The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future

IV. Science’s Technologies and Applications

PART FOUR Science's Technologies and Applications Western science at its foundations, as promoted by its most brilliant as well as its most ordinary exponents, never questioned the usefulness of scientific knowledge for warmaking. I know of no text from the early modern period which suggests that the scientist should withhold his knowledge from any government , at any time, but especially in the process of preparing for warmaking. Indeed most texts that recommend science also propose its usefulness in improving the state's capacity to wage war more effectively, to destroy more efficiently. Margaret Jacob, The Cultural Meanings of the Scientific Revolution [M]odern science and technology are indivisible. The particular character of modem science ushered in with the Galilean revolution is precisely that it is directed towards experiment, use, technology itself; it is this which sets modem science apart from that of classical Greece, Babylon or India. The contemporary production of scientific knowledge is predominantly through the method of experiment, inherently committed to acting on the natural world, in order to understand and control it. At the level of consciousness of individual scientists, a quite contrary view was commonly expressed from the nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century. This emphasized the disinterested and non-utilitarian nature of the work of the "man of science".... Their belief that they were pursuing knowledge for knowledge's sake savours more of the social functions of pre-modem science, where science is on a par with other intellectual and aesthetic activities such as music or poetry, than those of contemporary science. Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, "The Incorporation of Science," Ideology of/in the Natural Sciences Modern science . . . is a threat to democracy, the quality of human life, and even the very capacity of our planet to support life at all. Moreover, modern science is a social problem because it is part of modern society, which itself is a social problem.... The scientific revolution was one of an interrelated set of parallel organizational responses within the major institutional spheres of Western Europe from the fifteenth century onwards (including Protestantism in the religious sphere and modern capitalism in the economic sphere) to an underlying set of eco- 272 / Science's Technologies and Applications logical, demographic, and political economic conditions. This perspective does not readily yield a conception of modern science as an autonomous social system. Sal Restivo, "Modem Science as a Social Problem," Social Problems 35:3 (1988) [I]n the fifteen years following the war, the central fact of scientific life in physics was unprecedented growth based upon military funding. Yet however "significant" the funds made available for basic research, the total of such funds for all fields of science represented only a relatively insignificant fractionroughly 5°J6-of the military's outlays for research and development . This rule of the twentieth arose in the earliest efforts to attach basic research to military missions.... The observance of this rule almost religiously even unto the present day results not from any intrinsic quantitative dependence of technical development upon "basic" research, but because a twentieth is the largest amount still relatively insignificant. It is the highest still inappreciable rate of taxation on social investment in advanced technological enterprise.... [T]oday even the 5°16 is encumbered by an explicit mission orientation. Paul Forman, "Behind Quantum Electronics," Historical Studies in Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987) Should the strengths and weaknesses of the sciences, on the one hand, and of scientific technologies, applications and consequences, on the other hand, be evaluated independently? As was discussed in the introductory essay, the older view has been that they are discrete, and that it is important not to confuse the two. (This directive has sometimes, bizarrely, been interpreted to mean that no one should try to describe the causal relations between sciences and their technologies , applications, and consequences.) According to the older view, scientists and science institutions-foundations, universities, laboratories, journals, and so on-bear no responsibility for what society does with the information about nature and the social order that the sciences provide. Since World War II, however , this older view has come to seem more and more mistaken about the way contemporary science is located and practiced in contemporary society-and in earlier ones, as well. Of course there have been many good consequences of scientific technologies and applications. In contrast to Sal Restivo's important argument stated in the epigraph, science should not...