The Balkanization of Scientific Authority

Andrew Mark Creighton

The importance of conferences like this one, the International Conference on “Challenges of Source Evaluation in Science and Correlated Areas”, are paramount in this era of mass and social media. The availability of data, information, and knowledge within contemporary times has created societies and cultures where actors have a seemingly intimate relationship with the sciences. For instance, it would be fair to assume most adults with an internet connection will know what a gene is, they will know about Einstein and relativity, as well as the molecular structures of many substances, i.e. water as H2O. However, these times have also seen the rise of pseudo or even anti scientific movements and groups. Here I will specifically focus on possible reasons why conspiracy theories and pseudoscience has become prevalent within societies.

In this essay I hope to illustrate a few of the conditions that relate to the construction of pseudo and anti scientific forms of knowledge. I will largely focus on a loss of scientific authority due to balkanization. In other words, I believe that, at least for the general public, science is no longer the only authority on science. However, to treat this phenomenon fully, I would need significantly more pages than I have been allowed here. So, I will argue specifically that this loss of centralized authority stems from an increased viewing of the sciences through mass and social media, a lack of understanding of science as a process among the general public, as well as the institutionalization of sciences, here exemplified through the example of evolutionary psychology, that do not have sound scientific methodologies. I will note that this has in part played a role in the segmentation of populations in their loyalties to science, whether science of the academy, or more pseudo, anti scientific practices and views. Though I must concede that all the arguments in this essay will be brief and somewhat superficial overviews of these topics. However, my intentions here are not to demonstrate the full extent in which science is viewed socially, but to illustrate some aspects and issues regarding wider social understandings of science within our contemporary era.

So, why are such beliefs so prevalent? It can be relatively easy to blame floating signifiers like stupidity or insanity. What I mean by this is it is tempting to refrain from taking an analytical look at why such beliefs are so wide spread, and instead dismiss them as being the product of a faulty mind or group of minds. However, perhaps a more fruitful answer would be that science’s ability to put itself forward as an authority of truth and falsity is being challenged, and perhaps more importantly, it has difficulties positioning itself as being an authority on right and wrong in a moral sense. According to sociologist Stjepan Meštrović (1997), who draws from the traditions of Émile Durkheim and Jean Baudrillard, the collective consciousness and effervescence of western societies has been fractured. This fracturing is due to major delegitimizing events such as the JFK assasination and his subsequent delayed funeral, and the Vietnam war, both of which have created a mistruct for the state which has resulted in a balkanized society (Metrovic refers largely to the USA, and to a lesser extent Canada and the UK). However these events themselves can not be blamed entirely for balkanization, rather, a major component in this fracturing of society was the televising of these violent events. In other words, not only were individuals able to learn of these tragedies collectively relatively close to the events’ occurrences, but they were able to see images and films of these tragedies. Consequently, the failings of the American government in these instances was evident to an extent never seen before, and citizens were able to evaluate these situations and pass their own value judgements on them. According to Meštrović (1997), this was the beginning of the end of a unified USA, as a centralized authority could no longer legitimize itself when its shortcomings were so widely open for everyone to see; that the emotional trauma and absurdity created by these events fractured the emotional unity (effervescence) and shared norms (collective consciousness) of the nation. I believe a similar situation can be said for science in our current times. With the rise of the internet, and increased communication, the visibility of science now and its past inadequacies and ethical issues, can arguably be causing a fracturing of scientific authority.

Science is a process, at least in principle, and its attempts to understand the world entails trial and error and making mistakes, along with establishing theories and making verifiable claims of the world. Infact, scientists can make successful careers for themselves by being wrong in their hypotheses, as this allows for an understanding of what the world is not. However, what happens when the messiness of science is taken from its laboratory/field/class room and shown before the public? The recent covid-19 situation is a great example of what may happen. As we all know, this pandemic and the attempted mitigation of the virus by various institutions has resulted in rampant social and health issues. This has also resulted in a loss of authority for public health institutions in the United States and Canada (perhaps in many other countries as well, however I am not qualified to make claims in this regard). Hints of this can be seen, for example, in the comment sections of YouTube (any video on the topic from CNN or CTV is likely act as a good example), or in the pages of conspiracy websites, in which the competence of doctors and medical researchers is criticized for their inabilities to quickly create a vaccine, or contradictions regarding suggested and implemented health and safety measures regarding social distancing and wearing protective equipment (Tangherlini, 2020). Another example could be with regards to the rise of protests and social movements, which in part offer misinformation regarding the virus, procedures, and measures implemented as attempts to mitigate the pandemic. While these protestors and commenters are more or less a minority, they are fairly vocal and their anti and pseudoscientific messages are prevalent through various forms of social and internet media (Papakyriakopoulos et al, 2020; Zuckerman, 2019).

