Science and politics: how much should the two mix?
It was proof, if proof were needed, that sociological insights are not the unique preserve of academic experts.
At the end of last year I interviewed Dr Michael Bosch, a GP working in suburban Surrey, for an article I was writing on the attitudes of GPs to the upcoming NHS reforms.
Dr Bosch is a member of one of the new GP consortia that will collectively take responsibility for over 70% of the NHS budget by selecting and commissioning local healthcare services from competing providers.
The commissioning process, it seems, can devolve into death by PowerPoint.
Dr Bosch spoke of long hours spent in anonymous meeting rooms as healthcare providers pitched their services in the hope of winning a contract:
In policy-making and commissioning, that’s the call of the day: making big PowerPoint presentations with dodgy data.
And every time you say that it’s dodgy the answer is: ‘Oh yeah, we’ll get better data next time; we’ll get this multi-million pound computer system…’
You want to say to them: ‘Look - this is about choosing whether we commission ten more hip operations or people get their moles removed and you can’t really make those decisions on data.’
Dr. Bosch paused for a second, possibly realising that those last eight words constituted a modern form of heresy. Unperturbed, he pressed on:
This seems to be the paradigm of the 21st century: everything has to be fully evaluated with data. It’s almost anachronous to say that we could do this just by sitting around the table and discussing it.
I was taken aback; this suburban GP had just hit a nail, buried deep in the woodwork of contemporary secular society, square on its head. For Dr Bosch is right: the idea that data – or some other product of science – should set the course for all our actions is the pre-eminent paradigm of the 21st Century.
There’s a word for this, although you won’t hear its proponents pronounce it: scientism – an “excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques” according to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It’s a particularly slippery ideology to engage, not even presenting as an ideology, but rather as a kind of “anti-ideology” which dispenses with all the subjective human judgments of the past and simply promotes action in accordance with the facts.
Hence scientistic arguments are crushingly hard to dispute because they claim to have the evidence on their side. By disagreeing with the arguments you’re also disagreeing with the objectively established facts and if you do that you are, by definition, wrong.
And then comes the final, unbeatable blow: for the proponents of scientism (scientistics? scientismists? sciolists?) belief in the power of science can never be excessive. There is only the material world and the scientific method is the only reliable technique to gain information from it. How can that mode of thought ever be excessive?
Little wonder that scientism has become so all-pervasive.
The Geek Manifesto
Last month, Mark Henderson, the science editor of The Times, popped up on a corner of cyberspace to “canvass your opinions” (read: “plug”) for a forthcoming book which will address this issue. It’ll be called The Geek Manifesto.
“Geek” isn’t meant in a pejorative sense. Henderson, like several other science journalists, has taken to self-describing in the playground argot of 20 years ago. It’s an odd phenomenon, this “rise of the geek” and you could argue that it further distances science and scientists from the rest of culture and doesn’t do either any favours.
You could argue that, but I won’t. Instead, here’s Henderson setting out his stall:
The idea behind the book is fairly simple. The geeks, nerds and dorks of this world are no longer apologising for their slightly obsessive interest in science and critical thinking. Through events such as […] the Science is Vital campaign to protect British science against spending cuts, they’re beginning to gather the confidence to fight for the causes that matter to them. They are creating an emerging political force, and one that is sorely needed.
All of which makes it sound as if science is such a socially disparaged activity that, until recently, its practitioners have lived cowed in apology for their actions. This is clearly untrue and makes me wonder why Henderson would say such a thing. Is he still bearing a cross for the persecution of Galileo?
Galileo Galilei: one of the notable figures of the scientific revolution
He continues:
Science and politics have never got as much out of one another as they could. Science doesn’t always get the support it deserves from politicians [...]. Equally, politics doesn’t draw often enough on the problem-solving power of the scientific method — the best tool yet developed for working out what works.
