Science - A Liberating or Controlling Force?
Nowadays, there is a euphoria regarding science and its ability to deal with the problems of humanity. Originally, science was a core principle of progressivism - it was a tool to free the people from inequality's strictures. A deeper examination reveals science has become weaponized as a tool of control by corporations.
As philosopher Paul Feyerabend sounded this warning in his essay "How to Defend Society Against Science": "Science, surely, was always in the forefront of the fight against authoritarianism and superstition. It is to science that we owe our increased intellectual freedom vis-a-vis religious beliefs; it is to science that we owe the liberation of mankind from ancient and rigid forms of thought. Today these forms of thought are nothing but bad dreams - and this we learned from science."
Feyerabend warns, however, of the danger of science degenerating into scientific dogmatism, stifling individual thought and creativity: "I have said that science has become rigid, that it has ceased to be an instrument of change and liberation, without adding that it has found the truth or a large part thereof, considering this additional fact we realize, so the objection goes, that the rigidity of science is not due to human willfulness. It lies in the nature of things. For once, we have discovered the truth -what else can we do but follow it?"
The appeal-to-science argument is a powerful one. After all, who cannot be for the use of reason and logic, and the scientific methodology? But what if the powerful gatekeepers of society get to decide what constitutes science for their agendas?
Inevitably, those with monetary and commercial interests have an incentive to take over science and use it to advance their agendas - enter the corporate intrusion into science. This fact was a concern even before COVID. In 2019, the Union of Concerned Scientists lamented about corporate intrusion into climate change research: "Cases of such corporate intrusions have been observed in a variety of places where science is used to inform federal policy. They range, for example, from interference in the Food and Drug Administration's approval of medical devices to the blocking of a national ground-level ozone standard proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. And increasingly, climate science is being used as a political football, with companies and their allies creating confusion around the science in an attempt to delay regulatory action."
Corporate intrusion is the "worst enemy of science." As reported by Discover Magazine: "the biggest threat to science has been quietly occurring under the radar, even though it may be changing the very foundation of American innovation. The threat is money, specifically, the decline of government support for science and the growing dominance of private spending over American research."
What happens when profit-making incentives and corporate partnerships begin to dominate academic institutions, research priorities, scientific journals, and public health policies? Discover magazine stated that much of the problems of corporate intrusion into science began with the Bayh-Dole Act: "Passed in 1980, the act granted universities and their professors the automatic rights to own and commercialize federally funded research. The goal was to unlock financial incentives that would speed the pace of American scientific innovation. Overnight, many of the cultural taboos associated with overt commercial profiteering on campus began to evaporate."
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