The following comments refer to Mathieu Slama’s “How Brilliant Scientists Damage Democracy,” which appears here.
Among the many features of the COVID crisis, one stands out as particularly consequential: the attribution of ultimate and exclusive authority to science. Public statements abounded urging that we “follow the science,” and signs popped up on front lawns across the country advertising that the residents “believe in science”—as if science were a matter of belief rather than skepticism, observation, and experimentation. There was of course little attention to alternative scientific claims or debates within science. Instead of a scientific event, we witnessed the assertion of authority by way of the invocation of science or of what came to pass as “science.” The mandate to “follow the science” blindly has come to mean “follow the leader,” with no questions asked.
For large swaths of the public, the scientific label carries with it the implication of veracity: science, as opposed to religion (which is otherwise the proper subject matter of belief), is truth. Indeed the equation is a formula for modernity, which is why bizarre variants of modernization repeatedly cast themselves in the role of science: for Communism, the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” and for Nazis, “race science.” Nor do we have to look that far afield to those extreme cases in order to find reason to question the absolute truth claim of science. One can point to scandals like the Tuskegee experiment and to the regular reports of fraud and retractions, even in the most prestigious scientific journals. Just recently one reads that research reported in the journal Nature concerning Alzheimer’s may have been fraudulent. Following that science probably wasted millions of research dollars.
Nonetheless what took place during the COVID emergency also represents a disturbing subversion of the democratic expectations in the states of the liberal West. The severity—without appeal—of lockdown measures in Communist China is another case: no one expects freedom or rule of law there. However in varying degrees in Western countries, the pandemic elicited measures that peremptorily restricted liberties, justified always in the name of science. The policies in France were particularly severe, and Mathieu Slama describes how scientific authority displaced proper political decision-making processes. He develops a larger account in a recent book Adieu la liberté: Essai sur la société disciplinaire but in the short remarks translated here, he spells out the French experience with the curtailment of democracy in the name of science.
A core point in Slama’s argument is that the formulation of scientific recommendations was devoid of ethical considerations, and that these recommendations by the Science Council were passed on and nearly always adopted by the political authorities—because they were scientific. The process in fact points to two failings: the failings of the Science Council to build ethical reflection and democratic expectations into the scientific process from the start; and then the robotic acceptance of scientific authority by politicians who are supposed to defend the democratic order but instead merely . . . followed the science. Slama attributes this outcome to a particular managerial culture that he associates with French President Emmanuel Macron, but it is familiar elsewhere to students of critical theory as the application of an instrumental rationality devoid of ethico-pragmatic considerations.
An alternative approach might have faced the scientific claims concerning public health threats but balanced them with a broader vision of democratic processes and social needs, i.e., asking whether the severe anti-pandemic recommendations justified the losses in other parts of the balance sheet of social life: the disrupted education of young children, the economic devastation for many small businesses, the delays in medical attention for patients with non-COVID ailments, the psychological stress on everyone and its nefarious consequences, and so forth. Yet that longer tally sheet should have been attended to by politicians who, instead, just hid behind their “belief in science.” The problem was a matter of the mechanical passivity of politicians in the face of scientific claims—unless one wants to consider a different ulterior motive, the possibility that political leadership viewed the pandemic panic and the scientific injunctions as an opportunity to amplify their own ability to control and discipline societies that once thought of themselves as free. Otfried Höffe makes much the same case for Germany.
As Slama rightly points out, the pandemic crisis was not a “parenthesis.” It was an experiment in the declaration of a state of emergency as a vehicle for social discipline. There is every reason to expect new challenges to be treated as crises that demand emergency responses and corollary restrictions on freedoms. However, the more science lends itself to providing legitimacy to such politics, the more it undermines its own credibility.
