The late astronomer Carl Sagan, who perhaps understood the unique threat of technocracy as well as anyone ever has, has emerged from the grave with a prescient warning on the dangers we are wading into unchecked.
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“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology,” Sagan says. “And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces.”
“I mean, who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it?” he asks rhetorically.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It’s a way of thinking, a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility,” he adds.
Amen.
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I have previously written about the uniquely 21st-century phenomenon of turning scientists into a new kind of priest class in possession of knowledge forbidden or unattainable to the population at large.
In this way, normal, mortal humans with questionable ethics (to put it charitably) are magically transformed into unquestionable demigods who cannot be criticized by mere mortals.
To hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, the expert class is The Science™. The man is inseparable from the discipline.
Via Forbes (emphasis added):
“Research both sides and make up your own mind.” It’s simple, straightforward, common sense advice. And when it comes to issues like vaccinations, climate change, and the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, [doing your own research] can be dangerous, destructive, and even deadly. The techniques that most of us use to navigate most of our decisions in life — gathering information, evaluating it based on what we know, and choosing a course of action — can lead to spectacular failures when it comes to a scientific matter.
The reason is simple: most of us, even those of us who are scientists ourselves, lack the relevant scientific expertise needed to adequately evaluate that research on our own. In our own fields, we are aware of the full suite of data, of how those puzzle pieces fit together, and what the frontiers of our knowledge is. When laypersons espouse opinions on those matters, it’s immediately clear to us where the gaps in their understanding are and where they’ve misled themselves in their reasoning. When they take up the arguments of a contrarian scientist, we recognize what they’re overlooking, misinterpreting, or omitting. Unless we start valuing the actual expertise that legitimate experts have spent lifetimes developing, “doing our own research” could lead to immeasurable, unnecessary suffering.
