https://socialistaction.org/2017/04/17/the-tragedy-of-american-science/
The tragedy of American science
/ 3 days ago
April 2017 ScienceBy CLIFF CONNER
The Earth Day 2017 March for Science signals resistance to Donald
Trump’s sharp infusion of irrationality into the national discourse.
Official support for climate-change denial and other anti-science
agendas has suddenly become much more explicit. At the same time, many
protestors recognize a continuity linking Trump’s bizarre bluster with a
pre-existing condition sometimes referred to as the “Republican war on
science.”
But the problems at the root of the tragedy of contemporary American
science—its corporatization and militarization—are not ones for which
either the Democratic or Republican parties can offer solutions.
Describing science as tragedy would have seemed peculiar to most people
as recently as the first half of the 20th century. The reputation of
science was then golden. The expectation that modern science could and
soon would solve all of humanity’s problems was almost universal.
That benign image received a double jolt during the Second World War.
First came the horrors of Nazi racial science and its accompanying
technology of human extermination. That was followed by the advent of
the nuclear age in the instant incineration of a hundred and thirty
thousand inhabitants of two Japanese cities. J. Robert Oppenheimer, one
of the atomic bomb’s creators, invoked the name of Shiva, the Hindu god
of destruction, to signal the emergence of science’s ominous dark side.
The roots of the tragedy
The out-of-control proliferation and use of weapons of mass destruction
is perhaps the worst of contemporary science’s tragic fruits, but there
are others. The misuse and abuse of science to justify destroying the
Earth’s habitability has also become a source of widespread anxiety.
These and other perils have a common root: the corruption of Big Science
by Big Money. More precisely, they are the consequence of a
profit-driven economic system that hamstrings humanity’s ability to make
rational economic decisions.
Science is presumed to be a reliable source of knowledge based on
objective fact rather than subjective bias. By definition, that requires
research to be conducted impartially by scientists with no conflicts of
interest that could affect their judgment. But a science harnessed to
the maximization of private profits cannot avoid material conflicts of
interest that are anathema to objectivity.
The focus on American science is not chauvinistic bias on my part. The
science of the United States is the major component of world science—as
American science goes, so goes science in general. The American federal
R&D [Research and Development] budget is larger than those of Germany,
France, Great Britain, and Japan combined. American science’s primary
competition vanished in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. By
1998 science in Russia and the other Soviet spin-offs was on the edge of
extinction, surviving only by means of charitable donations from abroad.
The idea that anything about American science could be tragic may seem a
bit unsettling to some readers. It does not at all jibe with American
Exceptionalism, an axiom of the ideology that reigns supreme in the
public discourse of the United States. American Exceptionalism covers
all things American with a halo of virtuousness and a blanket of
immunity from wrongdoing.
Furthermore, isn’t the United States where most of world’s scientific
and technological innovations have been and still are produced? How
about airplanes? Television? The computer? The Internet? The iPhone? And
hasn’t American science been responsible for great medical and
biochemical advances? The current state of American science may present
some difficulties and challenges, but isn’t it gross hyperbole to call
it a tragedy? Unfortunately, it is not.
The corporate takeover
As corporate domination of science and technology has grown, the ideal
of objective scientific investigation has diminished accordingly. Big
Science has increasingly become the deferential servant of corporate
interests and billionaires. Allegedly scientific studies are now
routinely conducted by individuals and institutions with large financial
stakes in their outcome.
Big Oil and Big Coal fund climate-change-denial studies. Big Tobacco
produces findings minimizing the link between smoking and lung cancer.
Big Pharma investigates the benefits and risks of the medicines it
sells. Big Food enlists nutritional science as a marketing tool for
their products.
The scientific method has been refashioned to fit the new reality.
“Hypothesis-driven research” now signifies formulating propositions to
advance corporate interests and designing studies to provide evidence
for them. Investigations that produce a semblance of support for a
desired hypothesis are accorded full public relations treatment, while
those that do not are quietly consigned to the paper shredder.
The results of all this research are at worst fraudulent and at best
untrustworthy. And yet, abetted by venal legislators and a credulous
mass media, corporate science-for-profit shapes the public discourse and
public policy that adversely affect our environment and our health.
Institutionalization of Science for Profit
There are rational voices in the public discourse that have raised
concerns and warnings about the corruption of science by Big Money, but
the voices serving the corporate interests have all but drowned them
out. By skillful application of the false-equivalence fallacy, the
latter have managed to skew the conversation far to the irrational side.
