Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Tuesday, May 11, 2004

The Sounds of Science

Chris Mooney has a nice piece on ways in which the phrase "sound science" is deployed by social conservatives to promote their "anti-regulatory, pro-industry" agenda. Mooney exposes "sound science" as a rhetorical "term of art" for conservatives, who generally have been extraordinarily successful at articulating mainstream discourse in ways that serve their ends, not just providing pithy arguments that play well in media, but framing the terms of debate in ways that cause the overall tone of public deliberation to drift in a direction that is more congenial to conservative perspectives -- even among those who strictly speaking disagree with them. George Lakoff, for example, has quite a bit to say about this in his book Moral Politics and elsewhere, and the Rockridge Institute and the Breakthrough Institute (among others) are finally working to provide progressive alternatives to the very consolidated conservative rhetorical machineries out there.

Anyway, "sound science" emerges in Mooney's discussion as a powerful shorthand for, or short-circuiting of, argument about the social impact of scientific and technological development -- a phrase in the company of comparable "terms of art" in the conservative polemical playbook, "angry liberal," "pro-life," "it's your money," "tax and spend," "family values," "politically correct," and many others.

The rhetorical forces set in motion by the conservative deployment of the phrase "sound science" seem to operate like this, according to Mooney: "Conservatives... want people to hear 'good science' when they say 'sound science.'" Then, they "equate sound science with absolute certainty regarding a particular problem." "But [since] the answers provided by scientific research are rarely certain and always open to disputation or challenge," this means therefore that "[w]hen conservatives today call for 'sound science,' the evidence suggests that what they really want is to hold a scientific filibuster – and thereby delay political action."

Mooney offers up in evidence the "safe-cigarette" scientists of grotesquely recent memory and today's "climate change denial" scientists, all deeply interested, partisan deployments of unrealistically pristine standards of evidenciary certainty that function as hurdles to reasonable deliberation and regulation that would help protect the relatively weaker from the depredations of the relatively stronger as they play out in technological development as a space of social struggle. I have written elsewhere myself about the Precautionary Principle as one fledgling effort to counter these conservative strategies, and to democratize the public framework for deliberation about risks, costs, and benefits like these.

I read Chris Mooney's blog very regularly to keep up with his take on questions like these, and recommend it highly. By way of concluding this rambling registration of impressions from his Gadflyer article, I want to mention briefly another phrase that Mooney did not bring up in this article but has sometimes used in discussions of this sort of problem: the "politicization of science."

When people decry the politicization of science they often mean to highlight precisely the kinds of dangers Mooney is talking about here -- distorting reasonable scientific standards and practices in the service of unappealing political ends. I want to warn against the use of this particular phrase to express that important insight, however, because I think it ultimately functions as yet another one of these insidious rhetorical "short-circuits" that make discourse drift in pernicious directions.

Inherent in the charge of "politicization" as the "distortion" of science is the fantasy of a true science that is insulated from or indifferent to interested ends in the first place. But as Mooney points out here, "sound science" is ineradicably disputational. Even when science issues out instrumentally powerful descriptions of the world in which reasonable people rightly invest their confidence, these descriptions remain crucially susceptible to revision by still better, still more powerful descriptions.

Defenders of science too readily settle into discussions of this problem for which political ends are figured as a kind of alien infection that has no place in sound science. But it seems to me that much that is good in "sound" science is precisely a consequence of a kind of politicization of scientific practice. Sound science emerges in scientific cultures with stable funding and rigorous oversight and ferocious openness and intelligible standards and all of this looks like "politicization" to me. Scientific types and their admirers (of whom I am definitely one myself!) too easily imagine themselves as apolitical or even anti-political, and discussions of the impact of bad politics on good scientific practice too often reflect this self-image. But what is really wanted to combat the pernicious "politicization" of science is the celebration and defense of its proper politicization as a culture of collaboration, contestation, objectivity, and responsibility to all the stakeholders to its effects.

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