The scientific approach is not one of obedience to authority

The scientific approach is not one of obedience to authority

The scientific approach is not one of obedience to authority (even if it is the authority of a scientific institution (because these institutions are also state-owned and linked to the possessing classes), of refusal of debate, of discrediting new and iconoclastic theses, of media coverage, of discrediting authors who do not fall into line, of pressure from States to impose answers...

We are constantly being bombarded with undisputed statements (which are even recommended not to be discussed, and which discredit the intentions and intellectual or social capacities of those who discuss them).

We are told that discussing these theses (which are simple, unproven hypotheses) would be anti-scientific, intellectually inept and even anti-social.

This is based on a so-called "consensus of the scientific community." But it is important to know that in science, thousands of times a scientific advance has come up against a consensus among scientists who did not accept it at all. The opposite is a rare occurrence : a new scientific idea that is well received by the scientific community. Great scientists like Planck and Einstein claimed that they were waiting for the next generation to accept their point of view.

All this has always been observed, but what is new is the extent to which society in place, the ruling classes, claim to manipulate science and scientists to push public opinion in a direction that suits them.

So, in the past, there have been many times when the ruling classes have imposed their views on scientists, but it is very rare that they have used them to impose their views on public opinion. Most of the time, they were content to act without even informing the population.

Today, we’re going to have a speech that nuclear power plants are good for the planet, for the climate, for CO², whereas, when the nuclear power plants were launched, we didn’t even inform public opinion ! And we were careful not to ask for the consensus of scientists before launching the nuclear power plants because even the scientists who did the first ones admitted that they weren’t at all sure of the result (which means that Fermi and Oppenheimer said they didn’t know if they weren’t going to blow up the region or even the planet)...

Should we believe the consensus of scientists who say they are sure that a medical product against covid (let’s not say a vaccine because that is a pure and simple lie since a vaccine is an attenuated virus) which manipulates immunity will not have disastrous consequences in heart or autoimmune diseases ? We should know in advance what only decades of monitoring can provide as an answer. We do not have "the distance" recognize honest scientists and they generally affirm that they agreed to vaccinate because of the health emergency and at the risk of causing other mass misfortunes. But the majority are not honest and do not recognize it because they do not understand it or do not have the courage to face society.

Should we believe the consensus of scientists who claim that the worst thing for the planet and humanity is carbon dioxide, when it is far from being the worst pollution of capitalism and the greenhouse effect causing global warming on a climatic scale (i.e. over tens of millions of years) cannot be proven ?

The refusal to organize real public scientific debates between the proponents of the two previous theses and their opponents speaks volumes about the honesty of their proponents. The refusal to publish authors and articles that would oppose them in scientific journals, in the media, and in all public debates speaks volumes about the atmosphere of inquisition that surrounds these manipulations of science.

Covid vaccines (mRNA or not) and the greenhouse effect, the alleged cause of massive global warming, are not the only topics where it is currently forbidden to discuss, contest, or argue.

On the covid pandemic in particular, other debates were refused : on covid in schools, on protective measures (such as FFP2 masks), on treatments, on long covid, on the validity of mass vaccination in the middle of a pandemic, on the transmission mechanisms (aerosols and not droplets).

In medicine, many other public debates between scientists have been rejected, such as the one on the effects of aluminum in vaccines or on the necessity (or not) of so many childhood vaccines.

There is also no public debate on the results of the actions of major intergovernmental organizations such as the IPCC or the WHO. Their actions could be widely contested, as could the scientific advice they claimed to give. Let us recall, just as an example, that glaciers should no longer have existed for years in the Himalayas, according to the IPCC, and that Covid should be much less dangerous than the flu according to the WHO. These are the kinds of statements made by these organizations. It should be remembered that we were told that the unvaccinated would die, that unvaccinated health workers were the cause of the spread, while vaccine manufacturers now admit (but a little late) that they never claimed that their vaccine combated the spread of the virus !

