The perilous bargain: When science challenges the state

“ Here toleration is extended to every opinion, in the quiet certainty that truth needs only a fair field to secure the victory. Here the human mind goes forth unshackled in the pursuit of science, to collect stores of knowledge and acquire an ever-increasing mastery over the forces of nature. ”

“ Without the action of public opinion, any administration, however anxious to countenance the pursuits of science, and however ready toreward, by wealth or honours, those whom they might think most eminent, would run the risk of acting like the blind man recently couched, who, having no mode of estimating degrees of distance, mistook the nearest and most insignificant for the largest objects in nature: it becomes, therefore, doubly important, that the man of science should mix with the world. ”

“ Even governments can only appreciate that which they understand, and can only act as circumstances and public opinion allow them, and when fettered by an ignorant population are powerless to preserve a nation from decay.
There can not be a more complete error than to suppose that new knowledge discovered by means of scientific research is not practical. ”

“ What political wisdom would it be to honor as science any doctrine that becomes a social danger the moment it is taken seriously; what logic to denounce those as dangerous who are putting into practice a science that is hailed as the bearer of civilization! ”

“ These are sufficient reasons for care in the dispensation of truth; but the men we are describing will go on to say, "This is enough to throw suspicion on the discovery itself; even if it is true, its danger is greater than its value. ”

“ Conceding, as we must, the supremacy of facts in their own sphere, and granting that, as mundane and human affairs now stand, the evidence of the senses, purged from fraud and illusion, must be held to be conclusive, we cheerfully award to scientific men the largest liberty to pursue their inquiries in matters of fact, utterly regardless of the havoc which may be thereby wrought among the traditional, beliefs of men. In no other way can science be true to herself. ”

“ It is essentially hostile to science because it cultivates systematic misrepresentation, while the first requirement of science is allegiance to truth. Science begins with morality. It implies rectitude of thought, exemption from prejudice and passion, and the utmost attainable accuracy in its representations. It is a school—the only school we have—for discipline in truthfulness. Partisan politics, on the contrary—and partisanship is the essence of politics—is a school of deception and falsehood, and all its influences are at war with the fundamental virtue of truthfulness. ”

“ Yet even that would not change the nature of the belief, which alone could be the result of investigation carried sufficiently far; and if, after the extinction of our race, another should arise with faculties and disposition for investigation, that true opinion must be the one which they would ultimately come to. "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again," and the opinion which would finally result from investigation does not depend on how anybody may actually think. ”

“ The deer in the forest is freer in his movements than the cautious mountain-climber, who keeps to marked roads and paths, so as to journey safely, yet the latter is not without freedom. Nor will any one deny that the Australian bushman enjoys a greater outer freedom than the civilized white, restrained by laws, by rules and regulations, by standards of decency. And the busy writer of many things and everything, who in his writing never pays any attention to logic, to scientific form, to style and tact, has more freedom than one who strictly conforms to all these. ”

“ Thus our modern science can make the blind to see and the lame to walk, but it is so manacled by ancient ways and customs that it is left powerless, and so there are these maimed and darkened lives of innocent people, and they are left partially burdening the community which has only its own folly to blame for the whole stupid position. ”

“ The forces that really move the world have passed out of their control. And it is only where the forces are at work that the living ideas move upon the waters. Politicians don't study science; that is the extraordinary fact. And yet every day it becomes clearer that politics is either an applied science or a charlatanism. Only, unfortunately, as the most important things are precisely the last to be known about, and it is exactly where it is most imperative to act that our ignorance is most complete, the science of politics has hardly yet even begun to be studied. ”

“ It is the interested hypocrite alone, that is alarmed at the progress and power of truth, he whose very trade is the known propagation of falsehood and delusion, the tyrants tool and scourge. All tyranny, oppression, and delusion, have been founded upon the ignorance and credulity of mankind. Knowledge, scientific knowledge, is the power that must be opposed to those evils, and be made to destroy them. Come forward, ye Men of Science, ye must no longer remain in the back ground as trembling cowards, ye must no longer crave protection from, and creep at the pleasure of, your direst foes ”

