By David Pan · Monday, October 3, 2022 Telos 200 (Fall 2022): The Place of Truth at the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The place of truth at the university has always been elsewhere. Scientific conclusions are after all hypotheses, subject to continuing examination and critique in a process that forever defers the arrival at a final truth. In addition to this unbridgeable temporal distance from truth, there is a spatial distance to the extent that the university is subject to a larger purposive context that stands outside of scientific activity itself. A researcher can be objective by being non-prejudicial in collecting facts and weighing arguments but can never be neutral in terms of the goals of the research, which must always be established before the research begins and from outside of the research project itself.[1] Research cannot begin until an interest in some question has been expressed, and such an interest has generally not been up to the researcher to decide. Whether the goal of medical research will be to protect humans from a virus or attack humans with a virus will be determined by the sponsor of the research rather than the researcher, who at best may decline to take part in some forms of research. If the determiners of the goals of the university are not the professors themselves but the society that sponsors their work, it is within this external values framework that the truth of the university must be found.
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By Russell A. Berman · Monday, August 8, 2022 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.
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By Mathieu Slama · Monday, August 8, 2022 These remarks on the French Science Council were published in Le Figaro on July 7, 2022 and appear here with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
The Science Council met for the last time this week and has issued its 75th and final opinion. It will disappear officially on July 31. In its final statement, it underscored the importance of better scientific education for the youth, who will be the public leaders of the future, and it recommended the creation of a “Council of Science,” which would consist of a “group of scientists of the highest quality” to advise the head of state. Whether these recommendations are followed or not, it is likely that some new organ will be established in the coming months. In any case, we are at the end of an institution that played a decisive role throughout the public health crisis, and it is useful to offer a preliminary evaluation of it.
Composed of brilliant individuals and our best scientists, the Science Council—despite all the talent that it has included—has been one of the principal architects of the democratic debacle of the health crisis. And if there is a lesson to be drawn from this fiasco, it is that science should never be a substitute for politics and that political decisions cannot result simply from scientific expertise—at the risk of profoundly degrading our democracy.
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By Telos Press · Tuesday, December 28, 2021 Today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast features a panel discussion of Timothy W. Luke’s new book, The Travails of Trumpification, published earlier this month by Telos Press. The discussion, in which Tim is joined by David Pan, Fred Siegel, and Mark S. Weiner, covers a range of topics and questions, including the meaning and origins of “Trumpification”; Trump’s contempt for democratic liberal norms; the emergence of a progressive habitus in the early twentieth century; the critique of liberal managerialism; the rhetoric of the “forgotten little guy” (à la Rodney Dangerfield); the purposeful use of ignorance to send up the degreed classes; the extent to which Trump emerged out of “Nixonland”; Trump’s undermining of the claims of scientific truth; the relationship of science to political interest, and how each should inform the other; the populist attack on the New Class; Trump’s elevation of individual winning over larger collective interests and the public good; the weakening of a rationalist epistemology on which democracy depends in favor of an ethos of pure power; how the Afghanistan withdrawal and the coronavirus pandemic exacerbated the public’s disdain for expertise; and how power might be shifted from the administrative state to the local level as a way of integrating all members of the public in political decision-making and thereby revitalizing citizenship. Timothy W. Luke’s The Travails of Trumpification is now available in our online store, where you can save 20% off the list price by using the coupon code BOOKS20.
Listen to the podcast here.
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By Russell A. Berman · Tuesday, October 12, 2021 It is probably prudent to start with a clear affirmation that the pandemic is real, that COVID-19 has taken many lives, and that public health measures have been necessary to try to limit the devastation of the disease. No denying here.
But it is also evident that the messaging by health authorities has often been confusing, and that has undermined their own credibility: for example, in the shift from initial advice against wearing masks to the current (if inconsistent) mandate to do so. If the science on a particular question is not fully settled, it might be better for the authorities to be honest about that indeterminacy rather than to lay claim to an infallibility they cannot maintain. That clarity, however, would mean a willingness to trust the public to think on its own and to act in the spirit of individual responsibility, instead of issuing orders and vilifying critics.
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By Gérard Bökenkamp · Tuesday, October 12, 2021 The following essay first appeared in Achgut.com on September 18, 2021, and appears here with the permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, with comments here.
From the very start of the pandemic, corona and climate change have always been mentioned in the same breath. Indeed, the parallels are unmistakable. In both cases it is a matter of invisible threats from natural phenomena. In both cases, the discussion is shaped by scientists with data and modelings that are difficult to follow, as they demonstrate the need to limit personal freedoms. In both cases, large parts of the population submit to these prohibitions and limitations on freedom. In both cases, we have seen radical movements emerge, like Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Zero-Covid, that demand even more extreme measures, reminiscent of charismatic conversion cults and chiliastic sects. In both cases, “deniers” and “skeptics” are denounced as dangers who stand in the way of preventing a catastrophe. After the COVID lockdown, a climate lockdown will take place, with the one transitioning into the other seamlessly.
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