The nuclear example also speaks volumes about the "opinions of specialists" who are linked to the industry they are supposed to control... And also about the reliability of reports from specialized scientific institutions. They simply lie as they breathe !

They’ve reached the point of announcing that nuclear energy is a clean energy ! This is the height of absurdity. No trust is possible... When Fukushima releases radioactive water into the oceans. When the corium from the power plant cores has not been found. When no one is capable of managing the radioactive waste from this industry. When reports are truncated, hiding flaws, hiding accidents, hiding disasters...

Another well-known example is pharmaceutical companies and the organizations that are supposed to monitor them. It’s easy to say that they’re being sold out, and that capitalist interests take precedence over the lives of patients. Fake drugs or downright dangerous products are sold for years without the regulatory bodies lifting a finger.

The same is true of public health institutions responsible for monitoring polluting industries such as the chemical industry. This results in a proliferation of diseases in the vicinity of these industries, without any alarm from scientific authorities. Once again, science is being called upon to provide support.

Major scientific institutions are tied to major capitalist interests, and both of them don’t care about the lives of the people. They only talk about it to mislead public opinion and hide their crimes behind so-called scientific studies.

We remember that the head of French national meteorology intervened in the media to affirm that the Chernobyl cloud had turned around at the border, preventing thousands of people in the Alps or Corsica from taking precautionary measures and condemning them to illnesses (thyroid cancer, leukemia and others).

We also remember the French health authorities hiding the deaths from the heatwave. The figures from INSERM and Public Health were false. When the head of the Paris fire department made the true death statistics public, he was fired on the spot !

And that’s without mentioning scientific specialists in education, sociology, economics, politics, etc. Their basic principle is that what is good for capitalism is good for human society.

More than ever, in its necrophiliac phase, when it is dying at the end of its tether, capitalism only calls upon "science" to cover up crimes. We call this the "sorcerer’s apprentice" of science.

Science is not based primarily on obedience to scientific authorities, but on a method, an overall logic of work and interpretations, verifications with observational methods and above all a free and unlimited criticism of all the results obtained. Any statement, even one that has been long-standing and even one supported by the greatest scientists, has the right to be challenged provided that this discussion uses the scientific method and is based on credible arguments. Credibility does not consist in obedience to already recognized ideas, otherwise science would never progress. In science, we have the right to challenge Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg and any other "scientific authority" and we do not hold back.

When governments lack the authority to impose their choices, they claim to rely on the authority of science...

But can science itself be seriously mistaken due to social prejudices, economic interests or pressures from power ?

Can science be seriously mistaken due to social prejudices, economic interests or pressures from power ?

“The full development of capital therefore only takes place – or rather : capital has only established the mode of production that is adequate to it – from the precise moment when the means of labor are not determined merely formally as fixed capital, but abolished in their immediate form, and when fixed capital enters the scene as a machine opposite labor within the production process ; when the production process itself is determined as being not subsumed under the immediate skill of the worker, but as the technological application of science. To give production a scientific character is therefore the tendency of capital, and immediate labor is reduced to the rank of a mere moment in this process. (…) The development of fixed capital indicates to what extent general social knowledge, knowledge, has become an immediate productive force, and consequently, to what extent the conditions of the life process of society have themselves passed under the control of the general intellect, and are reorganized in accordance with it. "To what extent the social productive forces are produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but as immediate organs of social practice ; of the real process of life." writes Karl Marx, in Capital.

"At the present time, what is the situation in the social body of humanity for the man of science ? To a certain extent, he can congratulate himself that the work of his contemporaries, even in a very indirect way, has radically changed the economic life of men because it has almost entirely eliminated muscular work. But he is also discouraged since the results of his research have caused a terrible threat to humanity. For the results of his investigations have been hijacked by the representatives of political power, these morally blind men." wrote Einstein, in "On the Degradation of the Scientific Man," in How I See the World

“There can be no doubt that the 20th century was the century in which science transformed both the world and our knowledge of it. We should have expected to see 20th-century ideologies glorying in the triumphs of science, which were victories of the human spirit, just as the secular ideologies of the 19th century had done. Indeed, we should even have expected to see the resistance of traditional religious ideologies, which had been the great redoubts of resistance to science in the previous century, weaken. (...) Yet the 20th century was never at ease with science, which was its most extraordinary achievement and on which it became so dependent,” writes historian Eric J. Hobsbawm in “The Age of Extremes.”