The idea that politicians should consider scientific research when drafting policy is hardly new, eminently sensible and currently practiced; each UK government department has a Chief Scientific Advisor with an attendant team of civil servants. What Henderson seems to be calling for goes beyond that: a heightened incorporation of science in politics and even a melding of the two disciplines.
But can it really be said that politics doesn’t use science often enough and that is the reason for its frequent failures?
Haven’t the last twenty years in the UK been dominated by supposed “evidence-based policy”? Didn’t Thatcher and Blair both draw on the Nobel prize-winning models of game theory (which revealed that humans are only motivated by self-interest) and remodel the public sector in that image, with targets and incentives? Haven’t politicians already embarked a bizarre ontological project, seeking to quantify everything in the UK from “rural community vibrancy” (1997) to “happiness” (2010) and then rank areas accordingly?
And, taken as a whole, aren’t government policies increasingly guided by “scientific” economic data and models rather than humanistic ethical and moral principles?
Yes, yes, and thrice yes. And so, no – we don’t need any more science in politics. We need more politics in politics.
The death of debate
The rise of scientism and the call for an increased involvement of science in government comes at a peculiar juncture in Western political history.
Previously debate between opposed and often mutually exclusive ideologies was considered as a prerequisite for democracy; in order for people to make a democratic choice, they must be presented with genuine alternatives.
Today there is no visible alternative to the neoliberal ideology espoused across the political “spectrum”. Consequently, politics has been reduced to a scramble for power, bereft of substantive debate.
As the writer and activist Andrew Robinson noted in an essay written in the build-up to the last UK national election:
[T]he main parties have fused into something akin to a single party, indistinguishable on major issues; […] ‘everyone agrees’ that immigration is a bad thing, that public spending needs to be cut, that crime should be smashed with an iron fist, […] that benefits should be conditional on work, that education exists to serve the market, that the private sector should run or at least inspire the management of public services.
With “everyone agreed” on these goals, we can safely divide policies into two categories: those that work, and those that don’t. Science, “the best tool yet developed for working out what works”, will choose the right ones for us.
Thus, scientism is both a symptom of the current one-dimensional political landscape and a cover for it, obscuring our lack of choice on the fundamental issues on which, apparently, “everyone agrees”.
And the thing about those bigger choices, the ones which dictate the direction for society, is that “you can’t really make those decisions based on data”; they are ethical choices, they are human choices, and thus they require something that no amount of data could ever furnish: human judgment and reason.
So scientism may be a symptom of a still greater 21st Century phenomenon: a lack of faith in human reason and a growing belief in an infallible, inhuman, objective rationality which will somehow make our choices for us.
It won’t. We would do well to recall one of modern scientism’s earliest fictive forebears: the enigmatic Bazarov from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. Like them, Bazarov dreamt of a society built on purely scientific principles. He is, however, more often associated with another ideological tradition: nihilism.
Images: all Creative Commons licenses. Houses of Parliament courtesy of Adrian Pingstone (2005)
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Cracking article. Not sure I agree that the role morality has to play in politics is on the wane in favour of ‘objective rationality’, whatever that is. Issues at the forefront of politics at the moment - the ‘Big Society’, student fees, forests, etc - all relate to some notions of justice or fairness however diffuse or diluted. Moral principles still shape our discourse, and the scientific method has had very little impact in reducing that.
Also, the idea that science has, since we’re all apparently neo-liberals now, replaced ideology as the ‘truth’ in politics doesn’t make a lot of sense. The level of state administration required in mass societies (regardless of whether they are communist states or free market economies) still means some elevation of data as the golden nugget of political science and public policy. Isn’t it more a crisis of the whole modern era than a post-Cold War one? Communist and fascist states in the 20th century had enormous state apparatus, an enormous role for data and administration AND ideology. (Beast of an article though!)
Josh,
Thanks for the kind words and I’ll repay the compliment: cracking comment!
