What Is Science's Authority Now?

Only a few decades before I was born, in 1903, the Wright Brothers got the first aeroplane off the ground. As a ten year old I once proclaimed this “news” to my fellow classmates. My homework assignment was to bring to class something from the morning newspaper but I had forgotten to so thinking quickly on my feet I shared the (out of date but to me) exciting news of this Wright brothers achievement… I was glad I didn’t live a hundred years ago or five hundred or a thousand years ago before technology and its comforts, before anaesthetic was used in medicine for example. In 2012 there’s perhaps just enough perspective to look back and marvel at the role of science and technology in the 20th century but I don’t think it was beyond me even at that young age to have some appreciation of what I was living through. Things like the science of flight filled me with excited wonderment.

I’m sure at a one level science was a wonderful overarching benevolent authority, like my parents, to be trusted. Everything was in good hands. Everything was under control. Everything was going to be alright. Unfortunately my parents since split up and things there became a lot less in control. A lot of things have fallen from grace in my eyes as I’m sure is part of getting older and more cynical. Not that surprising. But beyond that it seems there is less and less to look up to. Where science was an authority of weight and standing its no longer like that. Maybe it hasn’t stayed relevant to our evolving concerns and preoccupations. What is science if not just another expression of imperfect human individuals after all and what does it offer if not clarification about the real concerns of life? I recently came across an extraordinary account of the declining authority of science and how indeed the institution of science reconciles with our schizophrenic human situation – article by Jeremy Griffith . It revived for me a sense of the overarching integrity of science and knowledge and the history of these things. Griffith gets the plot back for science.

I would like to think there is some product of our collective lives which endures beyond contention despite our day to day shenanigans. If there isn’t we’re left having to believe that everything out there is just as confused, stifled, jaded, grey as we sometimes feel we have become in our own life. Whilst science has been a bastion of authority most would agree we’ve been growing in cynicism and narcissism. We have become more and more reluctant to defer to anything except our own conclusions about what is in our own immediate personal interests. It’s a far cry from looking out as a ten year old, being able to be excited about the Wright brothers and their first flight, and looking forward to one’s own life of participation in the wonderful journey of humanity's achievements. Thanks for putting things back in perspective Mr Griffith with your authoritative overview of what has happened to science. Indeed your article makes me wonder if we’re not in the midst of another significant milestone in the history of science that future school children will excitedly find out about in future class rooms.

By: Jerico Lamentah

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I'm interested in all things science and the workings of our world, hence my engineering degree. However, my new found discovery of a 'profound essay titled what is science?' from the World Transformation Movement website has had a significant effect on the way I am now viewing the world and myself!