“ It is the bounden duty of every man openly to avow whatever his mind conceives to be the truth. If he shrinks from this he is a coward—a slave to the opinions, of other men. Shall the enemies of mankind boldly tell us that they perceive truth in their mysterious and incomprehensible dogmas, and shall we shrink from the publication and support of those truths which we perceive to have an evident foundation in Nature! Shall we shrink from the avowal of truths because despotism and ignorance have granted stipends to the propagators of falsehood, and because those stipends might be endangered? ”

“ But there is one sort of freedom the scientist should never claim—freedom against the truth, freedom to ignore the truth, to emancipate himself from the truth. He is bound to accept every truth, sufficiently proved, even religious dogmas, miracles too, provided they are authenticated. Not freedom, but truth, is the purpose of research: emancipation from the truth is degeneration of the intellect, destruction of science. ”

“ Only through science can we cure diseases, and save the only planet we've got, and ensure that America keeps its competitive advantages as the world's most innovative economy.
That's why it's so backward when some folks choose to stick their heads in the sand about basic scientific facts. It's not just that they're saying that climate change a hoax or trotting out a snowball on the Senate floor. It's that they're also doing everything they can to gut funding for research and development, the kinds of investments that brought us breakthroughs like GPS, and MRIs, and put Siri on our smartphones. ”

“ At the same time, the United States must rededicate itself to the promotion of excellence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Rather than directing the economy in the manner of authoritarian regimes, the United States government must supercharge the economy in the spirit of freedom and opportunity by funding a variety of educational programs that promote mastery of STEM subjects so that 21st-century America leads the world in innovation, entrepreneurship, and production. ”

“ The scope and speed of our discoveries are truly breathtaking, and each day new applications of science and technology enrich our lives in fields as diverse as medicine, communications, engineering, and the arts.
Recognizing the importance of maintaining America's scientific and technological leadership, my Administration is seeking increased funding in areas like biomedical research and in earth and space sciences. ”

“ Examples include GPS, touchscreen technology, and the internet. Yet many countries proportionally invest more in their own R&D than the U.S. What is the administration’s view on funding medical and technology R&D, and what can we – what can be done to ensure the U.S. does not suffer an innovation deficit?”
SECRETARY POMPEO: So there is a role in basic technology and basic research that is best performed with government dollars. There are multiple ways one can approach that. ”

“ Invest in the sciences: Obama and Biden support doubling federal funding for basic research and changing the posture of our federal government from being one of the most anti-science administrations in American history to one that embraces science and technology. ”

“ Accordingly, the Government has a special obligation to support science as an investment in our future.
My Administration has sought to reverse a decade-long decline in funding. Despite the need for fiscal restraint, real support of basic research has grown nearly 11% during my term in office. And, my Administration has sought to increase the support of long-term research in the variety of mission agencies. In this way, we can harness the American genius for innovation to meet the economic, energy, health, and security challenges that confront our nation. ”

“ In proportion as scholars yield to it, they are lowering the standard of what is most to be desired in human life, acting in perfect concert with that spirit which exalts money making as the chief good, which makes science itself the slave of the avaricious and greedy, and fills all the world with discontented and ignoble longing. We do not need to be told that if we neglect pure science for the pursuit of applied science only, applied science will speedily be degraded and unfruitful ”

“ Despite unprecedentedly low ratings of US democracy at home and abroad, the country's hysteria to export US-style democracy and values continues unabated. The US has not only cobbled together values-based alliances such as AUKUS, the Quad and the Five Eyes, but also attempted to disrupt and undermine normal international cooperation in economy, trade, science, technology, culture and people-to-people exchanges by drawing ideological lines and trumpeting the Cold War mentality. ”

