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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The recent coronavirus pandemic proved that the time-old notion seems now truer than ever: that science and politics represent a clash of cultures. But why should scientists simply “stick to the facts” and leave politics to the politicians when the world seems to be falling down around us?
Drawing on his experience as both a research scientist and an expert advisor at the centre of government, Ian Boyd takes an empirical approach to examining the current state of the relationship between science and politics. He argues that the way politicians and scientists work together today results in a science that is on tap for ideological (mis)use, and governance that fails to serve humanity’s most fundamental needs. Justice is unlikely—perhaps impossible—while science is not a fully integrated part of the systems for collective decision-making across society.
In Science in Politics, Boyd presents an impassioned argument for a series of conceptual and structural innovations that could resolve this fundamental tension, revealing how a radical intermingling of these (apparently contradictory) professions might provide the world with better politics and better science.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Notes
Introduction: The scientific predicament
Notes
Part 1: A troubled marriage
Part 1 Text
1 Beyond two cultures
Notes
2 The anatomy of a troubled marriage
Notes
3 Inside the politics factory
Notes
4 Rationalizing the politics factory
Notes
5 Gateways to the politics factory
Notes
6 Shoring up the marriage
Notes
Part 2: Science corrupted
Part 2 Text
7 The subjective by-pass
Notes
8 Products of the politics factory – evidence: quod erat demonstrandum
Notes
9 ‘What works’ in the politics factory?
Notes
10 Following the crowd
Notes
11 Trust in experts?
Notes
12 Redefining quality
Notes
Part 3: Taming the beast
Part 3 Text
13 Playing the paradigm game
Notes
14 Taming wickedness
Notes
15 Adaptive policy testing: making policy into science
Notes
16 More than just widgets
Notes
17 Fixing the marriage
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Begin Reading
Index
End User License Agreement
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Science and Politics
IAN BOYD
polity
Copyright © Sir Ian Boyd 2025
The right of Sir Ian Boyd to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Extract from SCIENCE AND GOVERNMENT by C.P. Snow, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1960, 1961 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6159-9
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024943112
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Preface
Not far from my home in Scotland there are enduring reminders of why we have science. These take the form of standing stones, set up over 4,000 years ago. Their precise function is still debated, but they seem to be mainly ritual or sidereal markers where people gathered to feast, socialize and recognize the rhythms of life. Archaeologists can show from the material cultures of the people who raised these stones how they used products from Nature to support daily existence as well as to build these monumental structures.
These people obviously researched their surroundings and learned how to use them, but there was much they did not understand about what they experienced, like the mineral crystals they saw in the rocks they hewed, the vagaries of the weather, the stars in the sky, the definition of life, the coming and going of the seasons, the infliction of disease and the constant rolling forward of time. This void in their understanding was filled by imagination and belief, a mixture of empirically founded theory and hocus-pocus. Even if their standing stones started as mainly functional objects for marking time, they accrued what, borrowing from evolutionary theory, we might call exaptive meaning, like a structure acquiring a function different to that for which it originally evolved.1 We can now only guess as to what their theories and hocus-pocus amounted to because, without philosophy, the people of the stones struggled to turn their theories and hocus-pocus into structured, cumulative knowledge stored in ways which made it timeless.
About 2,500 years ago the first known philosophers started to organize and make sense of the hocus-pocus, but by then groups of people who had vested interests in sustaining and exaggerating this view of the world were in control of politics. These princes,2 shamans and priests – whom I will collectively call charlatans – held power over beliefs and it was not in their interests to have those beliefs challenged. Ritual was invented as a way to reinforce the hocus-pocus and people were incentivized to believe that their beliefs were all that mattered. Whether this was achieved by tradition or by force, it was an assault on their liberty.
This assault continued for about another 2,000 years until the inventions of science finally allowed other forms of knowledge to escape the controls of the religious and military thought police. New knowledge became sealed in a form which could be both distributed widely and understood by many. This emancipation was powered by a technical and philosophical revolution which continues to co-evolve to the present. It defined the conditions needed to distinguish truth from hocus-pocus, and on its heels came an exponential rise in the enrichment of our knowledge about the world we inhabit, about us as animals within this world, and about our world within a wider universe – about Nature. It began to displace hocus-pocus as the font of all knowledge. This displacement continues, but the charlatans are still among us spouting their nonsense, subverting knowledge and, as a result, assaulting liberty, right here, right now.
