Science or Politics? Why We Can’t Tell Anymore

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by James Alexander

I wrote some time ago about how figures like Anthony Fauci, Michael Mann, Susan Michie, also Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty etc. etc., from 2020 onwards played cups-and-ball with science and politics. Ah, you thought it was politics under this cup, but it was in fact science! If not ‘The Science’.

Observe how no one has ever referred to such a thing as ‘The Politics’.

No one ever says, “The politics says that climate change is happening.”

No, we always say, “The science says that climate change is happening.”

Why?

Well, politicians are either 1) unitary, our overlords: sovereign, government, the ruling class, or 2) partial, the 24-hour-political-party people. And either way, we don’t like it: either something is being imposed on us from above, or it is being urged on us from one side or the other.

Let me lay this out in textbook manner:

Politics, in modern times, depends on partiality.

Yet partiality is not authoritative.

In those two lines we have the source of all our laments about modern politics. That old bore Habermas always talked about “legitimation crisis”. What does it mean? It means, if I put it in Shakespearian terms (about antique politics), that the king is a usurper. Read Richard II or Henry IV Part I to understand.

But the thought is incomplete. Politics or government has always suffered from that sort of periodic legitimation crisis: usurpation and how to refine it. That is antique politics. But a distinctively modern politics is 24-hour-political-party politics: which means what Machiavelli and John Stuart Mill thought was not a negative thing (as everyone in the entire history of the world had thought – ‘Let’s avoid civil discord at all costs’) but, possibly, a positive thing: antagonism between rival factions being fertile for vitality, as Machiavelli saw, and perhaps fundamentally institutionally necessary, as Mill saw.

So our legitimation crisis is not that of Bolingbroke-cum-Henry-IV: it is permanent. Party political permanent. No Trump or Starmer or anyone will ever be legitimate. Only Charles III is the Lord’s anointed. Touch him not. But you can touch everyone else: touch them in the P.G. Wodehouse sense of ask them for money, and touch them in the sense of jostle them, throw the odd egg or paper cup of warmed milk at them, ask them insolent BBC questions.

(Talking of the BBC, everyone should have known something very bad was going on when the BBC went to interview Evelyn Waugh ‘back in the day’ (as we say when we cannot be bothered to look up the date) and took it as its right to be impertinent. Waugh described it as being addressed as if he were a criminal-in-denial-of-his-crime. Fair enough, previously there had been Orwell, who had written about the Ministry of Truth, based on his experience at the BBC: but no one knew at the time that Orwell had intended 1984 to be a satire of the BBC. As far as I know, Waugh was the first to bring the problem to public consciousness – in his novel, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold.)

Anyhow, my point is that since our legitimation crisis is permanent – no one has authority – no one in politics has authority – we look for the secular equivalent of religion and find it in that highly remunerated conspiracy of thought known as ‘science’.

Language, language. Science is just the Latin word for knowledge, scientia. What we call science uses to be called natural philosophy or, by the Greeks, ‘physics’, i.e., the study of nature (physis). The word ‘science’ only really took off in the 19th century when William Whewell of Trinity College, Cambridge, coined the word ‘scientist’. It became a term of identification. I identify as a scientist. Ever since, the world has been infested with science and scientists, cocky little entitled and privileged and well-remunerated gate-keeping Overton window-cleaners that they are. Busy little confused oh-so-exact termites.

But they have authority. The authority of science. Science = knowledge. They know. Whereas we don’t know. We have opinions. Politicians have opinions, being partial. So in the land of the one-eyed political partisans, the scientist is a little god. Hence all genuflections to ‘the science’ in 2020.

Notice how language drifts.

I said no one ever talks about ‘The Politics’. But we do talk about ‘The Science’.

Why?

It is authoritative. Politics needs authority. So politicians, lacking religion, or, nowadays, even tradition, and troubled by Machiavelli and Mill-type antagonisms, fall back on science: unitary, authoritative science. That speaks as one.

Consider:

1. “The scientists say that climate change is happening.”

Hum. This still sounds a bit wobbly: what if one or two scientists disagree? Oh dear, I’ve checked, and they do disagree. Right, then. Let’s rephrase:

2. “The scientific consensus is that climate change is happening.”

