That’s Not What This Machine Is For

Why Science Ends Up on the Wrong Side of History

One evening not so long ago, I was reading the latest travesty in The Guardian, this one about the global spread of autoimmune diseases that had only emerged in the last half century and that were largely associated with populations in Western Europe and North America. Unsurprisingly, the journalist reveals that as Western diets spread across the world, autoimmune diseases spread in their wake.

This is something that everyone should feel angry about. Two of my close relatives and a couple good friends have milder autoimmune diseases, and they experience a great deal of suffering and difficulty. Many more people have it much worse.

The article, though, doesn’t ever talk about what people with autoimmune diseases go through, nor does the journalist bother to interview anyone who is affected. After ten paragraphs explaining that autoimmune diseases—in which the body essentially starts attacking itself—are not caused by genetics, but they are linked to genetic susceptibilities triggered by a bad diet and other environmental conditions, one of the two scientists who are the only sources for the entire article makes the following admission:

“If you don’t have a certain genetic susceptibility, you won’t necessarily get an autoimmune disease, no matter how many Big Macs you eat,” said Vinuesa. “There is not a lot we can do to halt the global spread of fast-food franchises. So instead, we are trying to understand the fundamental genetic mechanisms that underpin autoimmune diseases and make some people susceptible but others not. We want to tackle the issue at that level.”

In this brief affirmation, we can glimpse so many of the things wrong with science as a structure in our society: science is capitalist, colonial, ableist, and hopelessly confused.

Before addressing the connivance of the team of London scientists valiantly tackling the global spread of autoimmune disease I would like to name the usual rebuttals, and why they are wrong.

*Criticisms of science are right-wing ignorance, resting on the obfuscations of Flat Earthers and similar conspiracy theorists.

*It’s capitalism that is unscientific! Science is just a method, the empirical method. All the examples of scientists getting it wrong or supporting oppressive systems are just cases of individuals not being scientific enough. Eventually, science gets it right.

The first instance is the demagogue’s classical manipulation: either you agree with me, or you’re on the side of these nutcases. In fact, nearly every single movement for liberation in modernity has shed light on how the state of science at the time of their struggle did them harm, and erased or falsified their experience. Early feminists, gay liberationists, Black people fighting against segregation and Apartheid, Indigenous people fighting against colonization, and disabled people have all had to set their sights on powerful scientific institutions and the contemporary corpus of scientific knowledge as a matter of survival, criticizing outright fabrications and strategies of control disguised as neutral empiricism.

Scientific knowledge has not been at the cutting edge where liberation or our collective happiness and wellbeing have been concerned; it has always had to play catch up so as not to be left in the dust. Incipient struggles have to fight against the accepted beliefs of most scientists. Once scientists begin producing studies about how women and racialized people actually aren’t intellectually inferior, about how homosexuality isn’t actually a disease, it always occurs at a time, coincidentally, when the State has been forced to shift from a strategy of exclusion to a strategy of assimilation, and somehow the new scientific wisdom always happens to be in line with what the reformist wings of the movement are saying, and never the radical wings.

People who think that currently scientific institutions and scientists are at the forefront of the climate struggle should get a load of the first two chapters of this bad boy. (That will also be the topic of a forthcoming newsletter.) In a way, they’re right. Many scientists are in fact on the frontline, but the vast majority of them are fighting for the other side, developing the cutting edge in discourse and technologies that prioritize the interests of the State and capitalism over the interests of life on this planet.

As for the second instance, let’s analyze this one. Science is just a method, we are told. We need to be able to separate the science, which is right and correct, from the people and institutions which utilize it. Leaving aside for a moment the similarities between this worldview and Christian epistemology, what becomes undeniable is that such a defense of science requires a belief in an ideal model completely separate from its real world applications.

The scientific method is the ideal, a perfect way—perhaps the only way—for developing valid knowledge. The method runs into the imperfections of fallible people and institutions bowing to economic pressures or the unscientific prejudices of their culture. Therefore, sometimes—even often—scientific individuals and institutions will produce unscientific results. But the solution is simple: just go back to the method, that perfect ideal, evaluate the results produced, and eventually your compass points will bring you back to correct, scientific knowledge.

What do we notice about this idea? The proposition of an ideal model is certainly philosophical—and even though the early scientists were all philosophers, hyper-professionalization has predictably led most current scientists to consider “philosophy” a dirty word—but one thing it is not is empirical. You cannot observe and test an ideal model. You can only observe and test a model that is manifest, materialized, and, therefore, in the hands of fallible scientists and institutions.

In other words, the dominant defense of science writ large is unscientific. These ideologues who insist that science is just a method and not the manifestation of that method are essentially saying, “look, we have this perfect, invisible tool, but you cannot measure the output or operation of that tool. And if we eventually discover that the product of that tool is mistaken, then it actually wasn’t our tool at work, since ours is infallible, it was another invisible tool which is always fallible.”

At this point, Alex Gorrion’s critique of “Science” as the dominant religion of capitalism might make a good recommendation.