In the present, the charlatans exist by other names, but they still dominate politics within a vastly more complex society through the application of deceptive, one-size-fits-all ideology and ersatz rituals within a variety of temples, some actual, some virtual, all designed to strip people of their free will. Their vested interests lead them to block or subvert our search for the truths around us, and this continues to cause us to make decisions which are misaligned with Nature as we know it through both sensed experience and science.3 We are sustained by the resources of Nature, as were the people of the Neolithic, and the longer this misalignment goes on, the more painful eventual realignment will become. Continued misalignment results in the progressive magnification of unfairness and it inflicts injustice on more and more people. Scientific knowledge stops this misalignment and, as a result, it is a pathway to justice, a pathway to being treated in a fair and equitable way. Science is not itself representative of justice, but understanding how the natural world functions and how people fit in to it, which is something science has the capacity to address, is a prerequisite for a just society.
The story told in this book reflects a personal journey which began in September 2012 when I became one of the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisers. It was at that point that I began studying the ways in which science is used within government, where it comes into intimate contact with politics, ritual and hocus-pocus. It gave me an opportunity to experiment directly with different methods of delivering complicated scientific information to people at the heart of political decision-making, some of whom might be characterized as today’s charlatans. Most of them were honest people, doing extremely demanding jobs to the best of their abilities. In some cases they were highly intelligent and capable, but most were struggling with the burden of their office. Many had probably entered professional politics to try to make a difference and to do some good, for broadly the same reasons as I had become a scientist. But even if we are all to an extent products of a system which rules us, in their case this assaulted their liberty, often resulting in narrow thinking, dubious ethics and prejudice. Some were ruled entirely by myrmidons from the ‘party’ who held power without accountability. Very few ever managed to break out of these constraints, which sometimes drove pathological behaviours like bullying. Most cabinet ministers would have struggled to get on the shortlist to be selected to run a large business and yet they were often thrown into equivalent situations in government. The worst of them were those who failed to recognize their own limitations. Rather than being critical, in general, I felt sorry for them, hemmed in as they were by their politics and the hopelessness of their circumstances.
This experience was not confined to the British system; the job brought me into contact with other national and international science advisory and political systems, all of which had their own charlatans. I also had been through a career on an international stage where science was being introduced into decision-making and, in the particular case of the Antarctic Treaty, was the only accepted rationale for any political involvement in that distant part of the world.
The experience at the centre of government lasted seven years, and there were many interesting and difficult issues throughout that time which showed me how important science is to the operation of government. Some of these are mentioned for illustration in this book, but when I left government and started to see many of the issues at a greater distance, without the influence of politics, personalities, emotions and hocus-pocus, I began to develop a deeper appreciation of what was going on. This was added to when I was asked to provide procedural oversight for the science advisory group set up by the UK government during the COVID-19 pandemic and to co-chair an Environment Council with the First Minister of Scotland. I also spent some time as Chair of the UK Research Integrity Office. These experiences left me with a view that the insights which science could provide were certainly under-appreciated, generally under-used and often systematically subverted, leading to bad policy and, by implication, injustice within society. I had an overwhelming sense that the pursuit of self-interest was not balanced appropriately with collective interest – in the style of Locke’s and Rousseau’s social contract.4 I also saw some scientists insisting sanctimoniously that they were separate from the political process when they were obviously deeply involved. There is a lot of confusion among politicians, civil servants and scientists themselves about the utility of science as an endeavour working in the public interest and as a force for good. I also concluded that when I had started on the journey in 2012, I had been quite naïve about the political system I was entering; I have been on a steep learning curve ever since. But where did this leave others who did not have the benefit of my experience?
It is for these reasons that I have written this book. It is the book I would have liked to have read in 2012. Its objective is to improve understanding of the junction between science and politics, especially for people who have various roles within either of these domains, to help them to understand how they mingle and interact and how this can perhaps be made to work better. I believe those who are practitioners in the domains of science and politics have a duty to improve and, likewise, I have a duty to share my insights with them. I also hope this book may contribute a better understanding among many people who simply observe this interaction from a distance. When done well, the delivery of science for public good can improve the wealth of nations in ways that far surpass simply adding percentage points to soulless economic indicators.
I also had the aim of helping to debunk some common myths and misconceptions – such as science being an apolitical endeavour, or scientists somehow being more honest than politicians. The biggest myth of all is that scientists themselves cannot take part in politics, something I once thought was true, but perpetuation of this myth simply leads to worse politics, grounded in pure emotion and ideology, and to a lot of scientific research which is either completely subverted by politics or is irrelevant to public interests.