Good, good. No point allowing mere scientists any agency. If they disagree, then let’s point to the ‘consensus’: which has the advantage of being a unity, of speaking with one voice. Yes, the consensus, I like it. But, a second thought, isn’t it the case that a consensus sounds a bit as if it is based not on knowledge but on opinion? You know, ‘We have come to agree on something.’ Sounds a bit pragmatic, as if everyone has been paid, or is engaging in groupthink.

Hum. What about this?

3. “The science says that climate change is happening.”

That’s it. The full reification. Very good.

The science.

With a definite article.

(Silence.)

Well, of course, it is not good.

It is in our time that some of us have begun to doubt whether science is actually just a sort of conspiracy of universities, military planning and bright idea merchants. We had a recent piece in the Daily Sceptic which took a good look at ARIA, the farcically named entity, apparently one of Dominic Cummings’s legacies to the nation: the UK equivalent of DARPA, which one reads about in books about the history of the computer. America had military-industrial-complex levels of spending, and IBM. We had Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar. Geniuses like Dominic Cummings observed the difference, and thought we should have a small disbursement of funds for the actually not very eccentric eccentrics, to turn snake-oil-sellers into professional pharmacutes.

It’s just politicisation.

An enterprising Finnish political thinker, Kari Palonen, has written some good books on politics and parliamentarism. In one of his old articles he drew attention to the word ‘politicisation’. He defined politicisation as the phenomenon whereby something hitherto not considered political is now brought into the category of the political. Politicisation is the opposite of depoliticisation. Hence, COVID-19 was the politicisation of a virus, and Climate Crisis the politicisation of the occasional heatwave. The Supreme Court, Quangos, Devolution, the Stupidity of Politicians, EU-Logic and Globalism are all contributions to the depoliticisation of England.

I want to suggest, and this is just to see things a bit more clearly, that things may be made political, or politicised, in three ways, or three stages. I shall use visual analogies to help the argument along.

The first is frame.

The second is cancer or empire.

The third is colour adjustment.

First, we may have something like Christ Crucified, or Chinese Fireworks, or the Big Bang, or Tree Rings, things which are amusing and interesting: beliefs, entertainments, hypotheses, observations. But then we may put them in a political frame. They are framed, and they become political. Because they are framed by political imperatives: someone is paying, there are institutions, and the belief/entertainment/hypothesis/observation is put to use. At least here, though the original thing is twisted, it is not corrupted. It is put to political use, but is not itself political. The science is still science.

Second, we have cancer. This is where politics extends itself imperially, by means framing, so that its funding and institutional support start to corrupt the original thing. Its nature becomes politicised. People explode gunpowder, now, not out of interest or amusement, but with the purpose of blowing things up more effectively. This is the purpose. The purpose is political: the use is no longer a consequence. The use is a cause. Useless things are unfunded.

But third is worse than cancer. This is where, within the frame, the colour slowly changes, as it is used to do when old cathode ray tube televisions failed and went pink or some other colour. This is the sort of politicisation that is creeping and total: where everything is politicised in the sense of being inflected by the purposes of the state. This is where we are now. Centralisation, aided by technology, has run apace: and we have a fully saturated political order: framed, cancered, pinked. It was so effective that before 2020 many of us were still unaware: tricked by the slow colour adjustment, not noticing that our complexions were getting pinker and pinker.

By Gammon!

This is the world we live in. The system has an extremely awkward relation to genuine freedom of thought or eccentricity. Almost everyone repeats mantras they hear. I do, too, but I read books.

My advice. Read books. Not Douglas Murray’s book. But proper old books, with leather bindings, or in Penguin orange and blue, something from a second-hand-bookshop, the sort of thing you’ll find in Oxfam for a quid. I am reading, at the moment, Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language which I see I bought for a fiver, second hand. Incidentally, Shakespeare is actually quite instructive about the imperatives of politics, even though he knew nothing of the distinctive antagonisms of modern politics, or of science.

Shakespeare? The first thing he would have done is write some blank verse about how, if be science be powerful, then it be not science, for power is not science, and – but I am not Shakespeare: however, you know how it would go… 

I have been studying how I may compare

This prison where I live unto the world;

And for because the world is populous,

And here is not a creature but myself,

I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out.Richard II, Act V, scene 5 quoted in Kermode, p. 44.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.