Editor's Note:
It usually takes me an hour to edit six articles for this blog. It took me one hour just to edit this article. From an interesting website I'd never heard of until yesterday.
It covered too many subjects: Science, Climate, COVID, Politics and Philosophy. Many sentences were too long. The article itself was much too long. But I couldn't delete it, because it contained some brilliant thoughts about modern science. To "fix" it. I deleted a large portion.
I also moved the "CLIMATE" thoughts from the middle of the article, to the beginning. The result is still not great writing ('write as you speak'). And it's still too long. But there are some brilliant thoughts here. As usual, I did not add any of my own words:
Source:
https://unherd.com/about-unherd/
"How science has been corrupted"
https://unherd.com/about-unherd/
"How science has been corrupted"
CLIMATE:
"In 2009, someone hacked the emails of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain and released them, prompting the “climategate” scandal
in which the scientists who sat atop the climate bureaucracy were revealed to be stonewalling against requests for their data from outsiders.
... The climate research cartel staked its authority on the peer review process of journals deemed legitimate, which meddling challengers had not undergone.
But, as Gurri notes in his treatment of climategate, “since the group largely controlled peer review for their field,
and a consuming subject of the emails was how to keep dissenting voices out of the journals and the media, the claim rested on a circular logic”.
One can be fully convinced of the reality and dire consequences of climate change while also permitting oneself some curiosity about the political pressures that bear on the science, I hope.
Try to imagine the larger setting when the IPPC convenes.
Powerful organisations are staffed up, with resolutions prepared, communications strategies in place,
corporate “global partners” secured,
interagency task forces standing by and diplomatic channels open,
waiting to receive the good word from an empaneled group of scientists working in committee.
This is not a setting conducive to reservations, qualifications, or second thoughts.
The function of the body is to produce a product: political legitimacy.
The climategate scandal delivered a blow to the IPPC, and therefore to the networked centres of power for which it serves as science-settler.
This perhaps led to a heightened receptivity in those centres for the arrival of a figure such as Greta Thunberg
who escalates the moral urgency of the cause (“How dare you!), giving it an impressive human face that can galvanise mass energy.
She is notable both for being knowledgeable and for being a child, even younger and more fragile-looking than her age, and therefore an ideal victim-sage."
One can be fully convinced of the reality and dire consequences of climate change while also permitting oneself some curiosity about the political pressures that bear on the science, I hope.
Try to imagine the larger setting when the IPPC convenes.
Powerful organisations are staffed up, with resolutions prepared, communications strategies in place,
corporate “global partners” secured,
interagency task forces standing by and diplomatic channels open,
waiting to receive the good word from an empaneled group of scientists working in committee.
This is not a setting conducive to reservations, qualifications, or second thoughts.
The function of the body is to produce a product: political legitimacy.
The climategate scandal delivered a blow to the IPPC, and therefore to the networked centres of power for which it serves as science-settler.
This perhaps led to a heightened receptivity in those centres for the arrival of a figure such as Greta Thunberg
who escalates the moral urgency of the cause (“How dare you!), giving it an impressive human face that can galvanise mass energy.
She is notable both for being knowledgeable and for being a child, even younger and more fragile-looking than her age, and therefore an ideal victim-sage."
REMAINDER OF THE ARTICLE:
" ... My father became famous for these “kitchen physics” experiments after he included assignments based on them in a textbook he wrote,
" ... My father became famous for these “kitchen physics” experiments after he included assignments based on them in a textbook he wrote,
published in 1968 and beloved by generations of physics students: Waves (Berkeley Physics Course, Vol. 3).
... He pursued such investigations, not simply as a pedagogical exercise, but to satisfy his own curiosity.
And he made time for this even while working at the frontier of particle physics, in the lab of Louis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
This was fairly early on in the transition of the practice of science into “big science”.
Alvarez won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his invention and use of the bubble chamber, an instrument for detecting particle decays.
It was a device that would comfortably fit on a table top.
Today you can build one yourself, if you like.
But over the next few decades particle accelerators became enormous installations (CERN, SLAC) requiring the kind of real estate only governments and major institutions, indeed consortiums of institutions, can secure.
Scientific papers came to have, not a handful of authors, but hundreds.
Scientists became scientist-bureaucrats: savvy institutional players adept at getting government grants, managing sprawling work forces, and building research empires.
Inevitably, such an environment selected for certain human types, the kind who would find such a life appealing.
A healthy dose of careerism and political talent was required.
Such qualities are orthogonal, let us say, to the underlying truth-motive of science.