I am a natural scientist who has spent most of his career exploring some esoteric topics, mainly in animal physiological ecology and polar and marine science. But this means I can bring a unique and, hopefully, balanced, blended perspective about a topic which can raise some people’s hackles and result in a lot of blame shifting. The messages from my own knowledge of how systems in Nature operate, and sometimes fail, are a constant reminder that as organisms governed by the exact same physical forces, humans are not immune to these operational constraints. What has become clear to me is that, if people confine their appreciation of how society works to society itself, to what I call the social bubble, and forget about how society is ultimately constrained by Nature, then eventually only injustice can prevail.
I use ‘hocus-pocus’ when referring to systems of decision-making and rules for living which are based in blind, absolutist belief. It is ‘blind’ because much of it has been built without reference to the realities of Nature. It is often deceptive, and even when it might be correct, it can be deceptive about why it may be correct. Hocus-pocus is also dangerous because those who promote it fail to ask questions about its validity and to modify it based on experience. There is at least a little of the charlatan in all of us, but when we ask these questions, we become scientists. Even if this book makes us stop for a moment to think twice about what we are doing, to readjust and to modify our behaviour, then it will have succeeded.
The book tests four ideas. These are, first, that science is inherently political; second, that the structures within politics, which date back to before science was recognized as such, actively exclude scientists from the political debate; third, that this exclusion leads to injustice; and, fourth, that things can be done to resolve this problem, but they require change both within science and within political systems. My contention is that justice is unlikely, perhaps impossible, while science is not a fully integrated part of the systems for collective decision-making across society.
The book is structured in three sections. The first section considers the state of the current relationships between science and politics. It explores the old but still popular notion of science and politics representing a clash of cultures. It characterizes the relationship as a marriage where there is co-dependency in a partnership but also examines politics as a societal process of debate and collective decision-making which is a trade-off between public and private interests5 and of the dilemmas this creates for scientists. I use the metaphor of a ‘factory’ to describe the process by which politics happens because politics can be characterized as an emergent product constructed from many components. There may be no single guiding mind or design, but its products take the form of laws, regulations, agreements, contracts, conventions, protocols and policies, as well as debates, arguments, wars and conflicts.
The second section considers the impact of politics on science itself. If science is the main way in which we introduce objectivity into the operation of society, then it is subject to many different corrupting forces. Science struggles to move beyond simplifying platitudes like ‘evidence’, ‘what works’ and a hunger for ‘experts’, especially among the news media. I call this process the subjective by-pass. It is a structural problem which leaves our decision-making in the domain of public policy in what Rachel Carson called a ‘Neanderthal age of biology’.6 Distilling quality in science out of all the corrupting influences is a rare skill which turns scientists embedded within political structures (like I was) into graven sceptics.
The third section is more uplifting and optimistic. I use the metaphor of a ‘beast’ to describe the kind of organic structure which science is attempting to interact with and to influence. The body politic is like a large, complex organism which has behaviour emergent from formally complex underlying causation. This involves lots of features of systems where there can be many stabilizing feedbacks, most of which make it very difficult for anything to change as a result of single, small-scale interventions typified by the ambitions of politicians and their policies. One could fume or despair at the belligerence of this beast but, looked at with the eye of the biologist, the question is how one designs processes to shift and manage this organism in a manner which leads to greater justice.
In the final chapter, I suggest the kind of bureaucratic engineering which I think is required to mix technocracy with democracy and to avoid plutocracy.
The book is, therefore, emphatically not about creating and delivering a manifesto for geeks. Others have tried this7 and, apart from failing to make any difference, such an agenda just establishes science as a kind of ideology8 to be lost in the din created by yet another group of people with a special interest whose main aim is to carve out a bigger slice of the cake for themselves. Some scientists would have science trying to shout louder in a noisy room and others, with all modesty and humility, explain that their voice is just one among many. With respect, I doubt if either is right. Science is too important a ‘conscious artefact of mankind’9 to be caught up in the parochiality of fighting to be heard. Science cannot be just another thing which people do, like plumbing, accountancy or teaching. To see it this way would be to deprive people of the knowledge they need to rid themselves of the shackles of hocus-pocus.
This is neither a work of philosophy nor a work of social theory. Even if I refer on occasion to both, I want to be clear that this is a work founded in empirical experience. I am an empiricist at heart because there is nothing quite like the experience of living and working at the coal-face to understand its structure. To some extent this makes it a counterpoint to much social science in the field of science–policy interaction, where there can be too much theory and too little practice. It also impinges on political science, but it is not meant to be a work in this field either. I would not consider myself qualified to say anything original in these other disciplines, but it may be that the perspective I am able to give is helpful to those who focus on them. It would be impossible in the space of a few hundred pages to recapitulate the deep and important philosophical journey which has brought civilization to a point where science, as a rising power in the world, needs to be viewed with greater clarity and understood and used with greater depth of wisdom. As I write, some people fear we have unleashed a ravenous, destructive force on the world in the form of artificial intelligence. We need to get a lot better at governing our own innovative capacities or else these will end up supplanting the old hocus-pocus and do as much or perhaps even more damage to justice.
