The Review: Scientism, Covid, and the crisis of expertise

Science runs into trouble. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. “American democracy and scientific authority,” the scholar of political philosophy Jason Blakely [writes]( in the most recent Harper’s, “are suffering parallel crises of credibility, each standing accused by the other.” A longstanding pattern of tensions — “antirationalist religious traditions and anti-intellectual strains in American business and culture” on the right, the credulous acquiescence to “the overextension of scientific authority” on the center-left — has been thrown into sharp relief by the politics of Covid. A major culprit in what Blakely sees as the overvaluation of scientific expertise in the realm of politics is the social sciences, especially economics, in which, as he writes in We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power (Oxford, 2020), “description subtly implie[s] prescriptions.” Although social scientists speaking to one another in academic journals and conferences may not intend it, “the trajectory ... downward into popular domains of debate” (via, among other things, popularizing books like Freakonomics and The Tipping Point) enables the social sciences “to build a much wider political world.” Blakely is skeptical that, even in their properly academic realm, social-scientific research programs are capable of achieving sufficient “theoretical consensus within which to stage disagreements,” as he puts it in Harper’s; they are in this way unlike the natural sciences. But they sound good, and they can help “those seeking to exercise authority over the organization of society” to a bit of “the prestige of the natural sciences.” Covid politics, however, had very little to do with social scientists. On the contrary, as Blakely notes, when politicians promised to “listen to the data, listen to the science” (in the words of Biden’s former press secretary Jen Psaki), the rhetorical implication was that a rational social policy could flow directly from an accurate apprehension of the natural sciences. “Epidemiology,” he writes, “was invoked to justify the closure of schools, places of worship, businesses, and other vital institutions.” Science was deployed as a trump card that, all by itself, could settle the issue — as if, even were the data entirely accurate, competing interests and values didn’t need to be weighed. Blakely joins many on the right and some on the left in balking at this equation, which he almost seems to present as the corruption of the natural sciences by the social sciences: “The first thing to note about such policies is that they are prone to the kind of social-scientific distortions discussed above, even though they seem to emerge from the ‘hard’ science of biology. They are not acts of description but accounts of the way humans ought to behave under given circumstances.” The normative, political character of epidemiological judgment in the first year of Covid became plain when an open [letter]( signed by doctors and public-health experts endorsed the mass protests that followed the murder of George Floyd: “As public-health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for Covid-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States. ... This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.” SPONSOR CONTENT | Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore [Double Degrees: A Pathway to Global Competence and Enhanced Employability]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. Such proclamations were not calculated to promote trust in the good faith of “public-health advocates.” As Blakely observes, the letter-writers committed a category error by appealing to public health at all. “The protests,” Blakely writes, “were not a public-health action. They were a public expression of urgently felt moral outrage. The need for such expression in that moment may well have trumped the need for social distancing; regardless, it wasn’t for those health authorities to determine.” This is scientism, as Blakely defines it, distilled: the spurious invocation of one order of value (descriptive accuracy about disease transmission) in the name of another (the moral urgency of protests against police violence). Politically opportunistic messaging of this sort, Blakely writes, “sent a simple message: The rules apply when we want them to.” The consequences for the long-term reputation of public-health experts are hard to measure. Populist resistance to expert claims about Covid, of course, has another vector, more recent and arguably more important: the ongoing debates over whether Anthony Fauci and other top scientists systematically misrepresented the state of expert consensus regarding the viability of all versions of the lab-leak hypothesis. As Ryan Grim [reported]( this month in The Intercept, recovered communications among the authors of a 2020 paper called “[The]( of SARS-CoV-2]( which purported decisively to rule out a lab leak, indicate that scientists were far less certain in private. The big question is whether Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the time, had pressured the authors to publish an unambiguous rejection of laboratory origins. Edward C. Holmes, one of the authors of the proximal-origins paper, referred to “pressure from on high.” According to Grim, “Taken as a whole, the messages undercut the claims that the NIH took a hands-off approach to the paper.” In the “scientism” that concerns Blakely, the epistemic authority of the sciences is illegitimately pressed into the service of social or political ends. Here — if the charges bear out — is something different: the corruption of the natural sciences themselves in conformity with a social or political end. In further [reporting]( on July 21, Grim reproduced an email exchange between Kristian G. Andersen, the lead author of the proximal-origins paper, and Andrew Rambaut, its second author. “Natural selection and accidental release,” Andersen wrote, “are both plausible scenarios explaining the data — and a priori should be equally weighed as possible explanations.” Certain aspects of the data inclined Andersen “slightly more toward accidental release, but it’s well above my paygrade to call the shots on a final conclusion.” Rambaut responds: “Given the shit show that would happen if anyone serious accused the Chinese of even accidental release, my feeling is we should say that given there is no evidence of a specifically engineered virus, we cannot possibl[y] distinguish between natural evolution and escape so we are content ... with ascribing it to natural processes.” And Andersen agrees: “I hate when politics is injected into science — but it’s impossible not to, especially given the circumstance.” Read Jason Blakely’s “[Doctor’s Orders]( and Ryan Grim on “[A Trove of Damning Covid Documents]( and “[Key Scientist in Covid Origin Controversy Misled Congress on Status of $8.9 Million NIH Grant.]( ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Bootcamp for Future Faculty Leaders] [Join us in September]( for a professional development program tailored to the needs of midcareer faculty. Experienced academic leaders and faculty members will provide insights on the diverse professional paths that might be taken by faculty members in this one-day virtual program. [Register today!]( The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Student Teaching Evaluations Are Racist, Sexist, and Often Useless]( By David Delgado Shorter [STORY IMAGE]( It’s time to put these flawed measures in their place. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [The University as Truthteller]( By Kevin Dettmar [STORY IMAGE]( The University of Tulsa’s Switchyard Festival makes a mockery of censorship. THE REVIEW | OPINION [Another Black Woman Academic Deceived and Dismissed]( By Susan King [STORY IMAGE]( In 2021 it was Nikole Hannah-Jones. Now it’s Kathleen McElroy. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Howard Zinn and the Politics of Popular History]( By Nick Witham [STORY IMAGE]( The controversial historian drew criticism from both left and right. We need more like him today. 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And for more on paranoia and conspiracy theories, read Geoff Shullenberger’s Review essay on “[A Left-Wing Case for Conspiracy Theory]( - “When Linnaeus’s exotic agouti, a kind of oversized guinea pig on stilts, suddenly died, he was inconsolable, fearing that this would ‘surely shorten my own life.’” In The Wall Street Journal, Christoph Irmscher reviews the late Gunnar Broberg’s [book about Linnaeus]( translated from the Swedish by Anna Paterson and published by Princeton University Press. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [College as a Public Good - The Chronicle Store]( [College as a Public Good]( Many leaders and industry observers say it has been decades since the heat on presidents has been this intense. [Order your copy today]( to explore what today’s presidents are up against, how things are changing, and how to navigate new challenges. 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