I get sad and scared when people use scientific knowledge to justify their life, or (increasingly) their prescriptions for the lives of others. Living scientifically would be to take ones gardening advice from an agricultural technologist: nothing they say would be wrong, exactly, but if your favourite plant falls inside the 2% of expected crop losses from their recommended fertiliser youre shit out of luck, because you probably dont have the technical, rhetorical or financial resources to make your particular case meaningful in the knowledge system unless you are professionally in the game. In reaching a scale of knowledge you can use and develop as a gardening practice, its more useful to chat with the old person who has lived down the road forever. (Related: old women are the most interesting scientists). In that power relation, science remains a pious system, not too different in its value for living than the relation of theological scholarship to the evangelical mechanisms of religious institutions. Science warriors decry the lack of scientific literacy in the world, but the situation is not helped when public outreach efforts by scientists take a form that suppresses the difference between contexts of scientific discovery, justification and application: where science is presented as truth instead of a relatively arcane context for stabilising truth. Scientific knowledge is probably the most useful at the human scale in the way that it was for my late uncle: as a basis for science fiction, an understanding of technical modes of life that shape our possibilities for living. But as much SF dramatises, narratives for our lives are forged out of technical systems that we learn to escape or that wear out around us, while the technical governance of the political classes rolls on, soliciting our participation but ultimately immune to it, perhaps more immune as their version of rationality becomes our brittle default mode of making meaning.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 21:47:51 +0000