This is also not a work which is designed to illustrate the wonders of science. I am not keen on the glossy illustrations of science given in the popular press and media, where it is touted as some sort of playground for geeks or a crystal cave full of glittery, wondrous facts which are largely irrelevant to a secular audience. My experiences in government – at the sharp end of science – have only magnified my appreciation of the distance between the public perception of what science actually does for us and what people think it does for them. Science is full of hard, sometimes unpleasant lessons for us all, and turning away from them, presenting only the crystals from the cave of wonders, does us no good whatsoever.
For some scholars this book is inevitably going to be full of holes. If these people see it as an attempt to re-set how science works within politics, then they go too far. It is one perspective only. A lot of the questions I found myself asking as a result of my experiences are not well illustrated in social or political theory, or, even if they are, they are largely inaccessible to non-specialists. If I have missed some crucial aspect of theory or argument, then I can only apologize. I am trying to speak to people who are not steeped in the subject matter of the sociology of science and technology but who, like me, just want to know what it is like in practice and who might benefit from hearing a voice which has been through the mill of experience.
One lesson from this experience is that I see a need to shake many people out of their unquestioning acceptance of existing perceptions. My conjecture is that there is a ridiculous over-abundance of normative behaviours and this has left rational scepticism on the sidelines leaving the way clear for scepticism to be shaped by people for whom science is anathema and for whom rationality stems from pure belief. Moreover, those people who promote the cults of ‘evidence’ and ‘what works’ create the conditions under which science-free policy can flourish under the deceptive guise of evidence-based policy. I appreciate that many well-meaning people might find this absurd, perhaps even offensive, but my purpose is to suggest they stop and think more about what they are doing because their efforts often achieve precisely the opposite of what they intend.
A word also on terminology. I am painfully aware that in order to summarize and avoid getting bogged down in complex explanations, I use terms like ‘scientist’, ‘politician’ or ‘people’ as very broad categories. These are, of course, diverse sets, and nothing in what I say is meant to diminish this diversity or demean those who might not fit more or less into any particular categorization. These categories are less about pointing to individuals and their values and more about behavioural categories that we all adopt in different circumstances. For example, I argue at one point in the book that we are all ‘scientists’ to an extent. In the same way, people who self-identify as ‘scientists’ are also ‘citizens’ and can also behave like ‘politicians’. I have also tried to avoid technical terms but, when used, I provide a definition as an endnote. I have also intentionally avoided building the arguments around personalities and events. Besides having no wish to criticize specific individuals or betray confidentialities, involving personalities also subjectifies issues which are actually more often reflective of systemic challenges. While individual personalities can be influential in shaping issues, in general, they are no more than actors or nodes in wider systems.
The sense in which I refer to science is captured by the German term Wissenschaft, which is simply the pursuit of knowledge, learning and scholarship, a pursuit of general truth. Science is a system of knowledge but it is also a process for observing and helping to understand the structures and functions of Nature, which happens also to include humanity and the interests of people.
My use of the term ‘Nature’ also needs to be understood. It is not resonant of some aesthetic ideal (as one reviewer of this book seemed to think); rather it is the foundation of the realities which constrain and contain our existence. It is all matter from fundamental particles like bosons and fermions all the way to the aggregate structures like stars and galaxies within the cosmos and everything in between, including the contents of the biosphere of planet Earth of which we are an integral part.
I have provided references within the text where there may be a need to support statements or to help readers follow up with additional research, but these are not designed to be comprehensive. I have also used italicized text to provide emphasis and to highlight key terms when they are used. Where appropriate, direct quotations have been referenced.
Finally, I am grateful to the reviewers of this book and several other readers for their helpful comments, to my wife Sheila for her support and comments and the editorial and publishing staff at Polity Press for their enthusiastic encouragement. I am also grateful to colleagues from both academia and government, who are too numerous to name individually, for having provided support and challenge over many years. In particular, senior colleagues at the University of St Andrews never seem to have doubted providing me with their unconditional support.
Notes
1.
See S.J. Gould, ‘The exaptive excellence of spandrels as a term and prototype’,
Philosophical Transactions of the American Academy of Science
94 (1997): 10750–10755, doi: 10.1073/pnas.94.20.107.
2.
