Every time science enjoys one of its moments of enormous trust it sows the seeds for its own undermining by entrenching belief in one overriding authority.
, were simply betraying their insiders’ conviction that health rules were thinly disguised tools of authority.“To cover questions of interpretation and significance with the curtain of data is to recruit the authority of science in a way that ultimately undermines it,” Blakely continued. In other words, where we have blind faith in science, the science fades sooner than the habits of blind faith.
I would argue that this reaction is now harming causes as diverse as climate action and the Voice campaign. On climate, Australians have a high, and often unquestioning, belief in “the science” and a decreasing energy for doing anything about it. Few of us examine or test climate science, and are happy to go along with the consensus – “the science is in!”, we exclaim to shut down climate sceptics – yet the rate of climate action remains inadequate.
The victory of science in the COVID pandemic left a residue among millions of Australians who grew tired of smarter people telling them what to do. They went along with it when their lives and health were at risk, but they were building a stone of resentment for an issue that felt less threatening. Not for the first time, the welfare of Indigenous Australians has been thrown under the bus of an unrelated social tide. This time a reaction against expertitis.
As Professor Blakely argues, pretty persuasively I think, whenever science enjoys one of its moments of enormous trust, whenever it enjoys the prestige of a quasi-religion, it becomes irresistible to those in power. The worst crimes of the 20th century, from the Gulag to the extermination camps to atomic warfare, were committed by regimes acting in the name of “scientific progress”.
A health warning should always be attached to the health warnings. It was originally put by Popper, the philosophical father of modern science: don’t believe in anything unless it allows you to scrutinise it and prove it wrong.
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