A fully autonomous and authoritative science is too powerful, with no attendant responsibility, or so I shall argue. Critics of science attacked the most obvious aspect of this issue first: science's authority. Yet science is stunningly successful at producing accounts of the world. Critiques of science's general authority in the face of its obvious importance seem absurd. The issue that requires serious examination and reevaluation is not the authority of science, but its autonomy. Simply assuming that science should be autonomous, because that is the supposed source of authority, generates many of the difficulties in understanding the relationship between science and society.
That image of fully autonomous and authoritative science haunts my dreams: scientists in white lab coats issuing command and re-ordering the world, the common people reduced to washing bottles in a shining, anti-humanistic nightmare cityscape. This is the mere product of a a fevered imagination which has watched too many bad science-fiction films, but it struck me, what is it that we find so disturbing about an authoritative and autonomous science?
The world has seen rule by many groups who consider themselves autonomous. Any petty tyrant who rules by force is relatively autonomous from the demands of the population. Capital, in an oligarchy, might be similarly autonomous. Authoritative rule is also nothing new, at least in the limited respect that in a feudal system, no commoner would consider becoming the king, the social ordering was authoritative to that degree. A more specific example of an authoritative government might be the bureaucratic theocracies of ancient Egypt, or the Chinese Middle Kingdom. But these governments had to balance power between the priesthood and the monarchy. A fully autonomous and authoritative government would be the theocracy qua theocracy, the kingdom of God where His representative speak with absolute force. It is a totalizing force, which regulates every aspect of an individual's life with more exactitude than even the most intrusive secret police force. Rule by scientists would be much the same; through the mechanisms of biopower it would be similarly all encompassing. The technocracy would exercise the utmost normative and coercive force.
Modern America is not a technocracy, it is a state ruled by law and by a pluralistic sharing of power. But because of science's stunning success in revealing truths about the natural world, it is the final arbiter over major policy claims. The para-scientific disciplines of economics, history, and the social sciences have similar, if lesser authority over other matters, like the success of a policy. Rational policy-making must have a respect for truth, the alternative is to turn control of government over to spin doctors and those who directly use values to reach judgments, a situation that will eventually lead to disaster as aspiration hits reality.
The value-free ideal was created as a way to allow scientific knowledge to inform policy-making, while avoiding a technocracy, which is anathema to values of liberty, self-governance, and balance of powers enshrined in the Constitution. Yet, instead of insulating scientists from criticism, it has merely made criticism of science an endemic part of politics, and lead to a wholesale abandonment of rational/scientific policy-making (see global warming is scientific conspiracy). How then can science be brought back in line? We can't abandon the authority of science, but we can eliminate its autonomy, and have scientists recognize that they are political actors as well. Oddly enough, internalizing these debates may lead to better, less politicized science, as people make explicit their values and reasons for believing what they believe.
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