The presence of these views may in part be attributed to the many stages scientists are going through while attempting to better understand covid-19 and how it relates to the general public.

In attempting to understand the coronavirus, medical researchers, doctors, and health scientists have often disagreed with each other, offered contradicting advice, and have changed their recommendations and information about the virus (Martin et al, 2020). This uncertainty and changing information is to be expected, science is a process that involves a process of elimination and this is very much a truism to be taken-for-granted for those in academia. However, to the general public, who has had little academic experience with science, these inconsistencies among health professions may signify incompetence and irresponsibility. The inability for scientists to deal with a major health phenomenon, that has resulted in millions of infections and over 1 million deaths, news of which has been broadcasted through the internet and television media among others forms to an exceptionally wide audience, seems to eco Meštrović’s examples of JFK and the American-Vietnam war. As such, this void in legitimacy has allowed conspiracy theorists and populist politics to use the failings of the medical establishment to create a discourse in which these shortcomings, or the virus and media presentation themselves, are the product or failings of the medical establishment and governments as part of a nefarious plot aimed at social control.

Science in its institutionalized form, to those following conspiracy theories, has become implicit in using this pandemic as a destructive force while conspiracy theorists and populist have been able to gain and spread their own discourse on science, creating their own authority on the subject. However, the inability for science to educate the general public on the basic processes of scientific research and studies is also to blame. As many scholars, in the academy or not, and general members of the public have argued, academics and scientists are too closed off from the public. The colloquialism ‘ivory tower’ is such a prominent term within the english language for just this reason. How can an individual inexperienced in science be expected to maintain their belief in the authority of science, when it appears to them researchers are failing in realtime on television or on streaming sites? Moreover, it is widely known that unethical and even evil conduct can be found within the history of scientific experiences. The United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al. cases at the Nuremberg trials, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and John Money’s study on gender, which resulted in the suicide of his subject, are only a few of the extreme examples of sciences’ forways into unethical grounds. Such cases are relatively widely known, and information regarding them are easily accessible through online sources, whether through wikipedia, history focused websites, or conspiracy blogs. Consequently, the average individual will probably be able to cite information regarding destructive scientific practices, and generally has this information only a few ‘clicks’ away. So, with the general public gaining an increased awareness of scientific activity and history, while also lacking an understanding regarding actual scientific processes, the scientist in general may no longer be seen as an individual striving for a rigorous understanding of the world, but in the worst case, as an inadequate charlettone committing unethical atrocities. As such, the ability for institutionalized science to maintain its authority is undermined in an effervescence sence, through the mass sickness and deaths associated with the coronavirus, and the atrocities associated with past ethical issues, whiles it collective consciousness is being further mitigated by the general public being unable to partake in scientific rituals, i.e. not understanding how the scientific process works or ethical protocols.

However, these are not science’s only issues, as science seems to be delegitimizing itself in a sense. Social psychologists Shawn P. van Valkenburgh’s (2018) study on a misogynistic online group part of a wider collection of subcultures known colloquially as the ‘manosphere’, found that evolutionary psychological theories are being utilized to justify and structure misogynistic and oversimplified beliefs regarding women and sex relations. Philosopher of biology, John Dupré (2012), critiques evolutionary psychology, arguing that it is incapable with its present methodological structure of understanding the social world, and its claims are consequently pseudoscientific. However, and as van Valkenburgh’s work suggests, evolutionary psychology has considerable influence within the manosphere subcultures, and as Dupré states, the general public. According to Dupré (2012), evolutionary psychology is able to legitimize itself by appealing to and positioning itself within the confines of evolutionary biology, and psychology, though it does not take into consideration the methodological rigour its ‘parent’ fields have; instead using a speculative approach based off of outdated understandings of evolution and its relationship to human behaviour. So the perspective is able to ‘piggyback’ off of the legitimizing abilities of biology and psychology, while not actually having legitimate methods for studying reality. As such, evolutionary psychology is able to pass as a scientific endeavor while influencing not only misogynistic subcultures, but wider society, creating artificial debate, in that social psychological and sociological studies of relationships backed by empirical research is positioned against speculation and unscientific methods on equal grounds from the view of the general public. If Meštrović is applied here, a further balkanization of scientific authority can be noted, as the allegiences to evolutionary psychology found within the manosphere, and its influence on wider society create a perspective of gender and sex relations that is unfounded within empircal studies, but is legitimized to the level of said empirical studies to the groups following evolutionary psychology. The consequences of this are widespread beliefs in speculation misrepresented as science that is counter to actual scientific research and findings. So, scientific authority is split, between legitimate sciences and pseudoscience, each arguable holding its own collective conscious and effervescence.