... Kitchen physics is about the pure intellectual refreshment of wondering about something that you observe in the world with your own unaided powers, and then investigating it.
This is the basic image we have of what science is, immortalised in the anecdote of Galileo going up into the leaning tower of Pisa and dropping various objects to see how fast they fall.
In 1633, Galileo was brought before the Inquisition for his demonstration that the earth is not fixed but revolves around the sun.
This was a problem, obviously, because the ecclesiastical authorities believed their legitimacy rested on a claim to have an adequate grasp of reality, as indeed it did.
Galileo had no interest in being a martyr, and recanted to save his skin.
... This anecdote has a prominent place in the story we tell about what it means to be modern.
On one side, science with its devotion to truth.
On the other side, authority, whether ecclesiastical or political.
In this tale, “science” stands for a freedom of the mind that is inherently at odds with the idea of authority.
The pandemic has brought into relief a dissonance between our idealised image of science, on the one hand, and the work “science” is called upon to do in our society, on the other.
... Big science is fundamentally social in its practice, and with this comes certain entailments.
As a practical matter, “politicised science” is the only kind there is (or rather, the only kind you are likely to hear about).
But it is precisely the apolitical image of science, as disinterested arbiter of reality, that makes it such a powerful instrument of politics.
This contradiction is now out in the open.
The “anti-science” tendencies of populism are in significant measure a response to the gap that has opened up between the practice of science and the ideal that underwrites its authority.
As a way of generating knowledge, it is the pride of science to be falsifiable (unlike religion).
... Presumably, the whole point of authority is to explain reality and provide certainty in an uncertain world, for the sake of social coordination, even at the price of simplification.
To serve the role assigned it, science must become something more like religion.
The chorus of complaints about a declining “faith in science” states the problem almost too frankly.
The most reprobate among us are climate sceptics, unless those be the Covid deniers, who are charged with not obeying the science.
If all this has a medieval sound, it ought to give us pause.
We live in a mixed regime, an unstable hybrid of democratic and technocratic forms of authority.
Science and popular opinion must be made to speak with one voice as far as possible, or there is conflict.
According to the official story, we try to harmonise scientific knowledge and opinion through education.
But in reality, science is hard, and there is a lot of it.
We have to take it mostly on faith.
... The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it.
That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere.
It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the trade-offs.
But it can’t make the necessary choices for us.
... He pursued such investigations, not simply as a pedagogical exercise, but to satisfy his own curiosity.
And he made time for this even while working at the frontier of particle physics, in the lab of Louis Alvarez at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.
This was fairly early on in the transition of the practice of science into “big science”.
Alvarez won the Nobel Prize in 1968 for his invention and use of the bubble chamber, an instrument for detecting particle decays.
It was a device that would comfortably fit on a table top.
Today you can build one yourself, if you like.
But over the next few decades particle accelerators became enormous installations (CERN, SLAC) requiring the kind of real estate only governments and major institutions, indeed consortiums of institutions, can secure.
Scientific papers came to have, not a handful of authors, but hundreds.
Scientists became scientist-bureaucrats: savvy institutional players adept at getting government grants, managing sprawling work forces, and building research empires.
Inevitably, such an environment selected for certain human types, the kind who would find such a life appealing.
A healthy dose of careerism and political talent was required.
Such qualities are orthogonal, let us say, to the underlying truth-motive of science.
... Kitchen physics is about the pure intellectual refreshment of wondering about something that you observe in the world with your own unaided powers, and then investigating it.
This is the basic image we have of what science is, immortalised in the anecdote of Galileo going up into the leaning tower of Pisa and dropping various objects to see how fast they fall.
In 1633, Galileo was brought before the Inquisition for his demonstration that the earth is not fixed but revolves around the sun.
This was a problem, obviously, because the ecclesiastical authorities believed their legitimacy rested on a claim to have an adequate grasp of reality, as indeed it did.
Galileo had no interest in being a martyr, and recanted to save his skin.
... This anecdote has a prominent place in the story we tell about what it means to be modern.
On one side, science with its devotion to truth.
On the other side, authority, whether ecclesiastical or political.
In this tale, “science” stands for a freedom of the mind that is inherently at odds with the idea of authority.
The pandemic has brought into relief a dissonance between our idealised image of science, on the one hand, and the work “science” is called upon to do in our society, on the other.
... Big science is fundamentally social in its practice, and with this comes certain entailments.
As a practical matter, “politicised science” is the only kind there is (or rather, the only kind you are likely to hear about).
