At one point yesterday, a tweet crossed my timeline denouncing someone who had said they prefer to “keep things apolitical” when doing science outreach. I don’t have the link to the actual tweet, thanks to the deliberately ephemeral character of Twitter, but it’s a not uncommon sentiment in certain circles. The argument is that it’s inappropriate if not impossible to remove politics from discussions of science, because “science is political.”
This is an argument that I always find mildly irritating, because it’s presented as if it’s simple and straightforward, but is actually incredibly slippery. It relies on blurring together three different meanings of the phrase, which range from trivially true to actively unhelpful. It’s probably worth a blog post to tease out the separate meanings and how they get collapsed into something that bugs me.
The Process of Science Is Political. This is the trivially true one. The point is that since science is done by communities of people, the process necessarily involves a certain level of politics in the practical sense of negotiations between parties with different interests and levels of power. What gets studied and how is shaped by a variety of social factors and networks that determine the distribution of resources and attention.
That science is political in this sense should be immediately obvious to anyone who’s ever added an irrelevant citation to satisfy Reviewer 2. Or had to stretch some claims to make a grant proposal fit the requirements of a new program. Or had to hash out a procedure for sharing a single piece of equipment between two projects. Or any of a million other small interpersonal arguments that happen along the way.
This is, as I said, trivially true of science. Of course, it’s also true of basically any human activity involving more than a single person. Science is political in this sense, absolutely. So is stamp collecting.
(Of course, stamp collecting is also science:
(I did that video as promotion for my book Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist, which makes a lot of arguments along these lines, connecting everyday activities to the process of science.)
The Products of Science Are Political. This one’s a bit more nebulous, and as a result, the truth and significance of it cover quite a bit of area. In one quadrant, you have things like “Scientific findings are important inputs for policy-making,” which I hope most people would agree is both true and important.
But the validity of this version of “science is political” varies a lot when you talk about specific bits of science, and the people who do them. If you’re talking about controversial or potentially controversial topics— climate change, human biology, military research— the connection is clear and obvious, but there are huge swathes of basic science where this sense of “science is political” is basically irrelevant even if it’s true. The Higgs boson is arguably political in the sense that it required a substantial public investment to build the LHC, but the political implications of electroweak unification are basically nonexistent. It’s an even less meaningful argument when you move toward lower energies and lower budgets.
(Stamp collecting is political in this sense, too, in that they’re dependent on various national postal services to, you know, print stamps. But we’re maybe getting a little silly here.)
Scientists Have Political Obligations. This is where the collapse happens. The argument is basically that some combination of the first two meanings— science being an inherently political activity, and science having policy implications— means that scientists are obliged to be politically engaged.
There is, of course, a weak version of this that is basically unobjectionable: as beneficiaries of public funding in a variety of ways, both direct and indirect, scientists have an obligation to participate in civil society. Which means things like staying informed, voting in elections, maybe speaking out about issues they care about, etc. I think that’s true, but then that’s true for stamp collectors as well— those are just basic requirements of good citizenship.
Of course, that’s not what’s usually meant when people start throwing “science is political” around. Usually, it’s done as part of a claim that scientists have an active obligation to promote a specific political agenda, and that’s massively problematic, in ways both philosophical and practical.
For one thing, claims that the political nature of science imposes an obligation to argue for particular policies assumes a level of unanimity of opinion that doesn’t exist in science. Scientists skew liberal, yes, but are not uniformly liberal, and I’m fairly certain that most of the people saying “science is political” on Twitter aren’t enthusiastic about, say, Will Happer vigorously advocating his particular policy views. Even within the set of scientists who basically accept the consensus view on climate change and the origins thereof, there’s not perfect agreement on a single program— there’s no shortage of scientists who agree that climate change is a crisis, but will advocate for nuclear power or geoengineering at levels that would horrify a lot of the people calling for more political advocacy from scientists.
More than that, though, there’s a question of effectiveness: it’s just not particularly good for either science outreach or policy advocacy to impose political obligations on scientists. Doing politics well demands a particular set of skills and interests that don’t perfectly overlap with the skills and interests needed to do science outreach, let alone those needed to do scientific research. If you try to make politicking mandatory, you’re going to turn off some people who would be good at science outreach, and also some number of voters who end up subjected to poorly done political advocacy.
There’s also a question of relevance. If you’re talking about atmospheric research, it’s easy to bring in a discussion of climate change, and probably hard to avoid even if you wanted to. If you’re talking about fundamental particle physics, it’d be incredibly awkward, at a level where it’d probably be counter-productive.
(Now I’m wondering whether I could take one of my “Yay, quantum physics” presentations and bend it around to end up talking about climate change in a way that feels natural and doesn’t involve a jarring transition. It’s kind of interesting to think about as a technical challenge, in the same sort of way that a poet might think of some highly restrictive verse form….)
So, bringing this back around to the tweet that was the proximate cause of this whole thing, I think it’s fundamentally misguided, at least as a serious proposal regarding the practice of communicating science to the general public. It’s okay as the sort of fire-up-the-base choir-preaching that makes up the bulk of political Twitter, but the actual practice of political advocacy is best left to people who want to do that sort of thing, not imposed on those who’d just like to talk about this cool little thing they did in the lab.
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I will send this to a discussion group where some anti-AGW types say it is all politicized science.