Is “Science!” Another Victim of COVID?

Americans' declining trust in science portends new battle lines in the culture war.

A recent study concludes that Americans’ trust in scientists is lower than ever. Amidst what some Europeans are calling “The Polycrisis” — a state of world affairs marked by a multiplicity of highly-complex, highly-intertwined global problems (check out the Doomsday Dashboard) that in part stem from and yet whose solution depends upon science and technology — this may come as bad news.

After all, even if it was (a perhaps naive) trust in science that got us into this mess of oil, bombs, and computer chips, is it remotely plausible to imagine that we can safely extricate ourselves without the help of science? Science and technology must play some role in tackling humanity’s grand challenges–and yet, what that is, exactly, is increasingly up for grabs. It has been hard to ignore the growing anti-intellectual populism coalescing in opposition to “Science” as a source of authority, whether epistemic, political, or cultural. 

Having long urged lay publics to abandon the fiction of the “Modern Constitution” – that naive division of objective, scientific knowledge on the one hand and squishy things like morality, society, and subjectivity on the other – critics of science and technology are in a vexed position. COVID shook the Earth, and the polarities shifted. The naive trust in Science that used to garner their attentions is today counterbalanced by an equally unsophisticated skepticism toward the entire enterprise of professional inquiry. Decades of academic efforts to foster critical perspectives among the public toward science and technology foundered fruitlessly for decades. (Remember “public understanding of science” research? Neither do I!) But now everyone’s uncle does his “own research.” 

My impression is that this borderline-conspiratorial skepticism, widespread on the populist Right, is seen by many (of us in the PMC?) as something like “whatever the matter was” with Kansas. That is, another case of ignorant “deplorables” not acting in their own rational best interest because they are on the wrong side in the manufactured war over cultural values. If they could just get past all the God, guns, and gender hang-ups and think straight, they would just get the vax and comply.

But to all my friends who, lamenting that the deplorables are “still not trusting the science,” would double-down on your message of epistemic sanity, I have a message for you: Hold a second. We are a handful of years into this thing now. New lines are being drawn in the culture war, and thoughtful partisans for sane science in society had better pay attention. 

In this coal mine the canary was my friend Erik and his meme: 

Erik and I are both white cis male Americans living in Japan. Neither of us come from money. He’s worked as an English teacher here for nearly 20 years, of which I’ve known him for 15 as the guy who always explicitly avoided politics because he was what Gladwell called a “maven,” a connector, a central hub in the social graph of every gaijin in our prefecture. You can’t stay well-connected for long if you’re having it out over politics with half the people you meet. But midway through COVID, all that changed. 

Erik didn’t make this meme, but it sums up his feelings well: Scientists so completely bungled the COVID-19 response - a realtime crisis - that only a fool would believe what they say about events purported to occur decades if not centuries from now. This isn’t a hard argument to make, or accept, provided one works at the level of common sense. Erik is saying that scientists are like that friend who doesn’t even do their dishes but talks big about becoming a rockstar, one day. 

To wit: “Nice story, bro.” 

I will wager it isn’t only Erik who thinks this way. Who would deny that tens of millions of Americans have probably come (or been led) to similar conclusions?

Now, I know what you’re thinking — “Apples and oranges!” — and I said the same thing: “Erik, epidemiology and infectious disease science are completely different fields. It makes no sense to generalize from one to the other.” But instead of trying to shut Erik down as an ignorant science denier, I pushed the other way: “Do we really even need experts to tell us that global warming is a bad deal? What do you think is going to happen at the far end of that hockey stick?”

Erik’s answer surprised me:

We trust the “science!” of course and we go into lockdowns again. Climate lockdowns. Then we close our small businesses, are separated from family, and shut down food production.

Affordable housing is already a victim of the climate “crisis”.

Questioning needing to sacrificing [sic] food, housing and your family and your ability to travel will make you a disinformation “science!” denier.

Exactly the same as the past three years except “climate” can be applied to absolutely every possible thing in your life, whereas the pandemic could only use “health” as an excuse.

The planet was supposed to have sunk four different times over the past forty years, yet the beaches are exactly where they’ve always been.

I grew up on an island. I know.

Now, I know what you’re thinking — “subjective perception of beach levels isn’t the basis for” — and let me cut you off right there because you are right, but nowadays taking that approach online can get you called a “weeb,” “deboonker,” or worse, and likely met with a meme like this one:

And you will look stupid in the engagement, and feel stupid for even engaging, but the Internet itself will roll on, full of text and fury, signifying nothing. 

Besides, that is the least interesting thing Erik is saying. Being wrong about the esoteric points of climate science is easy to do. Observing the patterns of scientific, technological, and social governance adopted by nations around the world in the last few years and extrapolating them to account for probable approaches to future catastrophes is a bit harder. In that context, I think Erik’s dystopian scenario is, besides being plausible if not likely, a rather sophisticated take on complex issues.

There are two points to make here, one specific and one general.

First, I have not seen any thoughtful partisans for action on climate change address this specific scenario. How can we prevent the struggle for a sane climate future from going the way of technocratic managerialism a la COVID-19? Especially when millions are already primed to resist it on those ground?

Second, I read this as evidence that the game, generally, has changed. Yesterday, science and technology critics more incisive than myself had to fight hard to convince people that Science, that noble institution, is ultimately a social and therefore inescapably political institution. Today, laypeople such as Erik speak of “Science!” as an authoritarian institution of political repression. It’s something one shouts – “Science!” – while stepping on freedom and other fundamental human rights.

Their view is not, as my “trust-the-science” brethren might hold, that an epistemically valid Science was held hostage to power Politics and used to justify otherwise inept policymaking. When Erik calls it “Science!” he is putting it into the mouth of the State as the magical incantation necessary to invoke Schmidt’s “state of exception,” the emergency conditions where only raw power prevails. In other words, Science, for him and probably many others, is not a worthy institution being abused by politicians, it is the glove on the iron fist doing the abusing. 

Is Erik entirely wrong? His small business was destroyed by the pandemic. He watched his friends struggle to cope as travel shut-downs stranded ex-pat families all over the globe at great cost, sometimes for months on end. We all saw politicians prioritize pharmaceutical profits over universal vaccination and make countless other dubious tradeoffs while justifying their decisions with that exclamation: “Science!” 

Put another way, would any of us be right to deny Erik’s conclusions, drawn from his own lived experience and inferred from evidence observable to anyone with TV, just because he doesn’t know the difference between climatology and epidemiology? 

Rebuilding Americans’ trust in science may not be merely a matter of reeducating them on its epistemic validity or the rigor of its methods. Just like the events leading to its erosion, the path forward is likely to be a complicated political struggle, frustrated by difficult tradeoffs that cannot adequately be resolved by shouting, “Science!”