From liberal humanism to technocratic fascism.

Dominique Pestre, in his chapter "Science, Political Power and the State," looks at the development of the political-military-industrial-academia complex in the United States and Europe. Or, put in a less cumbersome manner, Pestre is interested in examining the political mobilization of science in the 20th-century. Though, as he argues, science at many times sits in for political processes as an authority unto itself:

Since science is a discourse that claims not to depend on partisan decisions, it enables one to 'technicalize' public action, to 'de-politicize' it, to render it impersonal, to bypass the democratic rules of accountability. This mode of action leads to an instrumentalization of politics through the use of specialists, it gives to political decisions the force of necessity, and it comes to substitute competence and technical knowledge for the affirmation of will and of values deliberately chosen.

Scientific and technocratic decisions thus come drenched with the scent of neutrality, which covers over the inherently political processes operating just beneath the surface. In other words, good science fools us into thinking that we needn't deliberate about its implications; it gets to pass go and collect $200. As Pestre points out, this was especially true in the transition period after the war when science and social sciences were mobilized to win the war and then found themselves taking that ethos back to post-war laboratories. The Cold War, of course, presented a perfect opportunity to stress the continued importance of ongoing technological and scientific advancements to win the new war. And today we have this ethos continued on in the ever-more-ubiquitous war on terror. As with most who talk about these "cold wars," Pestre underplays the severity of the "contained local conflicts" simply because they happen to be folded into the ambiguous boundaries of the greater Cold War.

Pestre emphasizes how the instrumentalization of science plays a central role in the transformation of what it means to do science. Thus scientific and technological gadgets, including devastating weapons, took center stage during the second world war. And this emphasis carried on after the war, thus displacing the more abstract philosophical questions that science had been equally interested in tackling. The delineation is clearly present in the uproar that ensues around stem-cell research (i.e. science playing God) and the absolute lack of concern around the proliferation of information technology and personal computing devices. The implications of the latter on civilization are no less ethically profound, but they pass along into our hands with no concern whatsoever. We don't even think to politicize the production of the iPhone or iPad; that's just "good science" at work put towards a seemingly practical end. Unfortunately, the massive land-fills of "out-of-date" computer devices in China tells a different story and challenges the goodness of the science. However, we typically ignore such issues because a distance has been placed between science and politics. Science does things and politics does ideas, or something like that. A wedge has been driven between the humanism of the Enlightenment project and the practice of science, where science, when it invents things like the atomic bomb, ends up embodying something like a technocratic fascism. In what other way could we describe something as monstrous as the creation and use of the atomic bomb?