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November 2, 2004
This goes to the heart of democracy. The proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education.
If science is the source of privileged knowledge, then 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?
Richard Lewontinsays that the liberal state has attempted to solve the problem by co-opting scientists into the apparatus of the state in three ways:
"Most directly it [the US] has built an executive apparatus including the president's science adviser, the Office of Science and Technology, and regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency. Second, it has created quasi-governmental bodies made up of senior scientists, like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, that are obliged to provide expert scientific advice and evaluation on request from any government agency. Finally, after the Second World War, the state became the chief patron of science, currently committing about $35 billion annually directly to basic and applied research."
The liberal state has has created a large and prospering community of independent investigators—most of them affiliated with universities—with immense public prestige and with effective control over the distribution of funds for research.
It is no surprise that attempts by various governments to make science serve political and economic policy have been met by public opposition from prestigious scientists speaking in the name of disinterested objectivity. Making science serve political and economic policy is what has been happening under conservative regimes in the US and Australia.
So we have situation where there is a deliberate suppression of scientific findings in the interest of a government's own ideological and political ends and the packing various regulatory and review boards with unqualified members who can be counted on to favor industrial profits or conservative ideologies over public health and safety. Consequently, the manipulation, distortion, and suppression of scientific findings in the interest of industries has affected research results on climate change, on mercury emissions and other pollutants, on airborne bacteria, on endangered species and forest management.
Responding to this speaking in the name of disinterested objectivity of science does not work, since institutional science is caught up in, and shaped by, power relations. This traditional liberal response presupposes the duality of knowledge and power. In the public policy science is not pure knowledge uncontaminated by power: science is an integral part of public policy about the environment.
It informs the public policy on increasing environmental flows for our rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, it sits with poltiical figures on various committees and it is contested by irrigators.
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