Science under Fire

Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America

Andrew Jewett

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674247086
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

Americans have long been suspicious of experts and elites. This new history explains why so many have believed that science has the power to corrupt American culture. Americans today are often skeptical of scientific authority. Many conservatives dismiss climate change and Darwinism as liberal fictions, arguing that "tenured radicals" have coopted the sciences and other disciplines. Some progressives, especially in the universities, worry that science's celebration of objectivity and neutrality masks its attachment to Eurocentric and patriarchal values. As we grapple with the implications of climate change and revolutions in fields from biotechnology to robotics to computing, it is crucial to understand how scientific authority functions—and where it has run up against political and cultural barriers. Science under Fire reconstructs a century of battles over the cultural implications of science in the United States. Andrew Jewett reveals a persistent current of criticism which maintains that scientists have injected faulty social philosophies into the nation's bloodstream under the cover of neutrality. This charge of corruption has taken many forms and appeared among critics with a wide range of social, political, and theological views, but common to all is the argument that an ideologically compromised science has produced an array of social ills. Jewett shows that this suspicion of science has been a major force in American politics and culture by tracking its development, varied expressions, and potent consequences since the 1920s.Looking at today's battles over science, Jewett argues that citizens and leaders must steer a course between, on the one hand, the naïve image of science as a pristine, value-neutral form of knowledge, and, on the other, the assumption that scientists' claims are merely ideologies masquerading as truths.

1

MENTAL MODERNIZATION

YOU STROLL THROUGH MANHATTAN on a late summer afternoon in 1929. As you traverse the right-angled streets, you move from bright patches of sunlight into the lengthening shadows of massive skyscrapers—huge geometrical shapes looming above, the products of innumerable hours of labor and immensely complex processes of planning, design, financing, contracting, scheduling, and construction. Crossing from neighborhood to neighborhood, you encounter banks, groceries, warehouses, sweatshops, tenement houses. Through open windows, over the growl of passing automobiles, you hear snatches of radio, voices in many languages. Newspapers hawked on street corners announce the rise and fall of the stock market, the latest merger. Crowds descend into train and subway stations, waiting to be whisked away to the neat lawns and gadget-stocked kitchens of the boroughs and the mushrooming suburbs. As the sun sets, street lamps flicker to light all over the city, joined by neon signs and movie palace marquees. Where did all of this come from? you wonder to yourself. What holds it together? What kind of future does it foretell?

The answers that come to mind likely differ greatly from those offered by earlier generations of Americans. Through the nineteenth century, the culturally dominant Anglo-Protestants—and many others—looked at the world around them and saw the results of hard work, self-sacrifice, thrift, and ingenuity. Asked what kind of culture inculcated those virtues, most credited some combination of Protestantism and republicanism. They argued that the autonomous, virtuous individual anchored any healthy polity. From this perspective, Protestantism and republicanism represented the religious and political expressions of individualism, neatly complementing American enterprise and inventiveness. But that story strikes you as out of date. Isn’t something else at work here? There’s a force, a drive, behind the city’s pell-mell growth that feels somehow larger than any individual, no matter how thrifty, clever, or hard-working.

Ducking into a bookseller in search of wisdom, you find the shelves bursting with popularizations of modern knowledge: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history, biology, medicine, and more. Perusing these fat but readable volumes, you find that most of them speak with a single voice. They announce the arrival of an utterly new thought world, as different from nineteenth-century thinking as day is from night. A thoroughly scientific “modern mind,” the authors explain, built the bustling metropolis around you—and that mind will singlehandedly shape the future to come.

