at play within science, then that is also true, but true of any field of life. But I don’t see that Politics, i.e. national politics, has a huge influence on funding decisions, apart from obvious things like extra funding for AIDS research, or the current US government’s birth control issues.
I submit that “Science has had its name dragged through the mud with what has been done with it” not because it deserves its name driven through the mud, but because politicians, media commentators and ‘thinkers’ have used the word ‘science’ as a political football, distorting its meaning. When people say ‘science bad’ they think nucelar bombs, ‘science good’ life saving medicine – but this is all about perception, not about science as what it intrinsically is.
I don’t think there’s any doubt that decisions made concerning the funding of research, or the uses to which the result of research is put, are not value-free – but the research itself is, if it follows the methodological safeguards that constitute science. And the whole point of Mitchel Cohen’s article is that science and technology are themselves suffused with value and ideology – hence his reference to Heisenberg. And that’s the point on which I most strongly disagree.
Another point – there’s this Marxist thesis that the ideology of the ruling class tends to be prevalent in any society. To the extent I agree, I think that the relationship is an extremely fluid one – there is definitely no inherent pro-technology, pro-progress ideology in capitalist society. Capitalist society may have very contradictory or even anti-capitalist (but not necessarily left-wing) prevalent ideologies at work in, for example, perceptions about humanity and science.
I also think you shouldn’t be focused too much on corporate funding and corporate science – depending on the politics of any government, government-funded science has as much of a capacity of going bad.
Out on a limb here – I think capitalism as such has been incapable of presenting any coherent, forward-looking perspective on humanity for a long time. We had a short bout of neoliberalism in the 90s, but that proclaimed the end of history rather than it’s continuation, and most of its ideologues – Fukuyama, Soros – now decry capitalism’s woes. The left has, after the fall of the SU but probably quite some time before as well – done no better. So you have a vacuum, which is slowly getting filled with various very reactionary ideologies, but also with a general skepticism towards humankind’s capability of changing it’s own fate for the better, distrust and fear of science and technology, etc. And there is nothing ‘left’ about it – take for instance such a Champion of the Working Class as Prince Charles. I think Mitchel Cohen’s ideology is part and parcel of the establishment one.
The real ‘radicals’ of today are the ones that dare suggest that genetic modification can benefit us, that nanotechnology is absolutely fascinating, that there are universal human values that override particular (especially religious) ones, that we are going into space someday to seek out new life and new civilizations – while not adhering to some rosy cloud cuckoo land vision of capitalism, but still thinking about alternatives. And there are unfortunately much too few of them.
That last paragraph is a good capsule definition of B&W.
Merlijn, beautiful stuff there. Thanks for going out on a limb, because I thought what you said was thought-provoking and accurate. Really, thanks for taking the time and effort to say something.
PM, how about this:
1)In order to pursue science properly, we must do whatever we can to minimize unconscious effects of the environment on our practices. Therefore, we should consider the effects of our current environment and be very aware that our motivations, processes, funding and expectations can and have altered our suppositions. If we refuse to take this into account and do not take measures to minimize it, we could make grave errors. According to Cohen, the founders of the Soviet system were blind to this, and it might have been a key element in their failure.
2) Overall ‘science’ performed in a profit-driven system (and possibly other systems) will support and reinforce that system to the exclusion of others in the absence of a countering force. ‘Science’ will be used as a tool, by the system, to sustain itself.
Tighter and with my own ridiculous meanderings and ax-grindings removed.
Mark
2) By profit-driven system do you mean micro or macro? That is, do you mean the nation or the particular organization a given scientist is working for?
And either way – there always are countering forces of various kinds, surely. Such as a lot of scientists’ passion for the free exchange of knowledge, on both instrumental and intrinsic grounds.
“1)In order to pursue science properly, we must do whatever we can to minimize unconscious effects of the environment on our practices. Therefore, we should consider the effects of our current environment and be very aware that our motivations, processes, funding and expectations can and have altered our suppositions.”
Well guess that’s pretty much the point the author and people like the feminist critics of science are trying to make. The problem I have with it is that I haven’t seen any good evidence that scientists all being white males, or that science is carried out in a capitalist society have fundamentally altered the science itself. It may have altered what areas of science are given prominence, but we’re all agreed on that, but I take it that these authors are trying to make a deeper epistemic point, and also to undermine what is claimed at present as scientific ‘knowledge’ (scare quotes theirs).
Anthropology openly admits that ethnocentrism is a basic human fact, but by being aware of it, they can minimize and counterract it. Perhaps it opens the door to criticism and skepticism of the results of anthropological work, but that just makes what survives better.
Without acceptance of cultural and market systems as valid forces than can alter scientific efforts there is an epistemic problem! A minor one, to be sure, in the harder sciences but measurable in the long term.
Physicists worry about air-friction, the effects of heat on magnetic fields; they also need to worry about ethnocentrism.
Refining is not undermining.
And yes, I mean both micro and macro; the small modifications of an individual’s output can snowball when others utilize that work in their research.
“Physicists worry about air-friction, the effects of heat on magnetic fields; they also need to worry about ethnocentrism.”
Err – no.
Time to read the Sokal Hoax, Mark!
No? I’ll go and re-read all the Sokal links like a good boy. I still think all good scientists need to consider every factor they are aware of, including their own subjectivity.
Einstein on quantum theory: “God does not play dice”. Physicists need to worry about ethnocentrism.
