Science Needs a Moral Compass Outside of Itself
Or Else It is Simply an Amoral Tool for Use by the Powerful
Recently, I read the book Project Hail Mary (hereafter referred to as Hail Mary) by Andy Weir. I don’t wish to give the wrong impression about it, for it was quite a good book – even better than The Martian – and Weir is quickly making a name for himself as one of the important science fiction writers of the early 21st century. But I noticed a disturbing suggestion in the book, which (even if not intended to be taken seriously) nagged at me. I wanted to comment on it, in part to comment on the attitude which it betrays, which may or may not be Weir’s attitude (I suspect it isn’t), but which nonetheless is a very real one.
That attitude is what I call “fascistic science.” It’s been remarked upon by other writers, and given other names, but I think “fascistic science” both focuses the attention and succinctly elucidates the problem it poses. This is the attitude that scientific experts “just know” the “best” course of action to take at any given juncture, and that therefore society should be organized such that it has no choice but to follow that guidance. Law is an impediment or an obstacle to be skirted or jackhammered. Moral conscience is an unfortunate hindrance, because sometimes you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet. Custom is the prejudice of the past, which holds back “the right thing” from being done.
In the 1920s, fascism was a futuristic, scientific, technocratic enterprise, not a reactionary, uncouth, dumb one. Thus, this attitude that scientists should run the world, including by brute force if necessary, is fundamentally a fascistic one. In other words, our common connotation of fascism with brutishness is at odds with the reality that the fascists believed (and many at the time who were not fascists believed) that they were on the cutting edge of progress. Scientific enlightenment is no defense against totalitarian temptation.
In Hail Mary, in the face of an existential threat of annihilation, the human race appoints a woman named Eva Stratt head of a taskforce aimed at neutralizing that threat. She is given “a certain amount of authority to get things done.” In practice, this means she tramples on nations’ laws, arrests individuals, requisitions militaries and law enforcement around the world, and wrenches various scientists out of their lives and careers to put them on her project. You might rightly point out that in the face of an existential threat, human beings would almost certainly resort to some form of dictatorship. But the attitude she displays is one of casual disrespect for the rule of law, for local custom, and for the individuals in positions of leadership and institutions within each nation. Everything and everyone is a tool to be used for her purposes, which she believes (rightly) is the salvation of the human race. She even betrays the protagonist at one point.
This is a fascistic attitude. Indeed, while much fun is made of her unlimited authority, her authority is essentially fascistic.1 She jokes that she has “all the power,” but the joke hits a little too close to home. You might say that I am taking it a little too seriously, as I did with another science fiction author I like (Isaac Asimov), but I think it is important to seriously consider the implications of this attitude. In fact, because it is fiction we can look at those implications more dispassionately.
Stratt Knows What’s Best:
People sometimes imagine the neutrality and purported objectivity of science makes scientists immune to temptation (or at the very least committed to the good). Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone close to the sciences knows that even when it comes to science scientists aren’t neutral. They are prone to the same biases all of us are. There is a saying that science advances “one funeral at a time,” because older generations are impeding progress (by refusing to accept evidence which contradicts previously-held views). However, it is probably equally true that young scientists are prone to biases of their own. Without going into detail, we know that politics and identity drive some of those biases, and anyone in medicine or the sciences will know what I am talking about.
Human beings are flawed creatures, and no human endeavor will ever be free of those flaws. But only science pretends that it is.
The reality of scientific progress feeds the illusion of moral progress and contributes to the mistaken belief that the two are linked.
If it were true that scientific progress fueled moral progress, the evil and barbarity of Nazi Germany would surely have repelled scientists. And some scientists did leave. But most did not. Most stayed. Their contributions to Nazi science fed the illusion that Nazism was moral progress supported by scientific progress.
If advanced science made nations robust to illiberalism, one of the two most scientifically advanced (at the time) societies in the history of the world, Germany, would not have fallen for the Nazis. Instead, many world-renowned scientists enthusiastically embraced the Nazi cause, or turned a blind eye to its evil, or failed to stand up to its crimes out of fear.
People imagine that the Nazis were backwards and reactionary. But the Nazis considered themselves progressive, utopic, and futuristic. Just because you or I don’t like their idea of utopia doesn’t mean they didn’t believe they were building a utopia. They claimed to be a revolutionary ideology, which sought a break with the past (in fact, they explicitly condemned “reactionary” forces which held them back from progress).
And what many don’t want to admit is that some American progressives believed the same. They believed that fascism was the future. Some American progressives cheered both fascism and communism, which they saw as part of the same movement: the scientific planning which represented the future. Lincoln Steffens, who famously said, “I have seen the future and it works,” of the Soviet Union, was also an admirer of Mussolini.