“On matters as fundamental as the general philosophy of change, science and society usually work hand in hand. (...) When monarchies collapsed and the 18th century ended in revolution, scientists began to regard change as a normal part of the universal order, not as an aberration or an exception. (...) Gradualism, the idea that all change must be gradual, slow, and steady, never originated from an interpretation of rocks. It represents a preconceived, widely held opinion, partly explained as a reaction of 19th-century liberalism to a world in revolution,” explained Stephen Jay Gould in “Panda’s Thumb.”

Franco Selleri adds, in "The Great Debate of Quantum Theory" : "Today the most widespread opinion is that physics is a purely technical activity carried out by researchers in their laboratories, according to well-established theoretical and experimental rules and that it is fundamentally neutral with respect to cultural trends, philosophy, social problems and others."
Can science be seriously mistaken due to social prejudices, economic interests or pressures from power ?

Science is by no means independent of the economic, social, political, military and ideological interests of the ruling classes and the capitalist system and sometimes the mixture is particularly horrible : atomic bomb, nuclear, chemical, bacteriological, biochemical catastrophe and others… Scientists must never be considered as objective guarantors against these dangers…

Official science claims that we are now turning away from the "big questions," that we no longer want to philosophize but to develop applied sciences that produce new technologies and generate rapid profits. Like all other areas of society, science must be held accountable on the altar of rapid profit, as rapid as possible. As a result, we only speak in terms of new technologies, nanotechnologies, information or computer technologies, biotechnologies, imaging technologies, energy technologies, etc.

Even specialist science journals are now in the hands of finance, and the journal Springer Sciences, owned by the Mohm family of financiers, is now called "Springer, Science and Technology."

Science is not objective, not neutral, it is one of the forms of human thought, not a direct expression of a certain and indisputable reality.

"The fascinating thing about science is that for a ridiculously low investment in facts, you get a surprisingly high return in conjecture."

Mark Twain
Science is not objective, not neutral, it is one of the forms of human thought, not a direct expression of a certain and indisputable reality.

This essay is written with the conviction that anarchism, while not the most attractive political philosophy, is certainly an excellent remedy for epistemology and for the philosophy of science.

The reason is not difficult to find.

"History in general, and more particularly the history of revolutions, is always richer in content, more varied, more multifaceted, more alive, more ingenious than the best historians and the best methodologists think." Lenin, himself, wrote in "The Infantile Disease of Communism - Leftism" : "History in general, and more particularly the history of revolutions, is always richer in content, more varied, more multifaceted, more alive, more ingenious than the best parties, the most conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes think."

History is full of "accidents, conjunctures, and curious juxtapositions of events" (Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History). It demonstrates to us the "complexity of human evolution and the unpredictability of the ultimate consequences of any act or decision of men."

Are we really going to believe that the naive and simplistic rules that serve as a guide for epistemologists can answer such a "labyrinth of interactions" ? Hegel wrote in his "Philosophy of History" (1837) : "Now what experience and history teach us is that peoples and governments have never learned anything from history and have never acted according to the lessons that could have been learned from it. Each epoch has circumstances so peculiar to itself, it is such an individual state that it must necessarily decide in itself and from itself and that only in this way can one decide."

"Very clever" ; "clever and very clever" writes Lenin in his marginal notes to this passage from Hegel.

(…) “From this (this character of the historical process) two practical conclusions of great importance follow,” Lenin wrote following the passage I have just quoted. “The first is that the revolutionary class (that is, the class of those who want to change either one instance of society, such as science, or society as a whole) in order to fulfill its task must know how to take possession of all forms and all aspects, without the slightest exception, of social activity (it must be capable of understanding and applying not only a particular methodology, but any methodology, with all the forms it can imagine for it (…) ; the second is that the revolutionary class must be ready to replace one form quickly and abruptly by another.”