The refences to ‘princes’ is in the sense referred to by Niccolò Machiavelli in his book
The Prince
(1532). It includes dictators and absolute monarchs.
3.
Of the great schools of Western philosophy, stoicism is most often associated with the virtues of alignment with Nature, and many eastern philosophies are also rooted in a similar conceptualization. However, in the context of this book I do not suggest that science has a particular affiliation with any one of these schools. The Peripatetic school of Aristotle has much to say about deductive logic, Platonism about inductive logic and Epicureanism about the importance of the fundamental, atomized or quantum structure of reality. All have their place and all are valid ethical and moral perspectives used in modern science, as different ways to grip the twisted topology of reality.
4.
Social contract theory, broadly stated, suggests that while people are free to live as they see fit, they also have obligations to wider society represented by authorities like governments which act to represent the collective good.
5.
There is, of course, a rich philosophical literature involving the likes of Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Hume, Rousseau and Mill, all of whom had much to say on the subject of the balancing of individual interests against the common interest. Much of this philosophy is relevant to this book, but it is beyond its scope and so must remain implicit.
6.
R. Carson,
Silent Spring
, Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1962, p. 297.
7.
See M. Henderson,
The Geek Manifesto: Why Science Matters
, London: Bantam Press, 2012.
8.
Richard Lewontin described ‘biology as ideology’ in his book of that name (R.C. Lewontin,
Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA
, Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1991).
9.
J.M. Ziman,
Public Knowledge: An Essay Concerning the Social Dimensions of Science
, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 1.
Introduction: The scientific predicament
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Patrick Vallance, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government, said, ‘I’ve got one piece of advice for any science adviser, it’s: stick to the science.’1
Some people say that science and politics should not mix,2 but I suggest the opposite is true: not only are science and politics closely enmeshed with one another and becoming more so with time, but this is a good thing because it is likely to result in better politics, and maybe even better science. Yet how can we reconcile this with Vallance’s advice?
First, we need to understand what politics actually is, which is something I suspect remarkably few people stop to really think about. In my view, politics is the manifestation of how we negotiate our ways through life as social organisms. Even as spectators of the high politics happening within national democracies, or even autocracies, we are participants. Politics is how we deliberate about making collective decisions.3 It is the process we use to rub along. It involves those who have a voice explaining their own interests and also listening to other perspectives. This happens at all scales, from households to the floor of the United Nations General Assembly. Rules of procedure – some formal, such as voting, and some socially modulated, such as consensus forming or even various forms of coercion – are then used to come to a collective decision. Once this collective decision is made, then it can be encoded as policies which are statements of collective intent. These provide guidance for those who are allocated the duty to implement decisions derived from the collective view. Some of these intents end up as laws or regulations, and it is this process of deliberation which mainly shapes the societies we live in.
But politics can also involve lots of mendacious behaviours to shift the balance of power within these debates, and I think this is often how it is viewed. We are all politicians, but many of us do not like to admit this in case it exposes our own mendaciousness, however trivial that may be. Of course, professional politicians have no such defence. Politics exaggerates behavioural pathologies associated with vested interests, tribalism, selfishness and the traits which make humans both successful and rapacious.
It seems to me that scientists need to be intimately involved in the process of deliberation which underlies all politics because without their input some of these pathologies can go unconstrained. Many people might say (as did Solly Zuckerman,4 a former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK government) that if scientists want more political influence, then they should use the democratic processes by putting themselves up for election. This seems reasonable in principle, except for two caveats. The first is that current political structures require rationalists like scientists to become hooked to a political party, which is equivalent to being hooked to an ideological position. It is, therefore, obvious that such a proposition is absurd. Current political structures are segmented by ideology and simply cannot accommodate people whose wish is to cut across all ideologies by championing objectivity.
The second caveat is that these critics are reinforcing a very narrow but all too prevalent definition of democracy by imagining that power only flows through elected representatives. Democracy is more than just about being elected to representative assemblies like parliaments. The institutions of democratic societies, from legislatures to the judiciary and the executive, plus all the paraphernalia of public, commercial and third-sector bodies surrounding these, many of which provide essential services across society, are just as much a part of the democratic process.5 Science can easily play its role through these, and often does. For example, science happening within government, academia and industry worked synergistically to solve the COVID-19 crisis. Government science provided public health surveillance; academic science came up with new vaccines and diagnostics; and industry science took those ideas and rapidly scaled them up making them available to everybody. This was an illustration of how science can operate effectively in a democracy without the need for scientists to stand for election.
