the scientist as philosopher-king

Or: Why Richard Lewontin is wrong. Again.

In 2000, a friend of mine ran for commissioner in rural Brown County, Indiana. On Election Day I manned a polling station—or more precisely, stood a legal distance outside and greeted voters arriving for their civic duty. With me were several other people electioneering for candidates from both parties.

For most of the afternoon I was stationed next to a very Republican woman—the stuff of Maureen Dowd's nightmares—who kept up a nonstop commentary on how, for instance, a Gore victory would mean Federal seizure of all our guns. And how weather patterns (in Indiana!) had changed since they “started sending up those Space Shuttles.”

This incident (and especially the bit about the Shuttles) came to mind as I read Harvard biologist and science reviewer Richard Lewontin's contribution to the 18 November 2004 New York Review of Books. The opening paragraphs are telling.

The founders of the American state understood that the proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education and that led slaveholders to resist the spread of literacy among their chattels. But the meaning of “educated” has changed beyond recognition in two hundred years. Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

The problem of the role of elite knowledge in a democracy is an old one… [Not quoted: a rather silly story derived from the Babylonian Talmud.]

Science has replaced Jehovah as the source of privileged knowledge, but the problems remain. How is the knowledge in the possession of the scientific elites to be factored into a process of decision in which considerations of economy, ideology, and political power also enter? Is elite knowledge to be given absolute priority? Why should we trust scientists, who, after all, have their own political and economic agendas? On the other hand how can we decide by vote when the voters and their representatives have no understanding of the facts of nature?

(Link via Brothers Judd; emphasis added.)

Now: I remain rather fond of science. (A good thing, too, else my extended sojourn in graduate school would be just that much more questionable.) And I wince at the level of scientific illiteracy displayed not only by backcountry Republicans, but also by academic lit-crit types who consider everything from DNA to gender differences as mere social constructions. Even so, Lewontin's supposition that “political rationality” requires the “privileged knowledge” of a scientific elite is risible.

Taken to an extreme, this is a prescription for rule by technocrats: the scientist as philosopher-king, in the language of Plato's Republic. But the Platonic Kallipolis, or ideal city, as described therein is far closer to a proto-totalitarian state than to a republic in any modern sense. Hence the mother of all literary Utopias foreshadowed the role played by intellectual elites in fomenting revolutionary movements—and in controlling the oppressive regimes which followed—from the first Bastille Day to October 1917 and beyond.

To be fair, Lewontin does acknowledge that scientists have “their own political and economic agendas”: they are not just neutral observers concerned only with the Greater Good. His own commitment to Marxism is hardly a secret, for example. Yet in spite of his long-ago assertion elsewhere that

The university is a factory that makes weapons - ideological weapons - for class struggle, for class warfare, and trains people in their use. It has no other leading and important function in the social organization.

for present purposes I shall assume that Lewontin is now arguing only that scientists are especially suited for “political rationality” and are not uniquely so. If the weaker claim can be demonstrated as groundless, then the stronger can be dismissed as mere wishful thinking.

Certainly no one should object to researchers playing a role in those public policy debates which directly or indirectly impact their specialties. Yet does expertise in a scientific discipline necessarily translate into political aptitude? Even if we consider scientists as a class—rather than as individuals with all their quirks of behavior and belief—it is by no means evident why this should be the case.

Here's Lewontin again, from later in the Review of Books essay quoted above (emphasis added).

It is disingenuous to claim that scientists come to their scientific work without prior ethical, economic, and social values and motivations. Everyone I know who studies endangered species cares about saving them. One never hears that the malarial parasite is “endangered.” To do science is to be political if only because it is a political decision to spend some amount of limited human energy and social resources on a particular question. Most scientists are, at a minimum, liberals, although it is by no means obvious why this should be so. Despite the fact that all of the molecular biologists of my acquaintance are shareholders in or advisers to biotechnology firms, the chief political controversy in the scientific community seems to be whether it is wise to vote for Ralph Nader this time.