Here we see very clearly how a few substitutions can transform a lesson in politics into a lesson in methodology. This is not at all surprising. Methodology and politics are both means of moving from one historical stage to another. The only difference is that standard methodologies neglect the fact that history constantly generates new characteristics. We also see how an individual, like Lenin, who is not afraid of traditional limits and whose thinking is not tied to the ideology of a profession, can offer advice useful to everyone, including philosophers of science.

"The external conditions," wrote Einstein, "which are set for the scientist by the facts of experience, do not allow him to be too restricted in the construction of his conceptual universe by adherence to an epistemological system. Consequently, he must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a kind of unscrupulous opportunist."

A complex environment containing surprising and unpredictable developments demands complex procedures and defies analysis based on pre-established rules that do not take into account ever-changing historical conditions.

Of course, it is possible to simplify the environment in which scientists work by simplifying its principal actors. But the history of science, after all, does not consist solely of facts and the conclusions drawn from them. It also contains ideas, interpretations of facts, problems created by conflicting interpretations, errors, and so on. We even discover, through closer analysis, that science does not know a single "brute fact," but that the "facts" that enter into our knowledge are already viewed from a certain angle, and are, therefore, essentially speculative. This point being established, the history of science will be as complex, chaotic, full of errors, and diverting as the ideas it contains ; and these ideas, in turn, will be as complex, chaotic, full of errors, and diverting as the minds of those who invented them. Conversely, a little brainwashing will easily succeed in making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more "objective" and more ready to submit to strict and immutable rules.

The scientific education we know today has precisely this last goal. It simplifies "science" by simplifying its elements. First, a field of research is defined. This field is separated from the rest of history (physics, for example, is separated from metaphysics and theology) and given a "logic" of its own. Advanced training in such "logic" then conditions those who work in this field, makes their actions more uniform, and also freezes large parts of the historical process.

Stable "facts" emerge and persist despite the vicissitudes of history. A key factor in this formation, which allows these facts to emerge, is to inhibit intuitions that might lead to a blurring of boundaries... And this is further reflected in the nature of scientific "facts," which are experienced as independent of opinions, beliefs, and cultural affiliations.

It is therefore possible to create a tradition and maintain it by strict rules ; this, to a certain extent, allows for success. But is it desirable to support such a tradition while rejecting all other possibilities ? Should it be given the exclusive right to process knowledge, with the consequence that any result obtained by other methods is eliminated without appeal ? This is the question I intend to pose in this essay. To this question, my answer will be a firm and resounding NO.

(...)

Science is a complex and heterogeneous historical process, containing vague and incoherent anticipations of future ideologies, side by side with highly sophisticated theoretical systems, and old or petrified forms of thought. Some of these elements are accessible in the form of clear statements, while others are implied and become known only by contrast, when compared with new and unusual points of view… Many of the conflicts and contradictions that have arisen in science are due to the heterogeneity of the materials, to the “unevenness” of historical development, as the Marxists would say ; and they have no immediate theoretical import.

According to Marx, the "secondary" elements of the social process such as demand, artistic production or legal relations can precede material production and lead it : see "The Poverty of Philosophy" by Karl Marx and especially "The Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy" : "The unequal relation between the development of material production and that of artistic production, for example. Generally speaking, one should not take the idea of ​​progress in the usual abstract form, modern art, etc. This disproportion is far from being as important, nor as difficult to grasp, as that which occurs within practical social relations. For example, of culture... But the real difficulty to discuss is this : how the relations of production, by taking the form of legal relations, follow an unequal development."

Trotsky describes the same situation : "The essential point of the question lies in this : the different aspects of historical progress - the economy, politics, the state, the rise of the working class - do not develop simultaneously on parallel lines." (speech delivered at the general congress of party members of the Moscow Organization in July 1921.

