Why I Can’t “Just Support Science”

Last Saturday I was showing a friend around Boston when we unexpectedly encountered a massive Earth Day Science Rally in Boston Common. Despite my ongoing interest in science – I will attend Navy Nuclear Propulsion School after graduating – I found myself amused and a little annoyed at many of the signs. The particular signs I wish to speak of concerned the general sentiment “forget politics; just support science.”

I found this amusing, first of all, because for every sign appealing to us to “forget politics,” another demanded we “impeach now.”  You get the sense that some people just made a multi-purpose anti-Trump sign to carry to the Women’s March, Tax Day Protest, Earth Day Rally, Science March, Climate March, etc. In fact, the rally seemed more like a science-themed anti-Trump rally than a support-science rally. But this was not my main concern.

There are two important tendencies in these signs with which I take issue. First, many signs equated science with civilization. President Faust, at a separate rally at Harvard, said, “We march because our future depends on the future of science.” However, science is not the savior of mankind, no matter how much we want or need it to be. Star Trek has given us the idea that if we just had enough science and technology, evil and suffering would disappear. But science can’t solve the world’s problems, because it can’t solve the human condition. Science is not an elixir for humanity’s ills; it can’t prevent conscious cruelty or even hard breakups. We have to work through those the hard, old-fashioned way. Thus, a lot of the idealism driving this is misplaced. Science is neutral; it can be used to save the world or destroy it. People choose which.

Which brings me to my second point. Science proper doesn’t actually exist. Think about it. Science is a way in which we interact with and study the world; it doesn’t exist outside of that interaction, in its own right. It’s a category of human activity carried out by specific people and institutions at specific times and in certain places. But it isn’t a being; it doesn’t have agency. People, individuals, can do things through it; by itself it can’t do anything.

What does that mean? It means I can support science in the abstract, but only in the vaguest sense, as a friendly sentiment towards a fuzzy mental image of nature walks and test tubes (let us note in passing that these do not necessarily go together; both those testing the atomic bomb in Nevada and those protesting the tests could claim to be on the side of science/the natural world). If I actually want to do something to support scientific research funding or environmental protection or what-have-you, I will have to do it by working through and with people and institutions and money and polices and volunteers and votes and so on. You can’t do anything to ‘support science’ without taking a specific stance on research funding policy, climate change, economic sponsorship, or the like.

It’s worth noting that this disagreement occurred within the rally itself. While organizers insisted the event was non-partisan, many of those attending claimed they were protesting federal funding cuts to scientific research. (The National Science Foundation will receive approximately 7.5 Billion dollars in 2017 for various projects, funded by an indebted federal government.) The issue is not that some people wish to make a political issue out of a bipartisan protest; the issue is that if this protest is to accomplish anything, it must be something political.

Nor is this idea of ideals without specifics limited to science. I keep hearing open-border policy arguments that go something like “if you care about children, you’ll support this,” or “just love God, and love people – perfect love casts out fear.” These are not valid arguments. We can’t take one sentiment, isolate it from the real world, and allow it to rule our decision and policy. There is no such thing as ‘loving a person’ in the abstract; love is shown through specific real-world actions in context, and it doesn’t exist outside of that context. Because of this, we have to look at the net effects of the specific policies and actions we want to employ.

Now, this is not to say that a bill to support scientific research or streamline and broaden immigration laws can’t be a bipartisan issue, or be required by our ideals, or have solid reasoning behind it. But “forget politics and support science” doesn’t work, because we are not talking about Platonic ideals; we’re talking about actions. All actions have practical consequences that need to be considered, and all actions should be shaped by our ideals; we can’t compartmentalize. So please, consider the full picture. And if you’re going to attend a rally, make sure you’re not waving around a logical fallacy.