Obama's Orwellian Doublespeak on Science and Politics

In the fateful year 2000, SWNID paid a visit to the magnificent Israel Museum (and other parts of Israel, Egypt and Turkey, for that matter, but that's off point) with a group of students and colleagues. Availing ourselves of the free guided tour, we listened to the volunteer guide explain the museum's context. Israel, we were told, is the most excavated country in the world. Generations ago, those who excavated it styled themselves "biblical archaeologists" and sought "to prove that the Bible is true." "But today," she intoned solemnly, "archaeology is a science, and today's archaeologists aren't trying to prove anything."

We glanced around our group and were gratified to see smirks of skeptical amusement on all faces.

Our guide then showed us the museum's first display, a stone-age burial site, each detail of which she explained precisely as a part of the primitive culture thousands of years gone, a preliterate culture from which we have by definition not one shred of text to explain what "scientists" have determined so positively and without bias.

Such epistemological naivete is to be expected from wealthy, elderly ladies who have left the Upper West Side to spend their winters in Jerusalem and who fill their days with volunteer work before afternoon cocktails.

Apparently, it is also to be expected of Presidents with law degrees from our Republic's leading university.

After signing an executive order lifting Bush's limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, the President had one of his many assistants (so many assistants, so few appointments: whatever became of "advise and consent"?)--Melody C. Barnes, director of Obama's Domestic Policy Council--announce that he is signing a memo to keep politics out of science.

Yet another authoritative figure untouched by Senate hearings, Harold Varmus, co-chair of Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, said that the memo, as yet unreleased, will "assure a number of effective standards and practices that will help our society feel that we have the highest-quality individuals carrying out scientific jobs and that information is shared with the public."

In other words, to shield science from politics, the Obamanoids assure Americans that they are led by suitably brilliant folks in lab coats, all much smarter than the rest of us. These Uebermenchen will share their wisdom with us plebs, despite the fact that we won't be able to understand or question it.

Nice. The guarantee that politics stays out of science is an overtly political program, a public-relations campaign that uses language as skilfully as any character in Orwell's books.

One more time, we state the obvious--our specialty:

• Science is not a better way of knowing than other ways of knowing. It tells us much about the natural world. It tells us nothing about meaning, ethics, aesthetics, and other matters.
• Whether embryonic stem cells have properties that could be therapeutic is a question that "science" might be able to answer. Whether destroying embryos to carry out such research is right or wrong is not a scientific question but an ethical one. Any decision to limit or not limit such research is not scientific and has nothing to do with the importance of science.
  
• Bush never restricted all stem-cell research, only federally funded research on embryonic stem cells that were not from the lines already subject to research. In effect, he made certain that more human embryos would not be destroyed on the taxpayers' dime, since many taxpayers believe that such destruction is murder or something approaching it. The decision was to respect the ethics of millions of taxpayers, not to stop scientific research. In that respect, it sought a balance between the two ethical conclusions at odds with each other in the body politic.
• By saying that politics will not interfere with science, Obama either confuses what science can do or cynically announces that no ethical considerations will limit his administration's funding of scientific research.
• Or more likely, Obama is announcing that science will be restricted only in those matters that do not fit his administration's ideology. It just takes some effort to understand that from the announcement.
  
• Obama's move is first of all to ingratiate his administration to all who depend on federal grants for research. He's promising, in effect, that while bankers, brokers and businessmen will be subject to stricter regulation in the future, researchers in the pure sciences will not. MBAs bad; PhDs good.
• Obama's longer-term move is to clothe his entire administration in the sacred priestly garb of "science." Policy decisions can now be advanced as the results of unfettered science, unquestionable in its objectivity, acuity and efficacy.
  

Who do we call next, Dr. Mengele or Dr. Science?