Science and activism

Is there a line that I could just go cross?

Yesterday, Scientific American published an opinion piece on the ongoing campus protests over the Gaza conflict. The piece is fine, I think, on its own terms. It argues that student protest is healthy and that campus authorities have reacted badly to it. However, I think that it’s wrong and damaging for it to appear in this venue, and it would have been much better suited to a political website.

The war following the October 7th terrorist attacks has been one of the most divisive events that I can remember. Many people believe that no country on Earth would simply not have responded to the deliberate and wanton cruelty they involved. Many other people believe that Israel’s response has now crossed a line beyond legitimate self-defence.

In terms of the campus protests themselves, as the Scientific American article implies, many people believe that they represent the conscience of a generation working towards lasting change for an oppressed group. Many other people are extremely uncomfortable with masked groups preventing Jewish students from accessing parts of their own campus for example.

And you know what? That’s fine. These all seem like reasonable things to believe. Indeed, it’s even just about possible to simultaneously believe all of them. But I think the mistake is to think that Science (capital letter deliberately there) can tell us anything about what is right in these matters.

These aren’t questions like “what is the mass of the proton?” or “what is the effectiveness of this vaccine?”, which can be resolved by experiment and data. So I believe that Scientific American needs to be very careful about just wandering into them and placing a flag of Science on a particular progressive position.

Of course, science itself doesn’t take place in a vacuum. We use it as a tool to study the world, and so its findings will always reflect back into everyday life. But I think as scientists, we need to be extremely careful as to how we do this, and not blur the line between science and activism any more than is strictly necessary.

Take climate change. I personally agree with the consensus that the science is essentially settled. We have data from the Keeling Curve that tells us that levels of CO2 are about a third higher than they were in 1960. We have climate models that tell us that this should have an effect similar to that being observed (and sure, it’s important and legitimate to argue about the calibration of these models and the data being recorded).

But this doesn’t tell us what to do about it.

It would be wrong to say that there is a single unarguable scientific position on the right response. Of course, we should aim to reduce carbon emissions, but the question of how stops being a question of science, and moves more into engineering and economics. It’s not at all obvious to me how soon we can build sufficient storage capacity to iron out the gaps in renewable energy generation in the UK, or whether we should be aiming for a massive expansion of nuclear power. These are again things that reasonable people can disagree about.

But it seems clear to me personally that the anti-nuclear activism of the 1980s has had a long-term damaging effect. Most days of the week you can look at the map of European emissions and see nuclear-heavy France in green and coal-burning Germany and Poland in much darker colours. Yet much of the campaigning against nuclear power came from groups of scientists themselves, leveraging their scientific credentials into the debate. I think too many people have forgotten the good advice of Richard Feynman:

I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy — and when he talks about a nonscientific matter, he will sound as naive as anyone untrained in the matter … Scientific knowledge is an enabling power to do either good or bad — but it does not carry instructions on how to use it.

We’ve seen many examples of this over COVID. Groups like Independent SAGE sought to use their own scientific backgrounds to not just report and interpret the data, but to argue for particular policy positions and interventions. I don’t personally believe this was a good thing, because it has had a corrosive effect on public trust.

As we face the possibility (and it’s no more than that at this stage) of an avian flu pandemic, as The Atlantic points out:

Flu viruses, unlike SARS-CoV-2, also tend to be more severe for young children than adults. Should H5N1 start spreading in earnest among humans, closing schools “is probably one of the single most effective interventions that you could do,” Bill Hanage said. Yet many politicians and members of the public are now dead set on never barring kids from classrooms to control an outbreak again.

But I don’t think we can ignore the fact that some of this reluctance might be reasonable. Having been told that any closures would be for two or three weeks to “flatten the curve”, only to see their children out of school for months at a time, and witnessing the ongoing learning damage as a result, you can’t blame parents for being sceptical.

If measures are needed (and we’re very far away indeed from that), surely compliance would be much higher if people believed that these measures were only being imposed as a last resort? Having seen activist scientific organisations argue for a return to masking because of the 2022 monkeypox outbreak, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to wonder if they are crying wolf again.

For this reason, I believe that it’s important for scientists to hold back on their activism, or at least to try to make clear where the line is drawn between their specific scientific expertise and the policy interventions that they personally advocate for. I think it’s important that we as scientists push back on things like the Scientific American article, if we as a community are to retain the trust of the general public.