“ One of the most compelling arguments for legislated OA policies is that governments should assure public access to the results of publicly funded research. This argument is widely effective because it aims to accelerate the research we’ve already decided to fund with public money, increase the return on the public’s large investment in research, and improve fairness to taxpayers. There’s no downside for the public interest, only an incomplete upside. There is more public funding for scientific research than for humanities research. ”

“ Federal agencies should take steps to ensure that public access policies support scientific and research integrity by transparently communicating to the public critical information, including that which is related to the authorship, funding, affiliations, and development status of federally funded research. The public should be able to identify which federal agencies support given investments in science, the scientists who conduct that research, and the extent to which peer-review was conducted. ”

“ When federally funded research is available to the public, it can improve lives, provide policymakers with important evidence with which to make critical decisions, accelerate the rates of discovery and translation, and drive more equitable outcomes across every sector of society. ”

“ Americans were offered a window into the great benefits of immediate public access to federally funded research at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the wake of the public health crisis, government, industry, and scientists voluntarily worked together to adopt an immediate public access policy, which yielded powerful results: research and data flowed effectively, new accessible insights super-charged the rate of discovery, and translation of science soared. ”

“ Such attempts have generally been undertaken less in the spirit of the scientific {100} investigator than in that of the politician; the point of departure has been a political conviction and not a biological truth; and as might be expected, when there has been any conflict between political conviction and biological truth it is the latter that has had to give way. Work of this kind has brought the method into deserved contempt by its crudity, its obvious subservience to prejudice, and its pretentious gestures of the doctrinaire. ”

“ It goes almost without saying that, if science is to grow and flourish, it must be esteemed and respected by the community. Its advocates, therefore, to protect themselves, must oppose every policy which tends to its disparagement. Nearly every trial in which experts are called is harmful to the interests of science, for its supposed representatives too often forget their duty, and a feeling is spread abroad that all its conceptions are fanciful and uncertain. ”

“ In other words, science has to take hold of education and remodel it, until it gives us a generation of citizens too intelligent and with too practiced a sense for truth to fall the easy prey that so many thousands now do to the arts of the political trickster. ”

“ Our politics is to-day the despair of our most earnest citizens, and we can see no possible escape from its corruption and its degradation but by the supply of new men animated by higher ideas, qualified by superior intelligence, and trained in reverence for truth, and these men are to be produced by the slowly ripening influence of science, as it comes gradually to pervade our educational systems. ”

“ People hear so much about modern research that they do not realise how entirely inadequate it is in amount and equipment. Our general public is still too stupid to understand the need and value of sustained investigations in any branch of knowledge at all. In spite of all the lessons of the last century, it still fails to realise how discovery and invention enrich the community and how paying an investment is the public employment of clever people to think and experiment for the benefit of all. ”

“ It requires not only candor, but courage, to accept a fact. When a new fact is found it is generally denied, resisted, and calumniated by the conservatives until denial becomes absurd, and then they accept it with the statement that they always supposed it was true. ”

“ When once they are indisputably ascertained and admitted, the academic and critical minds are by far the best fitted ones to interpret and discuss them—for surely to pass from mystical to scientific speculations is like passing from lunacy to sanity; but on the other hand if there is anything which human history demonstrates, it is the extreme slowness with which the ordinary academic and critical mind acknowledges facts to exist which present themselves as wild facts with no stall or pigeon-hole, or as facts which threaten to break up the accepted system. ”

“ I am inclined to think that partisan feeling is of less effect in this matter than, in some, ignorance of the facts and lack of critical faculty, and in others, really well-informed persons, failure to verify alleged facts, or an unwillingness to correct the errors of an overwrought public opinion—errors which, quite unknown to themselves, they really desire to believe. ”

“ Such a knowledge of human nature might be left to itself, if the wrecks it causes were not so saddening.
“How terrible is the power of science!” a voice of authority warned a short time ago. “The unlearned are defenceless against the learned, those who know little against those that know much; the unlearned are incapable of independently judging the theories of the learned; error in the garb of knowledge impresses them with the force of truth, especially when it finds an ally in their evil lusts. ”