Even if it showed what can be achieved, however, the COVID-19 experience was an exception in terms of the constructive mixing of science with politics. Making this the norm will require people to ditch some old ideas, and this applies as much to scientists as to politicians. These old ideas involve the suggestion that science is not about values and seeing politics just as a process practised by a few people – sometimes generically and stereotypically referred to as ‘decision-makers’ – rather than everybody.
It is a common stereotype to see politics as concerning values whereas science concerns facts. This is something political scientist Leo Strauss called the fact–value distinction,6 but he concluded that claims about the value-free nature of science are bogus and toxic. We need to openly acknowledge that scientists always bring values to any argument; otherwise facts and values become blurred and we lose our bearings in the resulting fog, something which the new age of disinformation aptly illustrates.
There can be no better illustration of the toxicity of the separation of facts and values than the role which science played within Nazi tyranny. Carl Schmitt, a political theorist who was a prominent member of the Nazi Party, promoted the idea that politics exists independently of science. This justified disengaging the morality of politics from the analysis of its consequences. It allowed falsehoods to bloom as if they were truths and, in the present day, it is part of the playbook of the proto-tyranny of populism and the idea that science functions simply to amplify narrow political objectives like economic growth and competitiveness.
Other prominent political scientists of the 20th century, including Max Weber, but also Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau (both, like Strauss, refugees from Nazi tyranny), saw an additional problem concerned with applying science to politics by reducing politics to rational paradigms and frameworks, essentially turning politics into technocracy.7 Weber saw politics as ‘a strong and slow boring of hard boards’ involving ‘passion and perspective’,8 but he also emphasized that it had a practical, dispassionate, pragmatic side which prioritized reality over imagination, and science provides the bulwark for this earthy aspect of politics.
Facts – the domain of science – and values become merged within politics. So politics is something more profound than pure passion or aspiration and science is more than just paradigms and frameworks: they both represent the hard work of making society function by merging reality with aspiration. Together, they are about establishing the rules of the game of life to achieve a balance between collective and individual good. Much political debate becomes centred on where this balance should sit, and science has a legitimate role in this debate. It can be the vehicle deployed to satisfy aspiration by driving the process of discovery and invention, but it also tends to observe that not all aspirations are feasible. When these messages become portrayed as restrictions of liberties, science can be unfairly viewed as a left-leaning conspiracy. It then becomes a target for those who think that re-engineering the uncomfortable messages from science, or ignoring science altogether, is the fairest way forward.
One constraint on making Weber’s merger work is that public politics is necessarily a highly abstracted (and in many ways deeply dishonest) depiction of what happens in private politics, where there can be genuine efforts to include science in deliberations about policy. The predicament faced by politicians is that they cannot afford to tell those who vote for them that many of those voters are bigots who fail to recognize that life is full of trade-offs and that compromise is essential. This means politicians can look like liars because, to please the bigots, they get trapped into making undeliverable promises. Of course, some politicians are themselves bigots, but it is the general fear of being exposed as such, and as liars, that mainly makes them wary of scientists.
Therefore, those who suggest that science should not mix with politics are making the case that science should not inform the collective decisions which lead to the codes by which society functions. The mistake they make, I believe, is in equating politics with the passionate spinning of dreams rather than Weber’s ‘boring of hard boards’. As a result, either they tend to join these people in the spinning of dreams or they walk away and allow the dream spinners to have a free run. Neither seems right.
A basic principle of creating tolerance and common understanding is to connect rather than to isolate differing parties, and scientists need to promote the making of connections.9 But this requires an especially energetic approach by scientists. In an essay written in 1945 called ‘The Evil of Politics and the Ethics of Evil’, Morgenthau began with the statement ‘Man is a political animal by nature; he is a scientist by chance or choice.’10 He saw science as something which was not innate, meaning that scientists are always having to educate, re-educate and then re-educate again. Moreover, Morgenthau thought that this was essential for ethical existence and that without a lot of hard work by scientists, among others, politics eventually descends to tyranny.11
Scientists cannot, therefore, disengage with politics, because when this happens, the foundations for ethical existence disappear. However, while this explains why scientists need to engage with politics, it does not explain how to undertake such engagement.
Religions have similar dilemmas, and in this context Strauss identified what he called the theologico-political predicament.12 It is often exemplified by the syndrome of politicians railing when bishops speak out on political issues. The predicament is caused by separating ethics from politics by applying the convenient excuse that we need to avoid theocracy rather than submitting to a proper debate about the morality of certain ideologies.
The homologue for science would be, I guess, a scientificopolitical predicament: the attempt to separate science from politics to avoid technocracy. The predicament, at least for scientists, is that if they get involved in politics, they end up becoming corrupted. Saying ‘stick to the science’ is one way to avoid this, but it is deceptive about the values carried by scientists and the value which science can bring to politics.