But as you venture into one of the city’s many university buildings and begin eavesdropping outside lecture halls, you hear other voices, other portraits of the present age. A professor of art history laments the philistinism and cultural leveling of a standardized society: the destruction of cherished, organic values by “the machine.” Two doors down, an anthropologist shocks the sensibilities of his students by announcing, with evident satisfaction, that human beings remain savages. We are Stone Age relics, he asserts with glee, transported into a Machine Age whose contraptions and institutions we can hardly comprehend, let alone operate effectively. Gliding down the building’s marble steps and crossing the street to a neighborhood church, the pugnacious sermon immediately pulls you into a maelstrom of conflict between religious modernists, who welcome science and the machine, and fundamentalists, who protest that newer is not always better—especially when it comes to the revealed word of God.

As you escape into the night air and begin to sort through this welter of perspectives, your mind flashes back to a time, not so distant but before the Great War, when economics, politics, and foreign affairs dominated the public conversation. It strikes you that something essential has changed. Questions about culture, about beliefs and values, have come to the fore in American public life. Yet you also realize that all of the voices you just heard—all the competing accounts of the relationships between science, religion, philosophy, the humanities, and the arts—took for granted that an unprecedented new form of civilization, based on the application of machine techniques, had recently emerged. The questions dividing the commentators started from there. Does the Machine Age hold great possibilities or reflect immense losses? If there is potential to be tapped, what forms of belief and valuation can unlock it? Can humanity gain control of its machines and turn them to the good by thinking in new—or old—ways?

KNOWLEDGE AND MORALITY IN FLUX

Such collective self-descriptions were indeed quite new in the 1920s. Through the nineteenth century, the mainstream Protestants who dominated American public culture defined their country as a product of republican politics and Protestant ideals. Of course, economic progress also figured prominently in the era’s portraits of American life. Yet most observers identified growth and prosperity as products of, and aids to, political and religious individualism. They also assumed that science went hand in hand with Protestantism and republican politics, as part of a single complex that American Protestant leaders called “Christian civilization” or simply “civilization.” In this understanding, economic freedom reflected a deeper pattern of political freedom, and below that lay the spiritual freedom common to Protestantism and science alike. Science, too, embodied individualism: the liberation of individuals from dogmatic authority and other mental shackles, so that they could truly discern God’s truth. From this perspective, Europe still groaned under oppressive, authoritarian institutions: monarchy, aristocracy, the Catholic Church. But Americans, freed from the dead hand of tradition and prideful, self-interested exertions of human authority, followed God’s dictates alone.¹

For the vast majority of nineteenth-century American Protestants, these divine strictures included binding, absolute moral laws that operated beneath the comings and goings of everyday life and alongside the causal patterns revealed by the natural sciences. Of course, individuals could break the moral laws, unlike the physical ones. But they would suffer the inevitable consequences. Far from threatening morality, in this view, science powerfully aided it by proving the existence of God, the creator and law-giver. Among Protestants, a long tradition of “natural theology” held that scientific findings would square perfectly with biblical teachings, because God had authored both Scripture and the “book of nature.” Investigating God’s creation could never reveal conflicts between its various elements. Thus, science would inevitably advance in tandem with industry, democracy, and Christian ideals as part of a single, integrated civilization.

Two developments shook this widespread understanding of the intimate connections between science, religion, and morality in the late nineteenth century: Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection and the impact of industrialization on American public culture. At first, the Civil War and Reconstruction blunted the force of Darwin’s materialistic account of natural history in the United States. Although the theory set professional scientists against one another and was hardly unknown to ordinary citizens, the mainstream Protestant leaders who played such central roles in American culture did not take up the issue in earnest until the 1870s and 1880s. When they did, a few concluded that Darwin’s theory utterly negated the prevailing Christian understanding of the world. These figures either reasserted the Bible’s primacy over mere sensory knowledge or threw off their faith entirely. Most leading Protestants, however—and many natural scientists—reinterpreted evolution as a matter of steady, divinely ordained progress, with the human person as its biological endpoint and a fully Christianized civilization as its ultimate goal. This framework of theistic evolutionism preserved the harmony between science and religion that the tradition of natural theology required.

