Defining disagreements: from intolerance to civil dialogue in the science wars

Paul Gross, Norman Levitt, and Martin Lewis’s 42-essay volume, The Flight from Science and Reason, originated in a 1995 conference sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS). Given what I had read about the gathering, I expected that I would find a book filled with the same kind of hyperbolic drivel that has saturated the pages of anti-science studies invectives over the past several years. There are papers of this kind in the book, and yet, although (as in any collection) the quality of the contributions varies, I was surprised to read a number of serious and thoughtful chapters.

In this review, then, I want to consider some of the interesting pieces in The Flight from Science and Reason, but I will spend the balance of the essay highlighting the ways in which the kinds of arguments in the collection and its overall structure serve to reinforce a particularly unhelpful dynamic that has characterized both the “science wars” and the larger “culture wars”: these debates have been dominated by exchanges of overblown rhetoric. I will also explore how the intersections of this volume with Steven Epstein’s Impure Science point us to the larger issues at stake in these ongoing public and scholarly skirmishes: the nature of and means to scientific literacy, the appropriateness of and possibilities for citizen participation in the realm of science, and the question whether there ought to be restrictions placed on the teaching of controversial perspectives.

Among the stimulating pieces in the NYAS volume, Martin Lewis provides an assessment of radical environmentalism from someone who calls himself a “self-professed environmentalist” (p. 210). Lewis agrees with most environmentalists that “the passage into the twenty-first century sees the world in a state of ecological crisis . . . [and that] much of the blame must be assigned to technologies that owe their existence to Enlightenment thought” (p. 210). However, unlike radical Greens who call for the “wholesale rejection of science” as the means to save human civilization (p. 209), Lewis is “convinced that a wholehearted commitment to reason and science offers the only way out of the dilemma” (p. 210). While he agrees with some ecoradical perspectives, he also attempts to show that the Enlightenment “cannot be directly blamed for our contemporary environmental crisis” (p. 215). He states, for example, that the human contribution to deforestation and the diminution of wildlife substantially predates the Enlightenment (p. 215). Beyond this, he contends that ecoradical theorists may inadvertently contribute to antienvironmental policy by delegitimizing environmentalism in the eyes of mainstream citizens and by undermining scientists’ evidence pointing to environmental degradation.

In a quite different (but equally engaging) chapter, Meera Nanda makes the case for the importance of science to the emancipation projects of postcolonial peoples. She argues that insistence on the validity of diverse local traditional knowledges is less likely to provide a means to liberation than the “chance to acquire and participate in the dominant knowledge systems” (p. 420). Ultimately, according to Nanda, “The problem with letting go of reason even as an ideal is that then there is nothing left in whose name arbitrary authority of patriarchal institutions and practices can be challenged” (p. 431).

Essays like these that seriously address the concerns of the perspectives they seek to contest while avoiding hyperbole make it difficult to dismiss this collection. Still, the volume is marred by the “flight from reason” and reasonableness found in a number of chapters. In several papers the writers caricature a field of scholarly investigation, treating a heterogeneous area of study as if its participants adhered to a single program. Thus, for example, Barry Gross outlines eight beliefs to which he claims the “anti-science brigades” are committed. These beliefs include: authority is always wrong; hierarchy is...