Science, politics and power

A few days ago the prestigious magazine The Lancet published an editorial entitled ‘Aupporting Medical Science in the USA’ where he commented on the latest attacks of American administration to US health science institutions and organizations. In this editorial the author denounced flagrant these attacks by drawing attention to their risks and appealing to the need for resistance by the scientific community. It seemed to me therefore pertinent and, above all, uphowed to reflect on the relations between science, politics and power.
If science is based on the search-application of knowledge and understanding of the natural and social world supporting itself in evidence, politics is the set of activities associated with decision making and power relations between individuals, leading to the distribution of status or resources.
The interactions between science and politics have always existed: since antiquity, warrior policies have led Archimedes to idealize war machines and today continue to boost physics in the discovery of increasingly lethal weapons and, these days, to evade the policy of harmful effects that disrespect the environment, to the chill of all the recommendations of science. Politics should not dispense with science to base its decisions, but it insists on using science as a weapon of powerful intervention. Reciprocally, science needs political-government support to finance their research and to implement their findings in order to benefit society. In this line of thought, the union of healthy collaboration between politics and science generates undeniable gains for safeguarding the life of populations – it was the example of the recent covid pandemic. However, even during the pandemic, there were many politicians who caught the evidence and recommendations of science – with the consequences we know!
Typically, the scientific method presents facts and asks that conclusions are extracting from these facts. The political method tends to submit conclusions and then request the facts that can bear them to their taste and convenience. When science, or pseudoscience, dangerously accepts this role there will be no dissent, but when refusing, the way is too tempting will be that of the asphyxiation of science by political power. In his very recent book when Science Meets Power Geoff Mulgan of University College in London, he considers that the unimaginable advances of science need good governance to become useful to society. However, such advances have a step of time that politics cannot expect and bring a complexity so that it is not, at all, prepared. Just reflect, for example, the number of doctorates we find in any science laboratory compared to the number of them incorporating the queues of any parliament. Thus, we will understand why this difficult compatibility as we see public trust in the agents of science and growing distrust in politics practitioners. Science must discover freely and exemptly guiding its purpose for the usefulness to populations and always managing moral values ​​and seeking consensual results of large foundation. But to investigate what, in who, in what time and what means, after all, political options will be… so it will make sense that governments have suggested to science their needs and may even govern science – which is, after all, their mission – but never disrespecting scientific honorability. In a word, politics and science should be complemented and never belligered.
The power should resist attempts to control, under the pretext of rationalizing, science because this will eventually curtail the truth and threaten, undermining democracies.
These temptations for power can be very thinly expressed, for example, in choices on which investigation to finance, in choosing science news to disclose, in promoting public distrust about the proven facts of science, thus tending to disbelief, and even attempts, such as those we watch in the recent past, to try to limit the technical autonomy of technical-professional orders… Currently in the US, where Donald Trump’s policies deliberately undermine scientific institutions, leading to dangerous negationism of well -tasted vaccination strategies, in underestimating the serious climate impacts, thus increasingly moving the science of politics, with populist discredit for the former. This exercise of discretionary power purposely discredits science, denies its financing, destroys its regulation and goes, in a word, denying knowledge and dangerously affirming populism.
We are lucky, for now, because we are spared the scenarios of this gravity, but it will be careful to be alert so that we do not allow science to be controlled, more than it must, by politics.
Desirably, the policy should ask the science to be proven, good evidence and by large consensus, in order to decide on these and in the interest of the populations that should always try to serve. Rather than trying to control science to, through your asphyxiation, disbelief and evasion, justify and legitimize any decisions of convenience. May science serve politics is one thing, a different thing will be to use science illegitimately for its conveniences. May God free us!
When politicians and scientists, power and knowledge, they meet and converge productively, we see great deeds: from the control of pandemics to the reduction of environmental impacts. After all, scientists and politicians share the same goal that cannot forget, which is to improve people’s lives. However, as suggested and well the Lancet editorial we have to be aware and fight resiliently!