“Religious repression and wars pass, but scientific knowledge remains.”
So goes theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser’s argument in a recent opinion piece on NPR’s 13.7 Cosmos & Culture blog. To which I thought:
Not necessarily.
Knowledge can be suppressed, corrupted, or simply lost. In one of the latter (lesser?) books of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, a character describes the problem of chronicling millennia of human history. In short, you can’t preserve everything. Choices are always made. Topics fall out of vogue. Those in power can produce countering knowledge, or bury unfavorable information. Even the most meticulous archivists, following the most stringent of professional standards, are guided by prevailing cultural assumptions about what is worth saving.
Later in the blog post, Gleiser writes:
“Kepler witnessed the state collapsing around him, and felt helpless. He couldn’t pick up a sword to fight, for he was a hero of ideas and not of bloody battles. Instead, he looked up. And so did Galileo. And what they saw, and their diligence in pursuing the truth, changed the world forever.”
How can one make such an eternal claim? For someone who lauds the scientific method and the “objective” power of observation so heartily, this is quite the leap of faith.
Contemporary Contempt 
I’m also interested in the glossing over of how some scientific knowledge has been created. Who gets experimented on? Who funds some of the scientific research, and to what ends is that knowledge put? The gathering, distribution, and use of scientific knowledge are human endeavors, meaning that they partake in all the moral flaws of human beings. The ways in which scientific positivists gloss over this explains their recurring surprise when racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression on the part of those engaged in the scientific enterprise are revealed.
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Seriously. Who indeed! This writer strikes me as a True Enlightenment Believer: knowledge and science good, damn the pesky externalities. Thank you for bringing up these excellent points about how science is situated in society, and all its attendant ills.
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The infuriating thing is you can be a supported of scientific knowledge and exploration *and* question the way science is done and ends to which it is put. Despite what the positivists believe, is doesn’t have to be either/or.
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*Applause* YES.
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