Friday, March 3, 2023

Follow the Science?

In recent years we’ve heard cries of “follow the science” in support of all kinds of agendas and political movements.  But science is a methodology and, in many cases, has exposed those agendas as unsupported by, and sometimes even contradicted by, the science.

Claiming a word as your own and attaching that word to your agenda is a neat trick, if you can pull it off.  (Prosecutors do it all the time with the word truth.)  But despite the recent flurry of creativity surrounding the word science, this tactic is as old as the hills.  A brief look at the history of science-misuse is instructive.

In Mathew Stewart’s book The Management Myth, he explains that various groups have historically used the word science to promote their own agendas, regardless of whether there was any actual science involved:


William James and his coterie looked to science to shed light on the possibility of communicating with the dead.  Francis Galton and his friends in the eugenics movement argued that modern biology . . . would provide irrefutable answers to problems of social and political policy.

         Scientific forums at the time were given over to phrenology and even phrenological meteorology—forecasting the weather by examining the bumps on a person’s head.  Leaders of the “scientific eating” movement maintained that illness could be eradicated if people would eat as science dictates.  Many people took to “fletcherizing” their food—chewing each bite as many as 100 times—on the basis of the scientific advice of one Horace Fletcher—a.k.a. “the Great Masticator.” 

With all of that abuse, it’s amazing that the word science still carries enough positive connotations to make hijacking it worthwhile!

And, as Stewart’s book is about the field of business management, he writes: “It is, of course, no coincidence that scientific management emerged in the same age that gave rise to scientific necromancy.”  And the so-called father of scientific management, Frederick Winslow Taylor, was also the darling of political progressives in his day.  “It was quite understandable that Taylor’s earliest supporters in the progressive movement hailed his work as a shining example of ‘science in the service of democracy.’”  But the problem was that, despite its name, scientific management, like many other scientifically-branded movements, “wasn’t an elaborate fraud; it was a transparent one.”

The lesson, of course, is that just because a group, a politician, or some other person claims to have science on their side, that doesn’t make it so.  Be on the lookout for this tried-and-true, time-tested tactic.  It’s important to remember the long history of abuse, to look past the label of science, and to get to the heart of the matter.  Chew on the meat of it, if you will.  Maybe even “fletcherize” it. 

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