But it is precisely the apolitical image of science, as disinterested arbiter of reality, that makes it such a powerful instrument of politics.
This contradiction is now out in the open.
The “anti-science” tendencies of populism are in significant measure a response to the gap that has opened up between the practice of science and the ideal that underwrites its authority.
As a way of generating knowledge, it is the pride of science to be falsifiable (unlike religion).
... Presumably, the whole point of authority is to explain reality and provide certainty in an uncertain world, for the sake of social coordination, even at the price of simplification.
To serve the role assigned it, science must become something more like religion.
The chorus of complaints about a declining “faith in science” states the problem almost too frankly.
The most reprobate among us are climate sceptics, unless those be the Covid deniers, who are charged with not obeying the science.
If all this has a medieval sound, it ought to give us pause.
We live in a mixed regime, an unstable hybrid of democratic and technocratic forms of authority.
Science and popular opinion must be made to speak with one voice as far as possible, or there is conflict.
According to the official story, we try to harmonise scientific knowledge and opinion through education.
But in reality, science is hard, and there is a lot of it.
We have to take it mostly on faith.
... The phrase “follow the science” has a false ring to it.
That is because science doesn’t lead anywhere.
It can illuminate various courses of action, by quantifying the risks and specifying the trade-offs.
But it can’t make the necessary choices for us.
By pretending otherwise, decision-makers can avoid taking responsibility for the choices they make on our behalf.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority.
Increasingly, science is pressed into duty as authority.
It is invoked to legitimise the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest.
Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life.
A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.
But the question of political legitimacy hanging over rule by experts is not likely to go away.
If anything, it will be more fiercely fought in coming years as leaders of governing bodies invoke a climate emergency that is said to require a wholesale transformation of society.
We need to know how we arrived here.
... Authority has always been located in hierarchical structures of expertise, guarded by accreditation and long apprenticeship, whose members develop a “reflexive loathing of the amateur trespasser”.
... In the 20th century, especially after the spectacular successes of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon landing, there developed a spiral wherein the public came to expect miracles of technical expertise ...
Reciprocally, stoking expectations of social utility is normalised in the processes of grant-seeking and institutional competition that are now inseparable from scientific practice.
The system was sustainable, if uneasily so, as long as inevitable failures could be kept offstage.
This required robust gatekeeping, such that the assessment of institutional performance was an intra-elite affair (the blue-ribbon commission; peer review),
... The internet, and the social media which disseminate instances of failure with relish, have made such gatekeeping impossible.
... In recent years, a replication crisis in science has swept aside a disturbing number of the findings once thought robust in many fields.
... Henry H. Bauer, chemistry professor and former dean of arts and sciences at Virginia Tech,
published a paper in 2004 in which he undertook to describe how science is actually conducted in the 21st century:
it is, he says, fundamentally corporate (in the sense of being collective).
“It remains to be appreciated that 21st-century science is a different kind of thing than the ‘modern science’ of the 17th through 20th centuries….”
Now, science is primarily organised around “knowledge monopolies” that exclude dissident views.
... The all-important process of peer review depends on disinterestedness, as well as competence.
“Since about the middle of the 20th century, however, the costs of research and the need for teams of cooperating specialists
have made it increasingly difficult to find reviewers who are both directly knowledgeable and also disinterested; truly informed people are effectively either colleagues or competitors.”
Bauer writes that “journeymen peer-reviewers tend to stifle rather than encourage creativity and genuine innovation.
Centralized funding and centralized decision-making make science more bureaucratic and less an activity of independent, self-motivated truth-seekers.”
In universities, “the measure of scientific achievement becomes the amount of ‘research support’ brought in, not the production of useful knowledge”.
(University administrations skim a standard 50% off the top of any grant to cover the “indirect costs” of supporting the research.)
Given the resources required to conduct big science, it needs to serve some institutional master, whether that be commercial or governmental.
In the last 12 months we have seen the pharmaceutical industry and its underlying capacity for scientific accomplishment at its best.
The development of mRNA vaccines represents a breakthrough of real consequence.
...This ought to give pause to the political reflex to demonise pharmaceutical companies that is prevalent on both the Left and the Right.
But it cannot be assumed that “the bottom line” exerts a disciplining function on scientific research that automatically aligns it with the truth motive.
Notoriously, pharmaceutical companies have, on a significant scale, paid physicians to praise, recommend and prescribe their products,
and recruited researchers to put their names to articles ghost-written by the firms which are then placed in scientific and professional journals.
