An irony about scientists’ traditional lack of interest in politics is that science is profoundly socially disturbing—especially for ideologues with a conservative point of view. Science refines our understanding of the world, leading to revolutions in thinking, and overturning convention.
Think of the problems Galileo caused when he proposed that the Earth was not the centre of God’s universe. And there are still many in that social Darwinist country, the USA, for whom Darwin’s concept of evolution is anathema.
The neo-cons of the Bush administration are well aware of the disruptive power of science, even if they are not always sure how science works. They want to use the results of research to their own ends—but don’t want it upsetting their ideological view of a world of free enterprise, consumption, competition, American domination, and so forth. This is deeply worrying to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), an organisation of more than 100,000 scientists and citizens which was founded in 1969 by staff at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to act as a lobby group to use science ‘to build a cleaner, healthier environment and a safer world’.
Last February, the UCS released a report entitled Scientific Integrity in Policymaking about what it sees as the politicisation and abuse of science by the Bush administration. It claims that under President Bush, the US Government ‘has suppressed or distorted the scientific analyses of federal agencies’ and has stacked advisory bodies with political allies. It provided examples from areas such as forest management, countering HIV/AIDS, and particularly climate change research. In July, an updated report included more examples. An accompanying statement, decrying the government’s actions and calling for greater openness, integrity and administrative reform has been signed by more than 6,000 scientists, including at least 48 Nobel Laureates.
UCS chairman, Kurt Gottfried was quoted in New Scientist as saying: ‘The Founding Fathers [of the US] were children of the Enlightenment, of the Age of Reason. Today we are governed by people who do not believe in evolution. They have few qualms about distorting scientific knowledge when it does not conform to their political agenda. They speak as if they are entitled not only to their own opinions, but also to their own facts’.
Because of the way scientific inquiry works, it is easy for an ideologue to cast doubt on the knowledge it provides. Science is a perpetual debate. Everything is questioned, even (sometimes especially) the views