Peripatetics

Separate State and Science

BY SHELDON RICHMAN

don’t reach much fiction these days, but one novel I blood individuals with preferences, values, and aspira- intend to read is State of Fear, Michael Crichton’s tions. Social engineering would meet with more skepti- Istory of how environmentalists use allegedly man- cism if this were kept in mind. made catastrophic global warming to control the popu- The other threat is the subject of Crichton’s appen- lation.Anyone who has the power to cause such hysteria dix: the politicization of science, or the union of scien- among the Kyoto Protocol set must be doing something tific research and state. By now, of course, government right. (Bjørn Lomborg is another.) I have Crichton’s has tainted much of science, especially medicine and cli- book in hand, but my schedule doesn’t permit me to matology. There is no neutral government funding of dive in quite yet. However, I was informed that at the research. Every benefit is a tether. Each grant creates a back of the book there is an appendix with this grabber desire for future grants, which means the findings had of a title: “Why Politicized Science Is better not offend the grant-making Dangerous.”This is a topic dear to my Anyone who has the agency, which always has an agenda. heart, so I read it. Crichton, who has anthropology Science, let us stipulate at the out- power to cause such and medical degrees from Harvard, set, has been of inestimable value to the hysteria among the begins his brief essay by looking back human race. Because of science we live at two notorious cases of politicized longer and healthier lives (to the dis- Kyoto Protocol set science: eugenics and Lysenkoism. In may of the Social Security bureau- both cases a preconceived “public pol- crats); we have devices that make life must be doing some- icy” objective drove and therefore cor- easier, more pleasant, and more fun: thing right. rupted the “science.” What occurred think of our reliable automobiles, small had the appearance of science (unless computers, PDAs, cell phones, portable DVD players, one looked carefully), but in fact bore no relation to and iPods (the latest thing I can’t live without); we have actual scientific activity. Essential terms weren’t even inexpensive ways to keep in touch with distant loved defined, so most of what was said was meaningless, except ones. All of us quickly take for granted revolutionary for its power to further the objective. inventions that would have astounded our grandparents As Crichton points out, in the early twentieth centu- and in some cases even our parents. ry eugenics was presented as a scientific answer to a pur- But science, like anything else, can be twisted into ported crisis—the enfeebling of the human race: “The something inimical to human welfare. I see two threats. best human beings were not breeding as rapidly as the One comes from scientism.This is the use of the proce- inferior ones—the foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degen- dures of the physical sciences in the study of human erates, the unfit, and the ‘feeble minded.’” What was the action, especially economics. When human beings are answer? In the United States, it was compulsory sterili- looked on as objects rather than persons, trouble brews. zation; in Germany,it included extermination by gas.Yet Properly conceived, science gives us life-serving control eugenics was the vogue among “progressives.” Presti- over our physical environment. Improperly conceived, it gious foundations—Carnegie, Rockefeller—poured emboldens social engineers to control us. Beware those money into it. Prominent figures were eager to associate who view the economy as a machine. Statistical aggre- gates and simultaneous equations conceal flesh-and- Sheldon Richman ([email protected]) is the editor of The Freeman.

25 JUNE 2005 Sheldon Richman themselves with the movement, including Theodore defeat the scourge of mosquito-carried malaria in the Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, developing world was reversed and the deadly disease Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank, Leland Stan- made a tragic comeback. ford, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and Margaret In his brief discussion of this episode, Crichton Sanger (founder of what became known as Planned Par- pulled no punches: enthood).The first president of the American Eugenics Society was the well-known Yale University economist I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen and did Irving Fisher. As Crichton notes, after the Nazis gave not cause birds to die and should never have been eugenics a bad name, biographers neglected to mention banned. I can tell you that the people who banned it their subjects’ former enthusiasm for the cause. knew that it wasn’t carcinogenic and banned it any- Regarding the scientific status of eugenics, Crichton way. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the writes, “But in retrospect, three points stand out. First deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly chil- . . . there was no scientific basis for eugenics. In fact, dren, whose deaths are directly attributable to a cal- nobody at the time knew what a gene really was. The lous, technologically advanced western society that movement was able to proceed because it employed promoted the new cause of environmentalism by vague terms never rigorously defined. . . . Second, the pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevo- eugenics movement was really a social program mas- cably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one querading as a scientific one.What drove it was concern of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth cen- about immigration and racism and undesirable people tury history of America.We knew better, and we did moving into one’s neighborhood or country....Third, it anyway, and we let people around the world die and most distressing, the scientific establishment in both and didn’t give a damn. the United States and Germany did not mount any sus- tained protest. Quite the contrary.In Germany scientists Crichton’s speech covers much more than this, and I quickly fell into line with the program.” commend it highly. (It is online at the PERC website, In the second case, the Russian peasant T. D. www.perc.org/publications/articles/Crichtonspeech.php.) Lysenko’s claim that he had discovered how to make In the State of Fear appendix, Crichton emphasizes crops grow better by treating seeds and thereby altering that he is not claiming that the global-warming scare is offspring seeds had no scientific foundation whatsoever, exactly like the fear-mongering about the supposed but it fit with the anti-genetic prejudices of Josef Stalin. threat to the human gene pool.“But the similarities are “Lysenko was portrayed as a genius, and he milked his not superficial,” he writes. “And I do claim that open celebrity for all it was worth,” Crichton writes. He even- and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is tually joined the Supreme Soviet.“By then, Lysenko and being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken his theories dominated Russian biology.The result was strong editorial positions on the side of global warm- famines that killed millions, and purges than sent hun- ing, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under dreds of dissenting Soviet scientists to the gulags or the the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts under- firing squads.” stands clearly that they will be wise to mute their Politicized science ruins and destroys lives. expression.” That kind of atmosphere is the death knell of gen- The Banning of DDT uine science and the benefits it is capable of producing. n a speech to the Commonwealth Club in San Fran- The lives and liberty of everyone are in jeopardy.“[T]he Icisco in 2003, Crichton provided another lesson in intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, the lethality of politicized science: the ban of the insec- with a bad history,” Crichton concludes. “We must ticide DDT. In the early 1960s Rachel Carson’s book remember the history,and be certain that what we pres- Silent Spring set off a movement to rid the world of the ent to the world as knowledge is disinterested and insecticide. As a result, the long and promising effort to honest.”

THE FREEMAN: Ideas on Liberty 26