“ Having regard to the entire ignorance of scientific matters which counsel, jury, and judge show, it may be truly said that the present system of taking scientific evidence is as bad as it well can be, and that it completely fails in what should be its object—to elicit truth and to administer justice. ”

“ Meanwhile the hesitancy with which these are returned breeds in large groups vague suspicion and acrimonious distrust of that which is published as truth, and which actually is true, so that on all sides we hear the query whether we are being indulged with what is considered good for us, or with that which constitutes the facts. Thus we impair the validity of truth and open the door and give opportunity for authority which is not justly theirs to be ascribed to falsehood and deceit. ”

“ It is far better that the truth should be made known voluntarily and with due precautions to those most qualified to deal with it, than that it should be discovered by accident. Everything depends, in fact, on keeping it from the knowledge of the world until a policy for rendering it harmless has been decided upon. ”

“ I have heard a skilful politician make a speech in which there was not one misstatement of fact, but the whole of which was a colossal untruth. And if in the affairs of the world it is so easy to make the facts lie, how can we hope to attain the truth in the realm that lies outside fact altogether. The truth of one generation is denounced as the heresy of another. ”

“ Few people confess that they are afraid of knowledge, but the university presidents, ministers, and editors who most often and publicly laud what they are wont to call "the fearless pursuit of truth", feel compelled, in the interest of public morals and order, to discourage any reckless indulgence in the fruit of the forbidden tree, for the inexperienced may select an unripe apple and suffer from the colic in consequence. "Just look at Russia!" Better always, instead of taking the risk on what the church calls "science falsely so called", fall back on ignorance rightly so called. ”

“ For not only would the more dangerous and penetrating scientific truths have been carefully destroyed at birth, but scientists, aware that the results of investigations offensive to accepted notions would be suppressed, would long have ceased to waste their time in search of a knowledge repugnant to average intelligence, and thus foredoomed, and have occupied themselves with services more agreeable to the public taste, such as the rediscovery of truths already known and published. ”

“ And yet it is constantly whispered that it would be dangerous to divulge certain truths to the masses. 'I know the whole thing is untrue: but then it is so useful for the people; you don't know what harm you might do by shaking their faith in it.' Crooked ways are none the less crooked because they are meant to deceive great masses of people instead of individuals. If a thing is true, let us all believe it, rich and poor, men, women, and children. If a thing is untrue, let us all disbelieve it, rich and poor, men, women, and children. ”

“ The means would have been found quite inadequate to the end, if it had not been for the fact that while society was absorbed by controversy, knowledge was only valued so far as it served a controversial purpose. Every party in those days virtually had its own prohibitive Index, to brand all inconvenient truths with the note of falsehood. No party cared for knowledge that could not be made available for argument. ”

“ Then commences the war between the educated who are ignorant of the truth and Science. While Science is growing in the minds of the people its opponents are eating and drinking, gloating over their spoils, till the tide of popular opinion sweeps away their foundation. ”

“ Let us now pass to the second division of the argument, and dismissing the supposition that any of the received opinions may be false, let us assume them to be true, and examine into the worth of the manner in which they are likely to be held, when their truth is not freely and openly canvassed. However unwillingly a person who has a strong opinion may admit the possibility that his opinion may be false, he ought to be moved by the consideration that however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth. ”

“ Waiving, however, this possibility—assuming that the true opinion abides in the mind, but abides as a prejudice, a belief independent of, and proof against, argument—this is not the way in which truth ought to be held by a rational being. This is not knowing the truth. Truth, thus held, is but one superstition the more, accidentally clinging to the words which enunciate a truth. ”

“ But, if truth itself is an expanding circle of ideas that grows through criticism and by modification, we need say no more as to the rough and imperfect apprehension of truth which constitutes the dominant opinion of society at any given moment. It needs little effort of detachment to appreciate the danger of any limitation of inquiry by the collective will whether its organ be law or the repressive force of public opinion. ”