Manipulating research results to serve private commercial interests is
anti-science masquerading as science. The forces of anti-science have
strong institutional support in the United States, most significantly in
our fundamental political institutions.
One dangerous result has been the weakening of governmental regulation
of commercial activities that contaminate the air we breathe, the water
we drink, the food we eat, and the medicines we take. The ability of the
Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration to
provide the oversight they were designed to provide has significantly
declined. And the Trump gang promises to accelerate that trend; the
regulatory environment is sure to get worse before it gets better.
Politicians’ appeals to ignorance are not the only weapons in the effort
to undermine the integrity of American science. University research
laboratories and Think Tanks alike have devolved into intellectual
brothels in their ignoble quest for corporate funding to support their
research. Private interests have been happy to oblige, and the obvious
quid pro quo need never be spoken aloud.
The militarization of American science
But the most tragic distortion of American science is a consequence of
its extreme militarization. Big Science literally exploded onto the
scene as a result of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Its
success was validated by mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in August 1945, thus establishing the martial inclination of
Big Science’s subsequent development.
If you take one thing away from reading this article, let it be this:
Today, American science’s primary mission is to find new and more
efficient ways to kill people—from thermonuclear bombs, to robot drones,
to cluster munitions, to antipersonnel weaponry of many kinds.
Science and technology, rather than being the creative engines of human
progress, have instead been reoriented toward destructive and antihuman
ends. American science has also made beneficial advances, but many of
those have been accidental byproducts of military research.
The proof is in the U.S. budget, where more than half of the Research
and Development (R&D) funding—amounting to trillions of dollars over the
past decades—has been for military purposes.
Imagine, by contrast, what could be accomplished if all of that money
and all of that scientific talent were instead directed toward finding
solutions to the crucial problems facing the human race today, such as
poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental devastation. But they are
not, and if that isn’t a tragedy, the word holds no meaning. Meanwhile,
massive war spending begets massive weapons production that begets
ever-escalating aggression that begets human tragedy of mind-numbing
dimensions.
The tragedy deepens with the realization that this is a problem that
cannot be fixed—at least not in the context of present American reality.
That is due to the American economy’s absolute, hopeless, incurable
addiction to military spending.
The metaphor of drug addiction is not nearly strong enough. Some heroin
addicts, with great difficulty, sometimes get the monkey off their
backs, but American society as currently structured is completely
incapable of breaking its addiction to militarism. War spending in the
American economy is more like an inoperable tumor destined to grow
uncontrollably until it kills its host.
How did the military become everything?
This fatal malignancy, not surprisingly, has been downplayed in the
public discourse of the United States. President Eisenhower’s 1961
warning about the dangers of the “military-industrial complex” is well
known, but the conversation went no further. Nonetheless, a recently
published book sports a title suggesting that perhaps it may finally be
breaking into the National Conversation: “How Everything Became War and
the Military Became Everything.” By stating the problem so bluntly, the
author, Rosa Brooks, has done us a service by acknowledging its
existence, but her proposed solution—to increase the military budget!—is
downright Orwellian. Or Strangeloveian.
The attention-grabbing assertion that the military has become everything
is meant figuratively, not literally. But the military’s death grip on
the federal budget and its R&D component is real enough and the question
is: How did it come about? If the United States were ruled by a military
dictatorship it would be understandable, but that is not the case. To
think the Pentagon drives the process is to believe the tail wags the dog.
Nor are the elected politicians primarily to blame for handing the
generals the keys to the treasury. Concerned above all with satisfying
the big-money benefactors who butter their bread, the legislators simply
kowtow to irresistible economic forces they don’t understand and feel no
need to understand. The addiction to military spending is built into our
economic system.
This dilemma has a name—a two-word phrase that sounds terribly academic,
but is useful as a shorthand way to identify the problem: “Weaponized
Keynesianism.”
Here is the obvious kernel of Weaponized Keynesianism: If you think the
American economy is having a hard time now generating enough jobs to
keep unemployment from rising to the skies, just imagine what it would
be like without the hundreds of billions of dollars a year in military
spending.
In the United States today, if the Pentagon ceased to provide a gigantic
artificial market for industrial production, millions of workers—and not
only defense-plant workers—would lose their livelihoods. Without
paychecks they would be unable to buy things and the wheels of the
economy would rapidly grind to a halt. It would not be merely a repeat
of the Great Deprespresent sion, it would be the Ultimate Demise of the
Current Global Economy.