One of the foremost critics of this attitude of “fascistic scientific progress” was the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Hayek coined the term “scientism” to describe the unscientific dogmatic attitudes which too often prevailed in his day (and ours). Above all, science is a process, not an ideology or a set of axiomatic statements. The scientific process requires skepticism and questioning (inquiry). Therefore, when “science” stops questioning and shuts down skepticism, in favor of disseminating axioms, it is no longer science but scientism, which has the appearance of science but nothing of the process which is integral to making science science.
When scientists go from using the scientific method to shutting down debate, insisting that “we know” because “we” have a “consensus” and therefore debate (and choice, dissenting opinion, etc.) must be crushed, there is no longer any science but scientism. When experts use the credibility of science and the reputation of expertise to stifle inquiry and stop further scientific discovery (in case further evidence disproves their theories), science has crossed over into scientism.
Hayek stressed the dangers of “scientistic” expertise because of the example of Nazi Germany. During his lifetime, scientific expertise was used to further totalitarianism and genocide, so he wasn’t writing about an abstract possibility. What Hayek understood was that the alternative to politics,2 as messy and unlovely as it is, is coercion (violence). When anyone enamored with the supposed neutrality of science wishes that experts could just tell everyone what course of action is “best” (and have everybody listen), what they are really wishing for is a world in which scientific orthodoxy is enforced at the point of a gun. Because we will never live in a world in which everyone will agree, we are faced either with contentious debates (which incidentally fuel scientific progress by a mechanism similar to natural selection), or enforced scientific orthodoxy (which counterintuitively will retard scientific progress by eliminating free inquiry).
This isn’t Speculative:
The attitude betrayed by Stratt in Hail Mary is not uncommon in the real world. Scientific planners sometimes speak admiringly of illiberal regimes. Love him or hate him, Anthony Fauci said that the United States should have copied China’s lockdowns. Lest we forget, China’s lockdowns were literally enforced at the point of a gun. You can’t have the successful forced conformity of authoritarian regimes without the authoritarianism. China put people in jail, welded people into their homes, killed people or let them die, covered up deaths, covered up the existence of the virus itself, shut down inquiry into the pandemic’s origins, monitored communications and whereabouts for all of their citizens via extreme surveillance tactics, and lied relentlessly.
Another person who has fawned over Chinese totalitarianism is the columnist Thomas Friedman. If only America could be China for a day, we could have renewable energy, good climate policy, better infrastructure, etc. Friedman isn’t a scientist, but William C. Tucker is. Along with other climate scientists, Tucker has expressed the view that climate change denial should be criminalized, with dissenters fined or put in jail. Even many climate scientists who wouldn’t support jailing someone for questioning the IPCC believe there should be consequences for someone’s career if they express skepticism about climate change.
Whatever you believe about climate change, climate science cannot advance if any view is shut down in this manner, because the shutdown itself is antithetical to the scientific process. If the goal of the process is the pursuit of truth, scientists cannot be closed off from criticism and skepticism, because if they are in error or if they miss something, the only way they will find out is if other scientists feel free to challenge or raise questions.
Perhaps climate change and COVID are too politically charged. By no means am I passing judgment here on either the various flavors of COVID skeptics or climate skeptics. The stifling of dissent by one group does not automatically make their critics’ claims true (or false).
And the truth is that the example could be particle physics or plate tectonics or elephant genomics or spaceflight or anything. This attitude can occur in any field. And it would be a problem even if the topic were not politically charged in any way. My point in bringing up these examples is the same as my point in bringing up the example of Hail Mary: we should take this attitude seriously.
Fauci, Friedman, or whoever would often be the first to protest that they hate the evil things the Chinese regime has done, just as their counterparts in the past would protest that they hated what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, or what Mussolini did to his enemies. They merely admire the efficiency.
And yet, history shows that the logic of scientific planning seems inevitably to lead to illiberalism, and indeed might require it. In every society which has seriously tried “scientific management,” terrible crimes and great evil have followed. Every society which has taken the logic of “we should just let the experts run everything cleanly” to its conclusion has killed millions of people. The fascists in Italy and Germany. The Soviets. Mao Zedong. Xi Jinping.
When one goes from the attitude that scientists should run everything, to practical attempts, one ends with scientific planning or scientific management of society. It is not a new idea, but rather a very old one. Science as a tool has worked so well for us in predicting the orbits of the planets and teaching us how to organize molecules so as to create new materials. Why couldn’t it help us predict and organize society?
But every time this has seriously been done, it has failed. And when it has failed, people have died.