Returning to Dupré (2012), and as already stated, he argues evolutionary psychology misunderstands its object of study and which methods it should be using to study humans and their behaviour. More specifically, this branch of psychology takes a view of humanity that removes value judgements, emotions, and wider social relations from impacting individual and group behaviours and their understandings of their world. This reductionist perspective is touted as being, ‘objective’, as an attempt to view reality as it really ‘is’. However, this is an extremely problematic view as Dupré (2012) argues value judgements and social relations are a part of the world, they exist in reality just as much as a biological or psychological system. So, evolutionary psychologists rather than understanding the importance of emotions, value judgements, and social relations in studying the social world,  instead see the world in a similar mechanistic way as would a chemist or physicist. However, people are not just physical and chemical phenomena, and they are not pure products of instincts developed back in the stone age. Rather, they are capable of rewriting or overcoming biologically innate instincts, whether from their own personal intentions or through socialisation; to interpret humans without a consideration of personal and social influences will result in a deep misunderstand of human behaviour. So, objectivity in this sense, is being skewed, a natural scientist’s understanding of the objective world and how to study it, should not be conflated with studying the social and cultural world. While this is common knowledge among social scientists and humanities scholars, as well as natural scientists, the general public’s understanding of objectivity in relation to various branches of science and scholarship is not informed by their own studies and researcher experience. Consequently it can be easy for members of the general public to dismiss various types of sciences, if they are only familiar with a very limited understanding of objectivity and research methods. This, in turn can be exasperated by fields like evolutionary psychology, as their misunderstanding of how to view objectivity in relation to their area of research, not only creates reductionist understandings of humans, but complicates social scientific teachings that would allow the general public to have a more competent understanding of how objectivity relates to the social sciences as compared to the natural sciences. As such, this creates the possibility for delegitimizing science, while also further undermining the authority of science, and balkanizing the general public between scientific understandings of objectivity and pseudoscientific understandings.

Having considered the above, and while the above is only a brief analysis of only a few issues science has with legitimacy, I believe Meštrović’s work, here also used as a ‘bare bones model’, allows for an understanding of how anti scientific and pseudoscience are being legitimized. That a poor understanding of scientific processes and ethical protocols among the general public, and the prevalence of scientific failings and unethical practices within various forms of media have delegitimized science through fracturing the collective consciousness and effervience associated with science. This fracturing has allowed in some cases the creation of anti scientific rhetoric and conspiracy theories to flourish as seen regarding the current coronavirus situation. Moreover, similar trends can be seen regarding evolutionary psychology, in that the perspective when viewed as a science in the eyes of the general public, acts counter to legitimate scientific endeavours, confusing understandings of objectivity, mitigating empirical studies, as well as offering seemingly scientific knowledge to base misogynistic views around, as briefly mentioned regarding the ‘manosphere’. The consequences of all of these phenomena are the balkanization of science, the confusion of legitimacy, and the creation of an environment in which anti scientific and pseudoscientific perspectives are able to develop.

References:

Dupré, J. (2012) Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology. London: Oxford University Press.

Martin G. P., Hanna, E., McCartney, M., and Dingwall, R. (2020) ‘Science, society, and policy in the face of uncertainty: reflections on the debate around face coverings for the public during COVID-19’,Critical Public Health, 30(5). doi.org/10.1080/09581596.2020.1797997 (Accessed: 5-11-2020).

Meštrović, S. (1997) Postemotional Society. London: Sage Publications.

Papakyriakopoulos, O., Medina Serrano, J. C., and Hegelich, S. (2020) ‘The spread of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on social media and the effect of content moderation’, The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review, 1(Special Issue on COVID-19 and Misinformation). Available at: doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-033 (Accessed: 10-11-2020).

Tangherlini, T. R. (2020) ‘An automated pipeline for the discovery of conspiracy and conspiracy theory narrative frameworks: Bridgegate, Pizzagate and storytelling on the web’, PLoS One, 15(6). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0233879 (Accessed: 5-11-2020).

Van Valkenburgh, S. P. (2018) ‘Digesting the Red Pill: Masculinity and Neoliberalism in the Manosphere’, Men and Masculinities. doi: 10.1177/1097184X18816118 (Accessed: 5-11-2020).

Zuckerman, E. (2019) ‘QAnon and the Emergence of the Unreal.’ Journal of Design and Science, (6). doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.6b8a82b9 (Accessed: 10-11-2020).