Worse, the clinical trials whose results are relied upon by federal agencies in deciding whether to approve drugs as safe and effective are generally conducted or commissioned by the pharmaceutical companies themselves.
The bigness of big science — both the corporate form of the activity, and its need for large resources generated otherwise than by science itself
— places science squarely in the world of extra-scientific concerns, then.
Including those concerns taken up by political lobbies.
If the concern has a high profile, any dissent from the official consensus may be hazardous to an investigator’s career.
Public opinion polls generally indicate that what “everybody knows” about some scientific matter, and its bearing on public interests, will be identical to the well-institutionalized view.
This is unsurprising, given the role the media plays in creating consensus.
Journalists, rarely competent to assess scientific statements critically, cooperate in propagating the pronouncements of self-protecting “research cartels” as science.
Bauer’s concept of a research cartel came into public awareness in an episode that occurred five years after his article appeared. (ClimateGate)
Note: The climate section of this long article, formerly located here, was moved to the beginning, as "CLIMATE" Ye Editor
There appears to be a pattern, not limited to climate science-politics, in which the mass energy galvanised by celebrities (who always speak with certainty)
strengthens the hand of activists to organise campaigns in which any research institution that fails to discipline a dissident investigator is said to be serving as a channel of “disinformation”.
The institution is placed under a kind of moral receivership, to be lifted when the heads of the institution denounce the offending investigator and distance themselves from his or her findings.
They then seek to repair the damage by affirming the ends of the activists in terms that out-do the affirmations of rival institutions.
As this iterates across different areas of establishment thinking, especially those that touch on ideological taboos,
Over the past year, a fearful public has acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life.
A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterised as “anti-science”.
But the question of political legitimacy hanging over rule by experts is not likely to go away.
If anything, it will be more fiercely fought in coming years as leaders of governing bodies invoke a climate emergency that is said to require a wholesale transformation of society.
We need to know how we arrived here.
... Authority has always been located in hierarchical structures of expertise, guarded by accreditation and long apprenticeship, whose members develop a “reflexive loathing of the amateur trespasser”.
... In the 20th century, especially after the spectacular successes of the Manhattan Project and the Apollo moon landing, there developed a spiral wherein the public came to expect miracles of technical expertise ...
Reciprocally, stoking expectations of social utility is normalised in the processes of grant-seeking and institutional competition that are now inseparable from scientific practice.
The system was sustainable, if uneasily so, as long as inevitable failures could be kept offstage.
This required robust gatekeeping, such that the assessment of institutional performance was an intra-elite affair (the blue-ribbon commission; peer review),
... The internet, and the social media which disseminate instances of failure with relish, have made such gatekeeping impossible.
... In recent years, a replication crisis in science has swept aside a disturbing number of the findings once thought robust in many fields.
... Henry H. Bauer, chemistry professor and former dean of arts and sciences at Virginia Tech,
published a paper in 2004 in which he undertook to describe how science is actually conducted in the 21st century:
it is, he says, fundamentally corporate (in the sense of being collective).
“It remains to be appreciated that 21st-century science is a different kind of thing than the ‘modern science’ of the 17th through 20th centuries….”
Now, science is primarily organised around “knowledge monopolies” that exclude dissident views.
... The all-important process of peer review depends on disinterestedness, as well as competence.
“Since about the middle of the 20th century, however, the costs of research and the need for teams of cooperating specialists
have made it increasingly difficult to find reviewers who are both directly knowledgeable and also disinterested; truly informed people are effectively either colleagues or competitors.”
Bauer writes that “journeymen peer-reviewers tend to stifle rather than encourage creativity and genuine innovation.
Centralized funding and centralized decision-making make science more bureaucratic and less an activity of independent, self-motivated truth-seekers.”
In universities, “the measure of scientific achievement becomes the amount of ‘research support’ brought in, not the production of useful knowledge”.
(University administrations skim a standard 50% off the top of any grant to cover the “indirect costs” of supporting the research.)
Given the resources required to conduct big science, it needs to serve some institutional master, whether that be commercial or governmental.
In the last 12 months we have seen the pharmaceutical industry and its underlying capacity for scientific accomplishment at its best.
The development of mRNA vaccines represents a breakthrough of real consequence.
...This ought to give pause to the political reflex to demonise pharmaceutical companies that is prevalent on both the Left and the Right.
But it cannot be assumed that “the bottom line” exerts a disciplining function on scientific research that automatically aligns it with the truth motive.
