American science has lost its credibility, and if it’s not swiftly restored, America will never be great again. That’s the bracing upshot of major new remarks recently delivered by Michael Kratsios, the White House’s new director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
On his second tour of duty in a Trump administration, deeply and extensively plugged in to the tech industry, Kratsios has the outsized authority and influence needed to deliver such an unflinching message, and it’s clear neither he nor the president is afraid to put it to use.
Nevertheless, Kratsios and the crisis of scientific authority he must contend with inescapably raise a deeper and more uncomfortable underlying issue: What, really, is the difference between trusting the science and trusting in science?
The goal, noted Kratsios, is the successful completion of “three interconnected tasks in pursuit of a golden age of innovation: to maintain American technological leadership; to ensure all Americans enjoy the fruit of transformative advances in science and technology; and, a mission I believe we all share, to revitalize America’s scientific enterprise.”
But for the first time in American history, these goals, which would be familiar to citizens since the dawn of the republic, require, according to Kratsios, a fundamental rejection of what the science industry and discipline have become.
“Blindly trusting in The Science, with a capital T and capital S, is inimical to free inquiry and open debate and is thus the enemy of scientific progress. The beginning of knowledge is the knowledge of ignorance. We seek to know, despite human limitations, and to move upward from mere opinion to the truth. It is convention, dogma, and intellectual fad that resist revision and correction.”
These claims are paradoxically controversial today in many corners of professional science, where many leaders and practitioners have shamelessly capitulated to performative ideological litmus tests and rituals.
But the way in which the COVID debacle radicalized many millions of Americans regardless of partisan label has made it plain that “trusting the science” is more than an ideological mistake that simply goes away if the “wrong” ideology is excised. The absurdities and injustices of the COVID regime struck a pervasive, invasive, and long-lingering blow against the very real and embodied life of vast numbers of American citizens — from tiny children to our elderly, from the healthiest to the most infirm.
So despite the controversy, Kratsios is leading on an issue where a growing majority of Americans already, regardless of ideology, increasingly find themselves.
Nevertheless, Kratsios and the crisis of scientific authority he must contend with inescapably raise a deeper and more uncomfortable underlying issue: What, really, is the difference between trusting the science and trusting in science?
Perhaps nowhere else is trying to simply walk the clock back to the relative golden age of the 1990s more conspicuous than here.
Didn’t we get into this mess of trusting “The Science” as a result of “everyone” agreeing at the turn of the century that the only inarguable source of truth was what the scientific method produced?
Doesn’t the transformation of the art of government into “political science” lead inexorably to the belief not that science must be ideologized, but that “doing science” is the only true ideology?
That the only good, consequential, meaningful, and useful thing for us to do is to “do science” to everything? To apply the scientific method to everything? For science to “eat the world”?
It’s not just a bracing set of questions, it’s a fascinating one, too — because the long-standing modern project to make everything science was rooted even more in modern philosophy than in modern practical sciences like engineering. But since the ‘90s, science driven by intellectual theory has indeed stagnated and regressed into ideological performance, while science driven by technology has gone ahead and eaten the world.
Who needs ideology when you have technology? Who needs philosophy? Tech has made itself into the thing that must be applied to everything, most conspicuously ourselves and one another; algorithms and now AI have caused human behavior within cybernetic systems to become opaque to both the scientific and the philosophic “outside observer.”
We have quickly gone from not being able to account for our technological phenomena in terms of cause and effect to not being able to account for human — or should I say cyborg? — phenomena in those terms.
Some people cheer on this development! And others don’t really care as long as it benefits them, or doesn’t seem to affect them, or simply seems the cost of doing business or the new normal one must find a way to bear.
Surely scientists should care … but can they, like the modern philosophers, actually do anything about the uncanny fact that trusting in science as mankind’s ultimate authority has led to science refuting its own claim to ultimate authority — and to technology seizing the mantle of our new ultimate authority?
What we’ve seen already is that tech occupying these grand heights is a fundamentally spiritual, not ideological, philosophical, or rational phenomenon. Therefore the only people who can assert trustworthy spiritual authority over both people and their machines are people who can do so on a religious basis!
This is very foreign territory for Americans to be in. Indeed it is terrain hard to navigate for people certain that “dogma” is axiomatically bad and that “debate” is axiomatically good. Somehow we will have to find a way to liberate science and scientists both from the constraints of ideology and the constraints of modern philosophy’s misplaced dogma that argument alone produces truth — without letting science vanish along with everything else, including our humanity itself, into a universal black box of inexplicable technology.
Viewed through a dystopian lens, this is a scary and daunting prospect. But isn’t it interesting how much our image and fear of dystopia have come to us from British writers working in the mid to late 20th century period of high modernism, high scientism, high utilitarianism, and high rationalism?
Christians have a unique opportunity at this strange time to weigh in with a powerfully anti-dystopian — yet also anti-utopian — vision of harmony between human beings and their mechanical creations. What we face on the precipice of a new American golden age is the mysterious recognition that no golden age is without its problems — problems that, if the highest focus is on the salvation of souls, we may find it easier to accept and admit of no final solution.
Tech, James poulos zero hour, James poulos