I believe this is because scientific management at a societal level is impossible, unscientific, bordering on pseudoscience, and yet it proves alluring for so many scientific minds. Hayek’s scientism was predicated on hubris, the attitude that we know more than we do and the belief that science is more powerful and more useful than it is. Science, on the other hand, is predicated on the attitude that there is much that we don’t know, and that our ability to discern what we don’t know is limited, but that by following a process we can eventually learn some of what we don’t know. Hayek argued that any belief in scientific management of a society was hubris, because such management was beyond the ability of science ever to discover. When it came to managing society, not only does the knowledge we don’t know dwarf the knowledge we do know, it isn’t even close.3
Taken to its conclusion, the logic of scientific management dictates terrible crimes. Why is that? Because it will fail. It won’t work. And when it fails the planners won’t throw out the theory, but will instead look for new information to avoid getting rid of their theory. Because the natural thing for humans to do is to look for a scapegoat, the people in charge will blame “the people standing in the way” – those people who by temperament, or philosophical outlook, or profession either openly oppose or simply don’t believe in scientific management – as being responsible, even if those people have done nothing. This is the way the human brain works. We look for someone to blame and believe that person is to blame even if they did nothing and it is our own fault, or especially if it is simply the fault of circumstances outside of our control. Logically, the people standing in the way must be persuaded or removed or coerced or brainwashed. Since it is easiest to simply have them eliminated, many regimes opt for elimination.
Tools Can Be Used for Ill as Easily as for Good:
Science has proven extraordinarily useful for the human race, and has contributed enormously to the unimaginable prosperity we have today. But it is only a tool, and it is only good for the things it is good for. Just as an electric drill is very useful for making holes, but completely useless for painting fences. There are some questions science simply cannot answer (or it wouldn’t be science, it would be something else).
For that reason, science has no justification in and of itself. It can give itself no reason to continue. It can answer material questions about the facts of human life, but human life is more than simply material. Science can make human lives easier and better, but why should it? Science has no answer for that question.
What is the meaning and purpose of human life? What is justice? What are right and wrong? To the extent that science proposes to give answers to these questions, they are usually clinical or even nihilistic. As far as science can discern, there is no such thing as justice or right or wrong, and there is no meaning or purpose to human life. Just as a microscope can’t detect sound waves, a tool which evolved to answer questions of natural philosophy can’t answer questions of moral and political philosophy. As far as the microscope is concerned, sound waves may not exist.
All of which is to say that we have come full circle and arrived back at the conclusion that science can be used for terrible evil, and can even justify terrible evil, and that even the most scientifically advanced societies are just as prone to human folly as any other. The smartest experts are just as prone to temptation. Because there is nothing in science which dictates that science cannot be used for evil. Only considerations of morality can do that.
And that is why the yearning for an existential emergency like that faced in Hail Mary, which would cause everyone on Earth to “come together,” and listen to the experts, is so dangerous. That is why we need to take seriously the idea, even in fiction, that things would run more smoothly if scientists ran everything and people just followed.
Many people really do want that, whether they understand themselves to want it or not. They really do think that somehow, if all the difficulties were smoothed out and the hiccups (such as the killing of all the “people in the way”) were papered over, it really would be better and smarter and more efficient than what we have now. Free society is messy and often ugly and the scientific procedure seems so clean and clinical.
But shorn of any moral compass – a compass which cannot arise from inside science itself, but which must necessarily come from without – that scientific procedure can be used to further the greatest crimes against humanity as easily as it can the greatest blessings of medicine and technology.
Human freedom, as unlovely and imperfect as it is, must never be given up in the name of scientific advance.
Let us contrast this briefly with another science fiction novel which is often criticized as “fascistic,” Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, which is a book about an all-volunteer military written at a time when eliminating the draft was considered a crazy libertarian fantasy. Critically, the Terran Federation does not impose a draft even when faced with an existential war for survival against an enemy dedicated to the wholesale destruction of the human race. There are elements of the society Heinlein describes which I dislike, however one of the most salient features of the book is choice, namely that the protagonist and his comrades have chosen to be where they are, and have to make that choice again every day (quitting is easy in the Mobile Infantry). Whereas Ryland Grace, in Hail Mary, has zero choice. He is where he is because he was forced to be, not because he wanted to be. Choice, after all, is one of those pesky human things which get in the way of scientific expertise and getting things done.
An alternative method to both politics and coercion for resolving disputes and organizing society is market transaction. Hayek preferred this method above all, and would have gladly seen most decision-making removed entirely from the political sphere (which still requires some coercion) to the market.
Another Austrian economist, Ludwig Von Mises, went further, arguing that some of the knowledge which would be necessary to the scientific management of an economy is created in the moment and cannot be known beforehand, meaning that such management is irrational and doomed to fail.