So, too, would this book that I’ve been on about for months: Inflamed by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, two real doctors who are also anticolonial activists able to evaluate claims empirically but also to recognize other paradigms of knowledge and to center the criticisms and experiences of lower class and colonized peoples who are often harmed by the real world practice of scientific institutions.

In a world without capitalism, in which all the present institutions of power had been abolished and we were hard at work healing the planet and ourselves from generations of colonialism and patriarchy, the scientific method would be a limited but valid way of producing knowledge. Today it is also valid, and in an age of COVID and climate deniers it is truly important to be scientifically literate. But its actual practice is entirely tied up with the forces waging war against us. To understand what that looks like, let’s go back to those two well meaning scientists at the beginning of this essay.

They claim that they cannot “halt the global spread of fast-food franchises. So instead, we are trying to understand the fundamental genetic mechanisms that underpin autoimmune diseases”. There is so much to unpack here!

They start off with a self-serving and baseless assumption: that they cannot do anything to take on the companies that produce poisonous food nor can they do anything to make healthy food widely available. I am pretty sure they have never tried, they do not study or evaluate the means by which the corporations responsible for fast food and other food products increase their market share, they do not study or evaluate movement campaigns to block the spread of big agro and industrial food production or grassroots initiatives to increase the availability of real food. They do not say anything about food apartheid in racialized neighborhoods, nor do they mention how a fundamental drive of colonialism has been to replace healthy food cultures with Western industrial diets, nor do they name the institutions (not just McDonalds but also the State Department, the IMF, Nutrien, Nestlé…) that are responsible for this ongoing replacement. They also fail to name the connections between this health crisis and the ecological crisis, which is most commonly reduced to climate change precisely so that energy companies can monopolize the proposals and keep us from seeing how this crisis ripples outward from every single facet of capitalism.

This failure, by the way, is also on the heads of the journalist and his editors. The role of the media in manipulating our view of the world has been pretty well documented.

Back to the scientists: they start with an egregiously erroneous premise, and then they skip away towards an equally self-serving conclusion. Since actually addressing the problem is impossible (false), they can find ways to evade the problem through genetics. Lucky for us, they’re geneticists! What a happy coincidence!

And what a coincidence, too, that universities these days put so many resources into training the geneticists of tomorrow, and not educating people, for example, in methods of urban gardening and ancestral food cultures, in critical epistemologies and the blindspots of colonial thinking, or in how to take down the harmful corporations that are poisoning us, since all of these are impossible pursuits, as any geneticist or journalist can tell you.

It’s a classic case of every problem looking like a nail when all you’ve got is a hammer. But it’s worse than that, because this shortcoming in our society’s dominant model of knowledge illuminates an entire pipeline of shadow games and self-reaffirming fallacies. The fact that these and many other scientists will be studying genetic therapies instead of studying the actual causes of autoimmune disease means that in the future we will have more technology and more knowledge about ways to manipulate our genes than about ways to not put poisonous food products in our mouths.

The political question of which is more possible: protecting already existing food cultures that are healthy for us or mapping and manipulating the genetics of the entire world population? determines which fields of study are developed and explored, and which fields of study are ignored. Genetics research is not neutral, it is a major line of defense for aspects of colonial capitalism. Likewise, trigonometry is not neutral, it was developed as an offshoot of artillery to make armies more efficient at killing people. But nowadays kids in high school learn trigonometry as though it were some entirely neutral field of knowledge, and they don’t learn how it’s possible to deal with conflict and harm without police or prisons, or how it’s possible for everyone to have access to healthy food without destroying the planet. Even suggesting such course work would be framed as not only a political but a dangerously radical intervention. But studying ways to improve murder techniques, that’s just mathematics.

Besides, our history shows that murder techniques eventually deliver other applications down the line, from trigonometry to nuclear physics.

Not only is the standard scientific response to a huge health crisis actually an avoidance of the true problem, it is a response that is likely to generate new problems or reinforce preëxisting ones. The history of medicine strongly suggests that whatever genetic therapies they develop will have harmful side affects, but even if they do not, they will only be available to the wealthy. The intellectual property rights for their treatment will help one or another biomedical corporation amass even more wealth, and the corporation will probably do harmful things with that wealth. Meanwhile, since the autoimmune diseases are supposedly cured, there will be fewer resources to help the people who can’t afford the treatment, and access to or deprivation of those resources will be just one more carrot and stick in the arsenal that governments and the wealthy have to boss around the lower classes all across the planet.

When we analyze the consequences and power dynamics of these scientists’ actions, it is hard to see them as any more neutral than a cop who tortures and kills racialized people or a billionaire who made his fortune kicking thousands of poor people out of their houses to flip the properties to tech yuppies, or for that matter the billionaire owner of a fast food franchise that is poisoning people all across the planet.

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

Robin McKie “Global spread of autoimmune disease blamed on western diet”

Me, The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below

Alex Gorrion, “Science”

Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice

Karen Washington and Bryant Terry, “The Farmer and the Chef”

Vandana Shiva, “The Future of Food”

Herman and Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent

Texts of the Week

Dean Spade, “Should Social Movement Work Be Paid?”

A good thread on degrowth by Jason Hickel, with links to longer works (Twitter link)

First image, Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. Second image, Clifford Harper.