One might well wonder how any political discourse over the merits of voting Nader might be considered “rational”. Snarkiness aside, though, it seems that here Lewontin has given away the store: if scientists approach their work with prior values and commitments, will not the presentation of their science in the political arena reflect those commitments? This question remains even if one accepts (as I do) Michael Ruse's argument that a mature and professional science can transcend its cultural milieu. For once one engages in the realm of politics and policy, affirmations of immaculate objectivity are difficult indeed to defend.

Then there is Lewontin's statement that most scientists are “at a minimum” left of center. This is probably true, at least when considering researchers within the academy: science faculty are after all a subset of the professoriate writ large, which is perhaps notable for nothing so much as a stunning lack of ideological diversity. (See also this two-part TCS article, here and here.) To his credit, Lewontin does not claim that this is because left-leaning political views are simply correct (although he likely believes just that). But neither does he address why this state of of affairs is amenable to “political rationality”.

Perhaps at this juncture an example is in order (all the usual caveats about the misleading nature of anecdotal evidence implied). Douglas Futuyma is a highly regarded biologist at SUNY Stony Brook, and author of a very successful college textbook in evolutionary biology. The text is now in its third edition, and parts have been essentially rewritten—including, notably, the first chapter. The earlier editions (1979, 1986) contain a gobsmacking passage on the very first page of that chapter; here's how it appears in the 1986 edition (once again, emphasis added).

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism—of much of science, in short—that has since been the stage of most Western thought.

Note the easy equivalence of materialism—a metaphysical program—with science. Note the adulation of Freud, the man whose lingering influence is most responsible for psychology's continued status as a third-rate discipline. Above all, note that Marx's theory of history is described as one of the “crucial planks” underlying not just much of modern Western thought, but also of science itself.

It is not surprising that someone could actually believe this claim; Marxism is, after all, a fundamentalism far more unrelenting than the average red-state Christian variant. But consider: it appears on page one of a general biology textbook, one that Futuyma presumably desired to see widely adopted (which it was). Also presumably, Futuyma believed that his colleagues would let his ideological posing stand unchallenged. Not without reason, it seems, as the passage remained through multiple printings and two editions.

But anyone who honestly believes Marxism to be scientific has serious issues with distinguishing science from political philosophy. Futuyma's textbook is, of course, just a single example. Nonetheless: for the reasons described in the previous paragraph, I suspect that his category error is representative. And as for Lewontin's claim that scientists have greater (or sole?) claim to political rationality, I am profoundly unconvinced.

Political science is a discipline far removed from the physical and life sciences. Anyone suggesting that facility in the former should extend to expertise in the latter would be rightly mocked. Why then should we presume that experience in natural science provides a unique insight into issues of policy and governance? (I ask that question as a recovering physics chauvinist.)

We can go further still. Here again is part of Lewontin's opening paragraph:

Reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer sufficient to decide on public policy. Now we need quantum mechanics and molecular biology. The knowledge required for political rationality, once available to the masses, is now in the possession of a specially educated elite, a situation that creates a series of tensions and contradictions in the operation of representative democracy.

So apparently, an informed voter needs to know something about quantum mechanics and molecular biology. But how many working biologists are familiar with anything beyond the billiard-ball dynamics they were force-fed as undergraduates? How many physicists can explain anything about cell membranes? Even in an era where paying lip service to interdisciplinary sensibilities is likely to score points on a grant proposal, it is common for a scientist to be unable to describe the research of a colleague in a neighboring lab, except perhaps in the most general of terms.

Without doubt, our civic discourse would be considerably elevated by an increase in scientific literacy. (And I hope to go a very long time indeed before hearing further speculation on the climatic effects of orbital launches.) Scientists should, and will, continue to play a role in the shaping and implementation of policy. But the answer to our admittedly imperfect system is not resort to an order of Platonic philosopher-kings.

Or of Lewontin's philosopher-princelings, for that matter.

I suspect that Darth Lewontin will soon advocate that his 'scientist-kings' robe themselves as the Sith to instill the proper fear into us unwashed peasants who are ignorant of quantum theory.