Various conventions have arisen to try to address this predicament. For example, scientists often refer to themselves as impartial and independent, but these terms are loaded with caveats. They are mainly about how scientists like to portray themselves and, certainly, many politicians I worked with saw scientists as neither impartial nor independent. When being viewed by somebody who is steeped in certain beliefs, one is neither impartial nor independent if one is a champion of objectivity. But many scientists also use these terms to hide their real ideological affiliations.
Being apparently humble is another suggestion,13 but this is not a neutral position, especially when this is confused with advice that scientists should maintain a ‘professional distance’ from politics. There is an important difference between avoiding getting involved in ideologically based arguments, which is what many commentators are rightly referring to, and counteracting the temptation by being distant. Informing has never been promoted by disengagement, yet this is how such urging is often interpreted.
Scientists – or any free-thinking intellectuals – probably have four modes of behaviour to choose from when operating alongside politics. The first is complete disassociation, to remain distant and other-worldly, to maintain a ‘professional distance’. A second is to engage either by prognostic opposition to almost all politics, by opening the can of worms for all to see, or by sanctimoniously speaking truth to power. The third mode is for scientists to surrender their freedoms, becoming captured by politics, even becoming apostles of politics, and cogs in the machine. This, as I shall explain, is where a great many scientists end up, even if they do so unwittingly. The fourth, and most difficult, mode to pull off is to collaborate but only up to a point. Rather than speaking truth to power, this mode integrates truth with power by operating inside the mechanisms of politics. As a result, it accepts the restrictions which come with this and the need for pragmatism and compromise. I was operating in this mode as a Chief Scientific Adviser. People operating in this mode have been variously described as ‘honest brokers’ or ‘knowledge brokers’.14 Sometimes scientists also operate in the role of issue advocates when they are involved in promoting specific knowledge, but none of these terms truly capture the richness of the relationship needed when science operates as a strategic guide within politics. In the end, however, none of these modes is really a satisfactory way of managing the scientifico-political predicament.
The predicament lies in the bigger picture presented by thinkers like Strauss and Morgenthau, who anticipated that, because of the ways it explains reality, science would become a force within politics. By showing us that power ultimately lies in Nature, science reminds us that the hyperbole of politics is ephemeral. As the holders of the keys to our understanding of Nature, scientists, therefore, hold the keys to power. This makes them both important and the potential target of all sorts of subversive activities, creating a bewildering predicament for scientists about how to wield their power. Their disengagement from politics becomes the simplistic solution.
As one scientist who reviewed this book said, ‘As a scientist I seek universal truths. Politicians lie to achieve short-term goals. This benefits the politicians but not society. Hence I have never wanted to engage with politics.’ This is a fair and understandable position, but it is equivalent to handing the key to power to people who probably cannot be trusted to use that power wisely. As Plato said, ‘Those who take no interest in politics are doomed to live under the rule of unworthy people.’15
The deep dilemma this creates for scientists is illustrated by an experience I had with one of my colleagues who was writing advice about his research for some government officials and was very reluctant to move beyond the purity of the facts at hand. I advised him by saying: ‘You know more about this subject than anybody else on earth. Why should you not tell them what you think they should do?’ The problem faced by him, which Morgenthau also recognized, is that the very act of acting potentially makes you immoral because there is a chance you might be wrong. But if scientists always position themselves as passive observers, only intervening when others think to ask for their advice, this is potentially equally immoral, especially if it deprives people of the knowledge they need to live better lives.
When among the politicians I advised, I was often thankful I was only the adviser, but should I have shared some of the responsibility for the decisions being made? If I had shared responsibility, would I have tended then to provide advice which was protective of my interests rather than built on objective analysis? For these reasons, allowing scientists to provide advice without accountability for that advice is a central tenet of current scientific advisory systems, but is this right? Juliet Gerrard, a Chief Scientific Adviser to the New Zealand government, seems to think so. She made the point that, ‘Science is never the only advice. Science can help inform the decision-makers, [but] scientists are not making the decisions.’16 I am not so sure. Politicians may be the fall-guys who shoulder the accountability when things go wrong, thus saving those elsewhere in the decision-making system from having to protect their own interests, but decisions in government are rarely a matter of a choice made by a single individual. Instead, they integrate among many influences, so in my view it possibly amounts to abrogation to suggest that these influences, and the influencers behind them, are not also making decisions. I shall refer later to how this plays out in particular when it comes to how technical analyses known as impact assessments are used to direct policy decisions.