Below the surface, however, aligning Darwin’s theory with Christianity subtly altered both, in ways that eventually undermined the natural theology tradition. In the churches, as in the new research universities that began to took shape in the 1860s and 1870s, debates over Darwinism accelerated a nascent shift toward theological liberalism. Protestant ministers and theologians—unlike many of their followers in the pews—increasingly followed avant-garde German thinkers in viewing the Bible as a historical product, cobbled together over centuries from preexisting materials rather than handed down by God in its entirety. They interpreted its verses as a set of parables that pointed to universal moral principles, not a literal, blow-by-blow account of either human history or natural history. These liberal tenets also permeated the emerging research universities, whose leaders presented their work as continuous with liberal Protestantism. Natural theology, with its claim that the book of nature and the book of Scripture contained the same divine truths, gradually gave way to a “separate spheres” approach holding that science and religion could not conflict because they did not overlap at all. In this view, scientific and religious thinkers used entirely different methods to address separate sets of questions. Religion provided intuitive and scriptural evidence of the moral law and the need for faith, whereas science used sensory evidence to reveal patterns in nature. Each reigned supreme in its own domain, with no possibility of contradiction.²

As it turned out, however, the separate spheres approach generated new kinds of conflicts. Many of its advocates in the sciences reserved potent terms such as “knowledge” and “truth” for the products of their distinctive methods of investigation. In response, a number of otherwise science-friendly commentators, such as Princeton University president James McCosh and Yale University president Noah Porter, insisted that certain foundational principles of Christianity—moral freedom, immortality, God’s existence—were matters of cognitive truth, not mere faith, intuition, or poetic insight. Christians, they argued, could not simply cede the mantle of genuine knowledge to scientists investigating the natural world.

Another major axis of conflict took shape when some scientists and philosophers, seeking to understand the implications of Darwin’s naturalistic approach, redefined truth itself in ways that challenged even liberal forms of Christian faith. The conventional view of scientific inquiry, associated with the writings of Francis Bacon, held that scientists discovered authoritative, unchanging facts and built their theories on those solid foundations. Empirical facts offered the basic units from which scientists painstakingly reconstructed the universal laws of nature. In the antebellum years, leading American Protestants drew on the tradition of natural theology to accommodate themselves to this Baconian understanding by giving divine warrant to its assertion that sensory evidence offered knowledge of the spatiotemporal dimensions of God’s creation.

Yet Darwin’s theory seemed to violate Baconian tenets. It ranged far beyond sensory data, trafficking in broad, speculative generalizations about the distant, unobservable past. After the Civil War, as theorists of science worked to accommodate this feature of Darwinism, some adopted versions of positivism. In line with the separate spheres model, positivism held that science revealed only the observable surface of reality; it could not address a set of “ultimate” questions that included the nature of causation and the constitution of reality itself, as well as cosmological questions such as the universe’s origin and purpose. Still, positivists assumed that science could find reliable, stable patterns of causation in the world.

Late in the nineteenth century, the pioneering theorists of pragmatism added a further stipulation, based on a Darwinian view of the human mind as an evolutionary product. Following Charles S. Peirce, they concluded that scientific knowledge could never be viewed as permanent and unchanging, even in the restricted domain assigned to it by positivists. Indeed, the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey ruled out the assertion of absolute, timeless truths in any domain, including religion and politics. In a world of constant flux, he argued, all judgments based on human experience remained inescapably fallible and revocable, subject to change as new evidence emerged—or as the contours of reality itself shifted.

Such post-Darwinian theories of knowledge codified the principle of methodological naturalism that defines science today: Investigators must not propose supernatural causes for natural phenomena. At the same time, these understandings of science implicitly questioned the existence of a divinely ordained body of moral laws. Clearly such laws did not reside in the spatiotemporal universe, alongside the other constraints on human behavior. What was the status of Christianity’s moral absolutes—if indeed they existed at all?

