As Americans, we’re profoundly conflicted about science.
On the one hand, we’re deeply suspicious of scientific inquiry; there is a strain of thought in American culture that is informed by a certain Faustian parable, that of the man so greedy for knowledge that he sells his soul to the devil for the hope of ultimate understanding and pleasure. In a nation of deep Christian roots, the Faust myth gets at a basic dilemma that has plagued us and the Western imagination since the Enlightenment: is science a savior or a sin? What should be the reach of human knowledge and endeavor?
In the narrative, Faust is an alchemist who is dissatisfied with the limits on his understanding and wants ever more; F.W. Murnou’s silent film portrays Faust as a doctor who craves ultimate medical knowledge to save his city from the plague, and enters into the pact in order to glean it. Like Eve and the apple or even the Greek myth of Prometheus stealing fire from the Gods, we are wary of one who tries to know too much.
In this way, science is seen as transgressive; we feel there is something about science that is an overreaching of our human boundaries, that the endless unchecked pursuit of knowledge is a type of fatal hubris. Experiments in neuroscience, prodding electrodes genome mapping, and understanding the ultimate nature of the cosmos are all types of inquiry that leave many feeling deeply unsettled in that they threaten to displace God and morality and put the human mind front and center. Neither of these correctly portray true science and the act of scientific inquiry, but still we fall prey to the fear that there is a Mephistopheles lurking at the side of every microbiologist.
On the other hand, we put an enormous amount of faith in science to deliver us to a utopian ideal. We are driven by the idea of progress; our early American hearts pounded at the sight of the expanse of land we assumed to be ours for the taking because writ large over the frontier and the subsequent spreading of the railroad was the idea that we can make for ourselves a perfect, advanced civilization. Technological prowess was a means to this end. Our feeling of the sublime in the face of giant feats of science and technology like the Hoover Dam, the power of flight and our move into space played on our already existent notion that we are and will continue to be a nation among nations.
So what is science to us: a sin or savior? Is it a Faustian overstepping of morality and boundaries or a means to realize our visions for the future?
Neither view, unfortunately, presents an accurate portrayal of science at all – or scientists for that matter. While the two myths are pervasive, they are still myths. While science itself is enmeshed in the larger culture and so is necessarily involved in the feedback loop between our myth-inspired ideas about it and the field itself. For example, scientists might appeal to politician’s ideas about progress in order to get funding for certain technological endeavors—our popular conceptions should not be conflated with the actual process of science, which couldn’t be farther removed from the Faust myth or a hyperbolic utopian fervor.
(It should be said that most individuals won’t necessarily be able to articulate these tensions; one might just know that they are morally outraged over something like stem cell research but also cherish their tablet and smart phone and ability to use the internet to connect to the world at large, despite the fact that both of these phenomena stem from the same process of doing science.)
At its heart, science is skeptical, predicated on experimentation and necessarily self-correcting. Good science is modest and wary of broad claims. It’s methodological. It’s about repeated experimentation and reproducibility. No scientist would ever claim to have found “The God Gene” — a title dreamed up by pulp science reporters who will often pursue sensationalist stories and only present the end “goal” of a study or technology and not the process itself — nor would a good engineer or doctor claim that science is the answer to all of the world’s problems. Science has a methodology that is different from almost everything that came before, where one poses a specific question about the natural world, formulates an experiment that might yield an answer, and then subjects that study to rigorous peer review.
With all of the other issues in the world, one might wonder why examining our own assumptions and lack of understanding of real science is even important at all. But extracting ourselves from the myths surrounding science and paying attention to its actual methodology will not only cull some of the culture wars but possibly make us better, more informed citizens; indeed, it is true science’s constant need for proof, for good answers and good research, that will ward against misinformation, pseudoscience and illegitimate claims to knowledge, which are ever more abundant in an age of mass dissemination of information. Unless we learn to be critical, discerning citizens, we are bound to always play the fool.
What does that mean for higher education? Don’t schluff off your science courses. It’s not merely the content that is invaluable, which it is, but the process of scientific inquiry that can train your mind to question things and filter the world with a healthy dose of skepticism.