Science Scepticism, from Left to Right

A few days ago, Chris Dillow asked a question: 'There was a time when scepticism about science was mainly a lefty thing (in the 60s, inspired by Feyerabend?) The psychohistory of how it became a rightist theme needs telling.' It's an interesting question, one which I'm sure more learned people could probably offer a good response to. But sheer ignorance has never stopped me from propounding on a subject, and it isn't going to do so now!

I think the intriguing difference between these two forms of scepticism is that the Left scepticism centred around the method and authority of science, whereas the Right scepticism centres around the results.

What Kuhn was doing, in responding to Popper's notion of falsificationism, was to point to how the methodology of science doesn't stack up with the reality. We are all, after all, taught about the scientific method: make a hypothesis, perform an experiment, see what the result is. The Left scepticism centred around questioning this.

That is, whilst the claim may be that scientists follow a methodology that provides objective results, the actual criteria for what counts as 'truth' 'a result' is often based on other criteria. Hence the paradigms: systems of knowledge that the studies exist in and are used to explain them. Contrary to the image portrayed 'proving' something as true, or falsifying something, doesn't automatically negate the previous knowledge, it's just adapted until a new paradigm is ready. Feyerabend is slightly more extreme in arguing that this is no real method; what decides a result as true is based on other criteria beyond 'the scientific method'.

This is what was being challenged, in essence. We have, even now, a cultural idea that science is an absolute authority: what it says is true is true, because of the power of the method. But this can be dangerous for all sorts of reasons. There may well be lots of biases that are going on in the reasonings but the result is still treated as 'the truth'. I don't think it's entirely a coincidence that this emerges in the 1960s and 70s, where post-colonialism, civil rights movements and second-wave feminism were questioning a lot of the hierarchies and assumptions of the world, and particularly sciences' role in granting these hierarchies and assumptions authority. The target is often physics, I imagine, because if you can prove that even the greatest and most successful of the sciences suffers from cultural and social biases then more malleable ones like biology and the social sciences certainly do.

This is still present in the Left, in challenging uses of statistics and how they're used on, for example, questions of poverty reduction and what the marker should be for that and, perennially, questions around IQ and measurements of intelligence and 'races'. I think it has, fallen away a bit, however, largely as a fear of how questioning science might be used to undermine responses to climate change.

For the Right sceptics, however, centres on the results - that is what they question is not the method, which is perfect, but rather the people who are using the method and the purpose. You see this quite a lot: the authority of science is appealed to to prove that there are only two genders/sexes, that climate change is just a naturally occurring phenomenon etc. That scientists are saying something different is because they are not using the method properly; they've been corrupted because they're closet communists, or social justice warriors or homosexuals (and God knows what else). The argument here is that if the method was just used properly and wasn't infected by personal beliefs then it would produce the 'correct' results.

In the end then, the shift to Right scepticism is probably part and parcel of the same phenomenon’s that characterise, e.g. incel movements. Science is now challenging a lot of pre-existing hierarchies that favoured dominant groups: men are more logical/rational than women; white people are naturally more intelligent; there are set gender roles that stem from biology; Western civilisation is the superior civilisation because of the people's genius; climate change is just a natural happening and it's just bad luck it's going to impact on the Global South hardest. All of these are things that science, precisely down to a greater understanding of how the method can be affected by social and cultural assumptions, is now challenging. This, consequently, sees a lot of people move to the Right, which politically is largely about preserving status quos and maintaining social hierarchies.

What the Right sceptics of science are after, then, is much the same as Rightists who hate video games because they don't chain mail bikinis, or Star Wars because it has woman Jedi and so on: to go back to a world where everything was fit around them. Because if the 'method' of science was followed properly, that's what it would show.