American Exceptionalism
Most Americans, unfortunately, are oblivious to the military domination
of American science and all that it entails. It is a society-wide blind
spot. What could account for the collective inability to see this
monstrosity ballooning before our eyes? It follows from accepting,
consciously or unconsciously, the doctrine of American Exceptionalism.
American Exceptionalism is the contention that the United States is not
bound by traditional norms of morality in international affairs.
Invading other peoples’ countries and killing them when they resist is
generally considered war crimes most foul. Also, the use of torture has
been condemned as immoral and repugnant by all civilized peoples since
the 18th-century Enlightenment. When the United States invades, kills,
and tortures, however, it is deemed acceptable because America is
allegedly a benevolent superpower that acts only in defense of peace,
democracy, and human rights.
This normalizes the outrageously inflated, runaway American arms
production as all being in a good cause. It serves as the rationale for
a “national security state” that monitors the private communications of
everyone in the country and spawns secret terrorism tribunals that
dangerously erode the rule of law. But because American Exceptionalism
has served as the ideological justification for many wars resulting in
many millions of deaths all over the globe, it is long overdue for
critical examination.
But all is not lost! (Breaking out of the box.)
Does the preceding litany of woe seem to imply unavoidable doom and
destruction of the entire social order? That is not my intention. The
current tragedy of American science may appear to lead to a hopeless
impasse, but there is a way out.
It is not an easy way out. To comprehend it requires some serious
thinking outside the box. In this case, the box is the market-based,
profits-driven economic system that almost all American commentators and
ideologues take for granted, as if no alternative system is possible or
even worth mentioning.
This has, for many decades, been a strong, indestructible box that has
successfully imprisoned the minds and constrained the thinking of almost
the entire American public. But the 2016 elections began, perhaps, to
reveal stress fractures in the box. The campaign of Bernie Sanders
brought the word socialism into the public discourse as something other
than a swear word for the first time in most Americans’ living memory.
I do not believe Bernie Sanders’ candidacy offered a solution to the
crucial conundrum of Weaponized Keynesianism that threatens to engulf
the planet in thermonuclear flames. The record of his quarter century as
Senator and Congressman from Vermont reveals that he is an unreliable
bulwark against military spending and war. While criticizing “excessive”
defense budgets, he frequently voted to approve them, and to approve
military aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Somalia and elsewhere,
demonstrating that he posed no real challenge to the warhawks’ agenda.
However, the 2016 Sanders campaign deserves a great deal of credit for
popularizing the idea of socialism, and destigmatizing it, among young
people in America. At least that now opens the way for serious
discussion of alternatives to the current American economic system.
That discussion is essential to breaking out of the death spiral of war
spending and warfare. Discussion is certainly not enough. If words don’t
lead to organization and action, then the problem will remain unsolved.
But the discussion is nonetheless crucial.
One element of that discussion is whether science and technology can be
reoriented from destructive to creative purposes by a transformation of
the economic system. Fortunately, history does offer some important
indications of how genuine, unfettered science might fare in a
post-capitalist economy. Examining that history demonstrates that
scientific advance is not, as pro-capitalist ideologues claim, dependent
upon material incentives to private enterprise. The most heartening
examples are in the Cuban medical sciences.
Our daunting challenge
The tragedy of American science today is that its direction is
determined by private profit considerations rather than by the desire to
improve the human condition. As a result, Big Science has been
irredeemably corrupted by Big Money. That corruption threatens the air
we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, and the medicines we take.
The U.S. economy’s addiction to military spending distorts and deforms
science by making it overwhelmingly subservient to military interests.
This transforms science’s classic ideal as a creative force for the
advancement of humankind into its destructive and antihuman opposite.
That trillions of dollars in resources and scientific talent are devoted
to warfare rather than to solving the problems of poverty, disease, and
environmental destruction is among the greatest tragedies in all of
human history.
The Bernie Sanders experience once again reveals that there is no
“progressive wing” of the Democratic Party that can offer a genuine
challenge to the corporatization and militarization of American science.
The hopeful note in all of this is that replacing the current
science-for-profit system by a science-for-human-needs system is not an
impossible, utopian dream. To make it a reality, however, requires a
fundamental restructuring of our society. That is the great, daunting
challenge facing today’s youth and the generations to come. It is by no
means melodramatic to say that the survival of the human race depends on
their success. n
Cliff Conner is the author of “A People’s History of Science.” He is
currently writing a book on the history of American science from World
War II to the present.
Photo: Scientists rally during Boston conference of the American
Association fo rthe Advancement of Science in February 2017. Steven
Senne / AP
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April 17, 2017 in Environment, Trump / U.S. Government. Tags: science
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