You make too many points for me to respond to them fully here but I’ll ggive just 2 knee jerk reactions (and bear in mind that they’re knee jerk):
1. I agree with you that issues that touch on notions of fairness and justice are at the forefront of political debate. Tuition fees and the privatisation of the forests are prime examples and people are against them for moral/ ethical reasons.
But the thing is they’re not portrayed as such by the government who make a kind of weird appeal to “the facts”: we HAVE to do this, our economic situation dictates it. It’s a kind of mauvaise foi on a national scale.
How telling it was that the only time I saw David Cameron get hot under the collar when he launched the NHS reforms was when he was accused (accused!) of acting for ideological reasons. That was simply too much! We’re doing this because the evidence dictates we should! (Although the claim that the NHS reforms are evidence-led has been excellently debunked elsewhere) It really seems that the worst thing a person can do these days is have an ideology…
2. The second para of your comments I like very much. It made me think of a passage in Huxley’s bizarre and terrifying “Ape and Essence” (I’m not saying you’re saying the same thing but your point seems to run obliquely to Huxley’s) which can be read here: http://quotes.dictionary.com/in_the_field_of_politics_the_equivalent_of
Anyhow, many thanks again for the stimulating comments.
James
I think you’ve muddled together two rather different things here: politicians adopting rhetoric from science (‘rational’, ‘evidence-based’ etc.); and them actually applying it. It would come as news to most scientists that the last 20 years has represented a triumph of evidence over ideology in politics - just ask David Nutt.
That’s not to say that scientists think they should be ‘on top’ rather than ‘on tap’. The ‘geek manifesto’ is about encouraging proper use of evidence in politics, but certainly not about replacing political decisions with (pseudo)scientific ones. There is a line to be drawn between what the scientific evidence tells us and what it doesn’t, which still leaves plenty of room for ethics, morals and ideology in politics. But that doesn’t mean we should just throw the evidence out as irrelevant. A good example is climate change: how our society chooses to respond to climate change has many more dimensions than just scientific ones, but should be informed by the scientific evidence on whether, why and how it is happening.
I find it surprising that nine months into the coalition government anyone can still maintain that political parties are interchangeable and ideology has ceased to play a role. But if that’s your view of the UK, it might be worth taking a look at the US.
Hello Martin,
Again, many thanks for your comment. I had hoped to respond fully to all replies on here (it’s an opinion article and I’d hoped it would generate some banter) but as with Josh above, you make too many good points for me to address them all.
I will say that I’m not at all arguing that good scientific evidence “should just be thrown out of the window as irrelevant”. As I say above, the idea that each government department should have a CSA is an “eminently sensible” one.
I also think that the David Nutt case was actually more complicated than just a case of ideology trumping science. But that’s another story…
Many thanks again for your commentary.
James
I wish my blog posts were as good as this one, good work sir. But I agree with my namesake above, there’s a difference between how evidence is used in the scientific sphere and in the political one. Furthermore, in science there often is one correct answer whereas in politics it is much more complicated. I think ideology determines how data/evidence is used by politicians, for example a left-leaning minister might want to look at economic evidence on how to close the rich/poor gap, deciding maybe through subsidies, whereas a right-leaning minister might interpret the same evidence another way with reducing a structural deficit instead. And I am not painting the Tory as a bad guy with that comment as they might truly believe strengthening the economy will lead to a fairer society.
I think evidence should always be taken into account, and has to be when there are limited resources; N.I.C.E.’s decisions can seem brutal but they are - or do I mean were? - the best system for making very tough decisions. If you put emotions into the mix then you’ll never win because everyone’s are different.
Oh also, one department doesn’t have a CSA, the treasury.
Thanks for the response James. I guess what I was arguing against when I talked about evidence being thrown out of the window was your comment that “no – we don’t need any more science in politics.” And I agree that the Nutt case was more complicated - I brought it up as a counterpoint to your portrayal of the last 20 years as being dominated by evidence-based policy.