I want not just to help scientists themselves to resolve their predicaments but also to illustrate the problem to others who might be spectators. Ignoring politics is, therefore, not an ethically robust option for scientists. That being said, I want to emphasize that the solution I propose in this book does not involve shifting science closer to politics. We will only be able to solve the scientifico-political predicament if politics shifts to resemble science.
The COVID-19 pandemic has had all sorts of impacts. Most of these have been bad, but there might be one legacy which could bring lasting good: perhaps it has helped people to better understand that they are vulnerable.
A more subliminal effect might be a lasting appreciation that it is science which both describes these vulnerabilities and helps to protect us from them. It was vaccine technology which really solved the problem of COVID-19, aided by better therapeutics and knowledge of epidemiology. But it was also science which brought the hated ‘lockdowns’ and ‘social distancing’ as interim measures to reduce the impacts of the disease.
Science also tells us that COVID-19 could have been much worse than it was and that other, similar events are very likely to happen even within the next five years.17 A pandemic of a respiratory infection was inevitably going to happen, and the fact that it turned out to be a virus which killed only 1 per cent of its victims was about as good as we could hope for. When COVID-19 struck, it was an unknown virus, but a close relative, SARS-CoV-1, threatened to become a pandemic in 2003, and it killed nearly 10 per cent of those infected. Another, known as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, killed 35 per cent.18 Neither of these other two viruses was as transmissible as COVID-19, and that is what saved us from them, but this happened by pure chance. It was Albert Einstein who said that ‘God does not play dice,’19 but he was wrong: the dice that rolled in 2019 when chance modifications happened to make the SARS-CoV-2 virus transmissible in humans was a relatively lucky throw.
What would it have been like if MERS had been as infectious as COVID-19? We can be reasonably sure that when the level of sickness in a population leads to an absentee rate of around 25 per cent, then things we take for granted start to fail. Food stops being delivered to supermarkets, water and electricity supplies start failing too, as do hospitals and the delivery of drugs to pharmacies. People start to die, not of the disease itself, which is bad enough, but because the support structures they need for life start to disappear. Government also starts to fail because those people we all rely on to keep the wheels turning behind the scenes also get sick. What we generally describe as ‘the economy’ no longer exists. Society itself starts to fall apart. One exercise I was involved in which simulated a highly pathogenic infectious disease came to an end when we could no longer manage the dead, let alone the dying. And what would emerge from the mess would probably not be the current kind of democratic politics built carefully over centuries of struggle. Instead, it would be back to the Hobbesian warlord politics of ‘all against all’. People are oblivious of just how close we are to this kind of dystopian future and how much goes on behind the scenes to stop this happening.
Glimmers of these kinds of problems appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic.20 The public was only vaguely aware of them because of shortages of a few items in shops and because of the appeals from government to stay at home and socially distance during the pandemic. Libertarians, who often appeared to prioritize ideology ahead of saving lives, made the case that sustaining the systems which ran society also saved lives in the long run. Fortunately, in general, countries managed to keep essential services and activities going, but we know it was a close call. A problem for governments is that systemic collapse is not a gradual process: it is more like the collapse of a house of cards, sudden and powerfully transformative with almost certainly no option for recovery. In science, we call it a bifurcation or state transition. In more basic language, it is like falling off a cliff.
The probability of such an event is quite high in view of current trends of population pressure, resource use and stress on the environment, all of which add up to us levering more and more out of the systems which sustain us. These systems do not have infinite resilience, even if we tacitly assume they often do. They are also not always inherently stable, or ‘equilibrium’ systems, as many people assume. The probability of system bifurcation is, therefore, not the same as a rare event like a large asteroid hitting the Earth. There are many known viruses which could create a much worse pandemic than experienced with COVID-19 and many others are currently unknown. The risk of nuclear war is high and, even if a war ends up being just regionally based, it would be very likely to result in rapid failure on a global scale of most of the mechanisms we rely on for normal life as we know it. It should be obvious to most people that these kinds of events would only have to happen once and we would be in dire trouble. One would have thought, therefore, we would be highly sensitized and precautionary about going anywhere near these kinds of scenarios. Yet we think little about these things and almost never plan for them. The experience of COVID-19 also showed us that even if we were to plan for them, our capacity for operational delivery of those plans can be very limited. If plans rarely survive contact with the enemy, then the best tactic is to avoid contact with the enemy altogether.
These are tough messages, but some people, like me, think about this kind of stuff and try to do something about it. We are a group of scientists who are engaged with defining these challenges, searching for solutions and attempting to ensure that people in positions of power understand the risks and, wherever possible, act to reduce them. The fact that bifurcations have so far been avoided perhaps suggests some level of success.
