The Politics of the Science Wars

Abstract

reason versus unreason. While the language and vocabularies of science are different from those of the arts, the animus is the same: as for those safeguarding culture and science, the barbarians are at the gates. Those who would demystify science by showing it is subject to the same cultural and social influences as any other discourse, no less than critics who excoriate science for remaining silent when its discoveries are recruited for nefarious purposes, are charged with being prophets of (take your pick) unreason, mysticism, anti-Enlightenment, and nihilism, and with being promulgators of a higher superstition. Science controversies are by no means as esoteric as one would think. Consider the bizarre result of an FBI investigation into the identity of the notorious Unabomber who, according to the New York Times, has, in the last seventeen years, "killed three people and injured 23 others" (Broad 1995). An agent appeared at the New Orleans meetings of the History of Science Association in October 1994 and subpoenaed its membership records because the FBI suspected the "bomber is immersed in the most radical interpretations of the history of science." According to the Times report, "professors have begun reconsidering old suspicions, acquaintances and tracts to help solve the crimes." Except for Langdon Winner of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, most of the association members and officials the reporter interviewed were donning their detective hats and Sherlock Holmes pipes or were prone to dismiss the bomber as "marginal" in professional science studies. Winner joked he was disappointed the FBI did not consult him on the case. "I feel left out. It's like being left off the guest list for a really good party" (Broad 1995). Defenders of science such as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt (1994) write polemics that betray philosophical naivete; others, like the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), are hosting conferences and symposia in which the critical theory of science is represented as a virus that must be