Notoriously, pharmaceutical companies have, on a significant scale, paid physicians to praise, recommend and prescribe their products,
and recruited researchers to put their names to articles ghost-written by the firms which are then placed in scientific and professional journals.
Worse, the clinical trials whose results are relied upon by federal agencies in deciding whether to approve drugs as safe and effective are generally conducted or commissioned by the pharmaceutical companies themselves.
The bigness of big science — both the corporate form of the activity, and its need for large resources generated otherwise than by science itself
— places science squarely in the world of extra-scientific concerns, then.
Including those concerns taken up by political lobbies.
If the concern has a high profile, any dissent from the official consensus may be hazardous to an investigator’s career.
Public opinion polls generally indicate that what “everybody knows” about some scientific matter, and its bearing on public interests, will be identical to the well-institutionalized view.
This is unsurprising, given the role the media plays in creating consensus.
Journalists, rarely competent to assess scientific statements critically, cooperate in propagating the pronouncements of self-protecting “research cartels” as science.
Bauer’s concept of a research cartel came into public awareness in an episode that occurred five years after his article appeared. (ClimateGate)
Note: The climate section of this long article, formerly located here, was moved to the beginning, as "CLIMATE" Ye Editor
There appears to be a pattern, not limited to climate science-politics, in which the mass energy galvanised by celebrities (who always speak with certainty)
strengthens the hand of activists to organise campaigns in which any research institution that fails to discipline a dissident investigator is said to be serving as a channel of “disinformation”.
The institution is placed under a kind of moral receivership, to be lifted when the heads of the institution denounce the offending investigator and distance themselves from his or her findings.
They then seek to repair the damage by affirming the ends of the activists in terms that out-do the affirmations of rival institutions.
As this iterates across different areas of establishment thinking, especially those that touch on ideological taboos,
it follows a logic of escalation that restricts the types of inquiry that are acceptable for research supported by institutions, and shifts them in the direction dictated by political lobbies.
Needless to say, all this takes place far from the field of scientific argument, but the drama is presented as one of restoring scientific integrity.
In the internet era of relatively open information flows, a cartel of expertise can be maintained
only if it is part of a larger body of organised opinion and interests that, together, are able to run a sort of moral-epistemic protection racket.
Reciprocally, political lobbies depend on scientific bodies that are willing to play their part.
This could be viewed as part of a larger shift within institutions from a culture of persuasion
Needless to say, all this takes place far from the field of scientific argument, but the drama is presented as one of restoring scientific integrity.
In the internet era of relatively open information flows, a cartel of expertise can be maintained
only if it is part of a larger body of organised opinion and interests that, together, are able to run a sort of moral-epistemic protection racket.
Reciprocally, political lobbies depend on scientific bodies that are willing to play their part.
This could be viewed as part of a larger shift within institutions from a culture of persuasion
to one in which coercive moral decrees emanate from somewhere above, hard to locate precisely, but conveyed in the ethical style of HR.
Weakened by the uncontrolled dissemination of information and attendant fracturing of authority,
the institutions that ratify particular pictures of what is going on in the world must not merely assert a monopoly of knowledge,
but place a moratorium on the asking of questions and noticing of patterns.
Research cartels mobilise the denunciatory energies of political activists to run interference and, reciprocally,
the priorities of activist NGOs and foundations meter the flow of funding and political support to research bodies, in a circle of mutual support.
... I suggested there are two rival sources of political legitimacy, science and popular opinion,
that are imperfectly reconciled through a kind of distributed demagogy, which we may call scientism.
This demagogy is distributed in the sense that interlocked centers of power rely on it to mutually prop one another up.
But as this arrangement has begun to totter, with popular opinion coming untethered from expert authority and newly assertive against it, a third leg has been added to the structure in an effort to stabilise it:
the moral splendor of the Victim.
To stand with the Victim, as every major institution now appears to do, is to arrest criticism.
Such is the hope, at any rate.
... The spectacular success of “public health” in generating fearful acquiescence in the population during the pandemic
has created a rush to take every technocratic-progressive project that would have poor chances if pursued democratically, and cast it as a response to some existential threat.
In the first week of the Biden administration, the Senate majority leader urged the president to declare a “climate emergency”
Weakened by the uncontrolled dissemination of information and attendant fracturing of authority,
the institutions that ratify particular pictures of what is going on in the world must not merely assert a monopoly of knowledge,
but place a moratorium on the asking of questions and noticing of patterns.
Research cartels mobilise the denunciatory energies of political activists to run interference and, reciprocally,
the priorities of activist NGOs and foundations meter the flow of funding and political support to research bodies, in a circle of mutual support.
