Let Science rule?

If science would rule my country, the COVID-pandemic would be over or at least confined, the death toll much lower, the health care system less strained, the disruption of the economy less marked, the stress for families less severe … Isn’t it tempting to imagine how effective the fight against SARS-CoV-19 could be, if medical expertise would be translated into political action directly? Instead it is thrown into the public arena, where anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing bullshiteers foster their anti-scientific quirks.

Technology pervades society to an ever increasing degree. And most of it we use without having even a faint idea of how it functions. Do you understand how your mobile phone works? Could you build one, repair or program it? How about refrigerators, recorders, respiratory machines, medicines, car tires, hydrogen fuel cells? Can you fly an airplane? Can you handle an x-ray apparatus or the water works? At least you can do a safety inspection of a wind turbine or the commuter train you use twice daily? (By the way, are there railway skeptics or even anti-rail-ists?) We live in a world full of complex technology and we need specialists to keep it going. If we are not one of these specialists, overseeing a tiny fraction of our technical culture, we are more or less clueless. Basically, our knowledge ends at the power button of our coffee machine. Why then do so many people think they know all about fighting a pandemic?

Let science rule? No! For at least three reasons.

A strict rule based on scientific evidence may be more effective, but in the end it is no more than another autocratic regime not compatible with a liberal concept of society.

Medicine has helped to improve human health in the last 150 years enormously. Moreover, medical research will most likely deliver more impressive innovations like mRNA vaccines in the future. So, let doctors run the country until the pandemic is over? I believe they would do it better, but better only with respect to strictly medical aspects of fighting COVID. Reducing contacts, for example, is a proven way of reducing the virus-spread. closing shops and offices, shutting down factories undoubtably would reduce infection rates. But is also causes economic damage, risks jobs etc. It is necessary to weigh economic damage against medical effectiveness. How much economic damage is acceptable for a so and so large drop in infection rates? For political decisions like that, medicine has neither democratic legitimation nor any special competence. Politicians at least have the democratic legitimation.

Standards of successful politics and successful scientific practice are incompatible.

Being a successful politician is not necessarily all about telling the truth. It is not about plain lying either. But disguising the political opponent, telling only part of what one knows in order to getting ones political agenda done, is central to politics. Being deceived is no excuse in politics, as the say. Being deceived in science is, though. Controversies are at the core of scientific history. Whether the earth is the fixed center of the universe or orbits the sun and whether Darwinian evolutionary theory is right are two of the most prominent examples. Now, proving evolutionary theory was not about lying about the facts, disguising the skeptics or inventing evidence. It was struggling for truth, piling up evidence for and against Darwin’s theory, discussing arguments and so on and so forth. Casting reasonable doubt on the arguments of ones opponent, and ones own arguments too, is a virtue in science, and likely the super-fast track to political suicide.

The incentive for science to cooperate with politics obviously is to improve political practice by scientific input. The more influence scientists want to have in policy consulting, however, with other words the more power they want to gain, the more likely they will act like politicians. That this bears considerable threat to the standards of of good science is obvious.

Some skeptics criticizing scientific and medical advice on fighting the pandemic may have a justified issue, but wrongly address it to science.

Public debates are run to the most part by elites. The ordinary citizen may sit in a talkshow every then and now, but he is not normally the one setting the the tone in public debates. In a complex, highly differentiated society based on the division of labour, there is nothing wrong in principle with this. An expert in, say, the economic consequences of globalisation, will be more successful in coping with these than somebody without much knowledge about these issue. However, that somebody is not having expertise or is not as well-trained or articulate as an expert, does not preclude him from having a well-founded concern.. The feeling of not being heard, of not having a voice in public debates may cause frustration and refusal to obey to rules made by a political class one sees as responsible for ones own problems. So, the protest against pandemic policies may not be justified from a scientific and medical point of view. But from this does not follow that protest need not be addressed. That is not something medical expertise cannot do.

#Science #Bullshiteers