Well okay Mark, that’s reasonable. It’s just that it’s my understanding that once physicists finish their coffee and really start scribbling down those equations – then ethnocentrism is kind of irrelevant. (It’s also my understanding, of course, that I don’t know a damn thing about physics, except that it’s difficult and I don’t know anything about it.) But perhaps you’re talking about the whole thing, including decisions about what to research and so on, which is a different matter.
But I think it is precisely his pint that ethnocentrism affects the content of science. The same point that post-modern, feminist etc critics of science make.
And, as I said before, I have been sympathetic to the position in the past, but always sought out that one thing that seems to remain elusive, any evidence or examples as to how exactly these biases have affected the content of science. I’m still waiting.
I think the Sokal Hoax isn’t the most relevant resource here, perhaps “Higher Superstition” or “A House Built on Sand”.
I think tghis quote from your nonsense files nicely illustrates the piint i’m making:
“When I canvassed various examples I might have gone into to try to make my main point about what has happened to the concept of ideology, I thought of many – too many, too easily. One is at the cutting edge of popular expositions of natural science, Richard Dawkins’ writings on The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Blind Watchmaker (1986). These are widely regarded as among the best writings about the world view that follows from neo-Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Another candidate for illustrating ideology at work is Darwin’s concept of natural selection, the explanatory principle which lies at the heart of biological change, as fundamental as gravity is to physics and affinity is to chemistry (Young, 1985a, ch. 4, 1992). Biological and social theory are mutually constitutive in the concept of social Darwinism, which has had a renaissance in social policy and debates about the economy of nature in these hard times (Young, 1985). There are debates about these issues – especially among advocates of close readings of Darwin’s research materials, an activity which is too often conducted at the expense of assessing the role of broader and deeper determinations (Bohlin, 1991, believes that he is doing close analyses in the service of demonstrating broader and deeper determinations) – but I would still claim that the constitutive role of ideology is well-established for all but the most blinkered textual exegete.”
Now it might be just me, but where exactly does he actually show anything, rather than simply asserting? But perhaps I just don’t understand the rarified intellectual discourse in the academy where “cumulative weight of textured entanglement…makes [the] case. It is not an argument in the ordinary sense.”
I just think that the possibilities of being affected need to be considered, kept in mind, just like any other factor of the environment that might taint the experiment. I don’t hold that all of our previous science is rotten to the core or anything ridiculous like that- that’s where I diverge from feminist theorists (okay, well, I don’t think men and women think differently enough to merit gender being a distinction either. Cultures, political systems, yes, gender, no)
I don’t think the cultural subjectivity is powerful or unconquerable, but it is there.
As for evidence, PM, it is difficult to say. I recall several studies in the last century that seemed to prove blacks were mentally inferior that were just poorly conceived tests by racists who started with the wrong hypothesis: some of them really believed culturally that the inferiority was a fact before they started. You could just call it bad science, because it was, but the people doing it thought they were doing good science, but were unaware that their own suppositions were causing problems. I quoted Einstein earlier because his fixation on a deterministic God prohibited him from making certain advances in quantum physics; he even held back the field some.
Lastly, Freud has gotten such a historic stamp-of-approval in our society one could consider that his defenders have money, can lobby governments, and influence universities that might otherwise allow detractors to make theories.
I do want to be clear that I am talking about things that affect the science process and need to be considered by the scientist, rather than the aftereffects of getting smashed by society for original work. That is different.
Great scientists have always been able to see past some of their cultural blinders.
Yeah – I think there is evidence of bad science in eugenics. And then, ironically, there’s also evidence of more bad science in work that was motivated by the effort to counter eugenics, such as Margaret Mead’s work in Samoa. But then of course anthropology is out on the far edge of what gets to be called science – because there is so much interpretation along with pure data-gathering, and the methodology itself is so liable to bias, error, etc. Or to simply being told a pack of lies, as Mead was.
But the point about Einstein seems reasonable, and I’ve seen other people make it. But I take that to be the coffee-drinking stage, as opposed to the equation-scribbling stage. In stage one, sure, biases make a difference, but in stage two, they don’t – unless mathematics is a lot squishier than I’ve been led to believe…
Right, right. Which is why all scientists should drink Fair Trade coffee because…ah…
The Telegraph on Crick said:
“I realised early on that it is detailed scientific knowledge which makes certain religious beliefs untenable,” he said; and his scientific endeavours thereafter usually touched on problems which had seemed beyond the power of science to explain.
It seems the obituaries are saying that he was able to discover DNA (and other things) because he was an atheist. Of course to us atheists, atheist means ‘not fooled by all that crap’: not a condition, but rather the absence of one.
Perhaps we should all strive to be atheistic aculturals.
I suppose I can now start using my initials like all you cool people.
That’s odd, I not only saw that quotation, I used it in the teaser.
Oh is there a time period for initials? I don’t know, I think PM has always used them. I think that’s his name. PeeEm for short. Actually I was entertaining the possibility that PM and MP were the same person, and ‘arguing’ with each other to fool the rest of us.
Yes, I cribbed from the Telegraph, they cribbed from the ‘postiveatheism’ site (I assume) cribbing from his What Mad Pursuit. There’s even better stuff there for my point: “I have no doubt, as will emerge later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science have played a dominant part in my scientific career”
Yeah, I quoted from the rest of that sentence for Flashback.