... I suggested there are two rival sources of political legitimacy, science and popular opinion,
that are imperfectly reconciled through a kind of distributed demagogy, which we may call scientism.
This demagogy is distributed in the sense that interlocked centers of power rely on it to mutually prop one another up.
But as this arrangement has begun to totter, with popular opinion coming untethered from expert authority and newly assertive against it, a third leg has been added to the structure in an effort to stabilise it:
the moral splendor of the Victim.
To stand with the Victim, as every major institution now appears to do, is to arrest criticism.
Such is the hope, at any rate.
... The spectacular success of “public health” in generating fearful acquiescence in the population during the pandemic
has created a rush to take every technocratic-progressive project that would have poor chances if pursued democratically, and cast it as a response to some existential threat.
In the first week of the Biden administration, the Senate majority leader urged the president to declare a “climate emergency”
and assume powers that would authorise him to sidestep Congress and rule by executive fiat.
Ominously, we are being prepared for “climate lockdowns”.
Western nations have long had contingency plans for dealing with pandemics, in which quarantine measures were delimited by liberal principles – respecting individual autonomy and avoiding coercion as much as possible.
... when the COVID pandemic began in earnest, China locked down all activities in Wuhan and other affected areas.
In the West, it was simply assumed that such a course of action was not an available option.
... Public opinion matters in the West far more than in China.
Only if people are sufficiently scared will they give up basic liberties for the sake of security – this is the basic formula of Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Stoking fear has long been an essential element of the business model of mass media,
Western nations have long had contingency plans for dealing with pandemics, in which quarantine measures were delimited by liberal principles – respecting individual autonomy and avoiding coercion as much as possible.
... when the COVID pandemic began in earnest, China locked down all activities in Wuhan and other affected areas.
In the West, it was simply assumed that such a course of action was not an available option.
... Public opinion matters in the West far more than in China.
Only if people are sufficiently scared will they give up basic liberties for the sake of security – this is the basic formula of Hobbes’s Leviathan.
Stoking fear has long been an essential element of the business model of mass media,
and this appears to be on a trajectory of integration with state functions in the West, in a tightening symbiosis.
While the Chinese government resorts to external coercion, in the West coercion must come from inside; from a mental state in the individual.
The state is nominally in the hands of people elected to serve as representatives of the people, so it cannot be an object of fear.
Something else must be the source of fear, so the state may play the role of saving us.
But playing this role requires that state power be directed by experts.
Early in 2020, public opinion accepted the necessity of a short-term suspension of basic liberties on the supposition that, once the emergency had passed, we could go back to being not-China.
... There are many things governments can do, which it is generally accepted they should not do.
And one of them, until last March, was to lock up healthy people in their homes.”
... It is far easier to destroy a convention than to establish one.
This suggests going back to being not-China may be quite difficult.
... In the US, as in the UK, the government has immense powers.
“The only thing that protects us from the despotic use of that power is a convention that we have decided to discard.”
... It is also clear that “Science” (as opposed to actual science) is playing an important role in this.
Like other forms of demagogy, scientism presents stylised facts and a curated picture of reality.
In doing so, it may generate fears strong enough to render democratic principles moot.
The pandemic is now in retreat and the vaccines are available to all who want them in most parts of the United States.
But many people refuse to give up their masks, as though they had joined some new religious order." ...
While the Chinese government resorts to external coercion, in the West coercion must come from inside; from a mental state in the individual.
The state is nominally in the hands of people elected to serve as representatives of the people, so it cannot be an object of fear.
Something else must be the source of fear, so the state may play the role of saving us.
But playing this role requires that state power be directed by experts.
Early in 2020, public opinion accepted the necessity of a short-term suspension of basic liberties on the supposition that, once the emergency had passed, we could go back to being not-China.
... There are many things governments can do, which it is generally accepted they should not do.
And one of them, until last March, was to lock up healthy people in their homes.”
... It is far easier to destroy a convention than to establish one.
This suggests going back to being not-China may be quite difficult.
... In the US, as in the UK, the government has immense powers.
“The only thing that protects us from the despotic use of that power is a convention that we have decided to discard.”
... It is also clear that “Science” (as opposed to actual science) is playing an important role in this.
Like other forms of demagogy, scientism presents stylised facts and a curated picture of reality.
In doing so, it may generate fears strong enough to render democratic principles moot.
The pandemic is now in retreat and the vaccines are available to all who want them in most parts of the United States.
But many people refuse to give up their masks, as though they had joined some new religious order." ...