The answers given by Dewey and his science-minded contemporaries often took their shape from the second key development of the late nineteenth century: rapid industrialization and the dramatic social and cultural changes it fostered. Social scientists, philosophers, and reformers clashed over the political meanings of industrialization. Some insisted that the familiar principles of economic individualism and laissez-faire governance still applied to the new industrial economy. Others, however, contended that the growing size and power of industrial corporations had fundamentally changed the rules of the economic game, requiring new policy responses. The emerging labor movement put a point on the question, especially when its radical wing advocated Christian or Marxian forms of socialism.

Although the fear of violence and class struggle remained strong among middle-class professionals, the 1880s saw a new generation of Christian leaders, philosophers, and social scientists reject free-market orthodoxy, styling themselves “Progressives” in politics and taking up the associated Social Gospel in Protestantism. Dewey and other Progressive theorists argued that industrialization represented the opening of an entirely new phase in human history, wherein the old laws of political economy no longer applied. The massive size of industrial corporations gave them immense cultural and political power, allowing them to run roughshod over individual citizens and smaller competitors alike. As a result, unregulated competition no longer guaranteed widespread prosperity. The Progressives reasoned that industrialization and corporate consolidation demanded new forms of economic intervention, to protect the interests and freedoms of workers and consumers. And in a democratic context, where the people theoretically reigned supreme, such changes in the realm of political economy could only arise from the spread of a new social morality—a new understanding of what the inhabitants of an industrial society owed one another. Progressive theorists worked assiduously to define and promote this framework of social morality, which rested on new understandings of economic causation as well as personal and collective obligation.

The Progressives thus abandoned a major component of the divinely ordained moral law as Protestant leaders had long understood it—namely, the principles of classical political economy. They argued that such allegedly absolute rules, governing the mutual obligations of citizens and the proper scope of state authority, were actually time-bound and no longer applied under industrial conditions. In practice, Progressives usually defined the new social morality as an application of universal Christian principles to unprecedented conditions. But their arguments, when combined with positivist and pragmatist understandings of knowledge, raised the possibility that other elements of the moral law could, and should, change as well. By the 1920s, such challenges to moral absolutes in the name of modern science grew increasingly loud in the universities and the culture at large. In response, critics of modern science argued that its understanding of the world ruled out the possibility of morality itself: either moral principles were absolute and unchanging or they were meaningless. As a result, the entrenched assumption that science and moral progress reinforced one another began to unravel in the wake of World War I.

DEFINING THE MODERN MIND

What was the evidence that an amoral science had spawned an amoral public culture in the 1920s? Understandings of science as a cultural category take their shape from perceptions, not unvarnished facts or pure logical deduction. Those perceptions, in turn, can reflect many factors, including not only scientists’ own writings but also claims about science by many other kinds of commentators, as well as economic, social, and political changes that come to be considered scientific in origin or character. Above all, two developments in the 1920s convinced a small but vocal group of critics that science had poisoned the well of American public culture. First, the emergence of a full-blown consumer culture, however limited its actual reach, led many social critics to conclude that Americans had become shallow, materialistic, acquisitive individuals who retreated to suburban enclaves and cared for nothing except their social status. Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt provided a popular shorthand for the type: enamored of watches, radios, and other consumer gadgets; obsessed with keeping up with the neighbors and the latest trends; and devoid of moral ideals or even aesthetic preferences beyond those installed by advertisers. Second, popularizations of modern psychology flourished in the 1920s, bringing to the masses what critics considered a profoundly materialistic, reductive interpretation of human behavior. Drawing a causal con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Science as a Cultural Threat
• 1. Mental Modernization
• 2. Resisting the Modern
• 3. Science and the State
• 4. Social Engineering
• 5. Modernity and Scientism
• 6. The Humanistic Opposition
• 7. A New Right
• 8. Cross-Fertilization
• 9. A New Left
• 10. Skepticism Instantiated
• 11. Science as Culture
• Conclusion: Humanizing Science
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index