See also Lenin’s "The Infantile Disorder of Communism – ’Leftism’" where he explains that the multiple causes of an event may be out of phase and have an effect only when they are united. In a different form, the thesis of "uneven development" deals with the fact that capitalism has reached different stages in different countries, and even in different regions of the same country. This second type of uneven development may lead to inverse relationships between the ideologies it gives rise to ; so that efficiency in production and radical political ideas develop in inverse proportions.

“Civilized and advanced Europe, with its brilliantly developed technology, with its rich and varied culture and Constitution, has reached a historical moment when the ruling bourgeoisie, through fear of the proletariat growing in numbers and strength, supports everything that is backward, dying, and medieval. (…) On the other hand, all of young Asia, that is, hundreds of millions of workers in Asia, have a sure ally in the proletariat of all civilized countries.” (Lenin, “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia,” May 18, 1913).

(...)

Separation of State and Science...

... Science ... It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, but not necessarily the best. Science is indiscreet, noisy, insolent ; it is only ... religious.

Essentially superior only in the eyes of those who have opted for a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having studied its advantages and limitations. And since it is up to each individual to accept or reject ideologies, it follows that the separation of State and Church must be complemented by the separation of State and science : the most recent, the most aggressive and the most dogmatic of institutions

The fairy tale...

Facts, logic and methodology alone decide... Science is a neutral structure, containing positive knowledge independent of culture, ideology or prejudices - this is what the fairy tale tells us.

Myth and science...

Myth is much closer to science than one might expect...

The myth : - central ideas are ... sacred - there is anxiety as soon as they are threatened - there is almost never an admission of ignorance - events that challenge ... established lines of classification ... provoke a taboo reaction.

Science : -is dogmatic -skepticism is reduced to a minimum ; it is directed against the conceptions of the opposition ... but never against the fundamental ideas themselves -attacking the fundamental ideas provokes taboo reactions ... and everything that does not succeed in integrating is ... considered as ... horrible ... or ... held to be non-existent (e.g. ... the first reactions against quantum theory, astrology, telekinesis, telepathy, Voodoo ...).

It is necessary to review our attitude towards myth, religion, magic, witchcraft, and all those ideas that rationalists would like to see disappear from the face of the earth...

A more modest place...

The rise of modern science coincides with the suppression of non-Western societies by Western invaders. ...tradition disappears... one simply becomes a slave in mind as well as in body. Now, however, this movement is gradually being reversed - with much ill will, of course, but it is being reversed. Freedom is being regained, old traditions are being rediscovered among minorities in Western countries, and among a large part of the populations of non-Western continents. (...many Western experts were horrified at the revival of traditional Chinese medicine...) But (Western) science still reigns supreme... its practitioners are incapable of understanding different ideologies, and do not want to compromise with them. ...they have more money, more authority, more sex appeal than they deserve, and the stupidest procedures, the most ridiculous results are in their field, surrounded by an aura of prestige. It is time to take them down from their pedestals and give them a more modest position in society.

... Modern society treats science in a special way... it grants it privileges that other institutions do not enjoy.

We must conclude, then, that even within science, reason cannot, and must not, have a universal scope ; that it must often be overridden, or eliminated, in favor of other authorities. There is no rule that remains valid for all circumstances, and no single authority to which one can always appeal. (...) Given science, the rational cannot be universal ; this particular character of the development of science is a very strong argument in favor of an anarchist epistemology. But science is not sacrosanct. The restrictions it imposes (...) are not necessary for having general, coherent, and adequate views of the world. There are myths, the dogmas of theology, metaphysics, and many other means of constructing a worldview. It is clear that a fruitful exchange between science and such unscientific worldviews will need anarchism even more than science itself. Thus, anarchism is not only a possibility, but a necessity, both for the internal progress of science and for the development of culture in general. And Reason, in the end, joins all those abstract monsters—Obligation, Duty, Morality, Truth—and their more concrete predecessors—the Gods—which once served to intimidate men and restrict a happy and free development ; it withers away.