Tyrannic Mans Dominion: Trump Era Physical Sciences Approaching Social Sciences Marginal Status
FEBRUARY 10, 2017
Tyrannic Man’s Dominion: Trump Era Physical Sciences Approaching Social Sciences’ Marginal Status
by DAVID PRICE
One of the Trump Administration’s most dramatic departures from preceding administrations is an open hostility to commonly agreed up facts and scientific findings, a stance culminating in new notions of “alternative facts.” While far from the first administration to lie–this is part of the office’s skillset—what’s new is the open attack on science itself, or more specifically on basing public policy on the findings of physics, biology, chemistry, and climate science. Trump is remarkably frank about what he doesn’t want to know; he intends to limit the impact of independent science on informing the policies of his administration.
The Trump Administration’s anti-science position is the foundation of their denials of human roles in climate change—with announcements of new limitations on the EPA and promises of ending NASA projects studying climate change. In his brief time in office, President Trump has issued new gag orders for governmental scientists, and proposals for new limits placed on the research these scientists can undertake and report. Scientists inside and outside of government have been vocal in their opposition to the Administration’s attacks on science, with news reports of scientists backing up massive data bases with information on environmental pollutants and climate data off-site, to protect it if from possible data purges.Weaponizing-Anthropology-404x600
All states seek to control not just the directions of scientific research; they weigh in on interpretations of findings with the policies they develop or ignore. Trump’s rhetoric moves beyond this as he appears ready to openly limit scientific interpretations. We have seen much of this approach before, in ways large and small. But when it occurs at this level, this is what totalitarian science policy looks like. History provides plenty of top-down centralized science policies, few of them producing a wealth or reliable results; whether it is the Rockefeller Foundation and German government funded eugenics research feeding nationalist policies developed for the Nazi Administration of the 1930s, Soviet biological research for years was required to align with the work of Trofim Lysenko, or the research underlying any number of failed five Year Plans. Trump’s policy wonks aren’t interested in hearing scientific findings about the damaging impacts of capitalism, and the deck is being stacked. The names for Trump’s Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy are outlier scientists whose main qualifications are rejecting human caused climate change, hostility to academia, and support for expensive weapons applied science projects. It isn’t difficult to foretell how coming funding streams will shift and shape our national scientific imaginations.
Scientists have a lot to worry about with congressional and presidential plans to limit the ways that science will be used to inform public policy. It all looks like a disaster, yet, perhaps the most significant thing about this new in is unwelcomed state of constrained-use-of-science for public policy is that the physical sciences are finally rapidly catching up with the government’s longstanding practice of ignoring the findings social science to influence public policy.
Climate and environmental scientists are only starting to acquire on the status of ignored scientists that has been afforded many social scientists for the past half century. It’s not that sociologists and anthropologists haven’t long understood and demonstrated things like the links between income and wealth inequality and crime, negative consequences of mandatory sentencing, the ways to improve access to public health, or the economic and social impacts of structural violence; they have, but policy makers don’t want to hear about data indicating that unfettered capitalism has negative social impacts. During the 1950s, anthropologists and sociologists who used their disciplinary findings indicating that race was a social construction, and not a biological variable accounting for differences between peoples were routinely ignored. When this research led to activism, these social scientists were marginalized and punished by the FBI and other agents of McCarthyism. Today, growing numbers of US scientists’ findings stand to place them at odds with the preconceived notions of elected officials in similar ways.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/02/10/tyrannic-mans-dominion-trump-era-physical-sciences-approaching-social-sciences-marginal-status/
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