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Science may be a tried and tested way of knowing what we know, but it’s under threat. In Australia, leading science agency CSIRO is expected to cut up to 350 research roles. A CSIRO staffer said it was among the worst cuts the agency has ever seen.
In the United States, the Trump administration is waging war on science. It’s threatening the largest ever budget cut to the US National Science Foundation. It has also allowed US National Institutes of Health to slash $2 billion from its grant budget. The freezing of US National Science Foundation budgets this year left many researchers without a salary.
These cuts are affecting global science funding – including in Australia.
The attacks belie a longer running civil war. On one side are those who champion science: the process of carefully designing and carrying out an experiment to obtain data that can be used to prove or disprove a hypothesis and advance toward objective truths. On the other are those who reject science as a way of knowing – and harbour “dubious, postmodern notions regarding objective, evidence-based enquiry”.
War on science
This is the thesis of The War on Science, a collection of 39 essays edited by physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss. Its authors, all current or former academics, from various countries (including Australia) unite to defend freedom of speech and open enquiry.
It’s up to the reader to evaluate the evidence the book provides in light of this hypothesis. If we disagree, can we use rationality and counter-evidence to make an opposing case? The book challenges us to do so.
Krauss is a polarising figure. He has had a successful career over many decades, founding the Origins Center and authoring numerous bestselling books on science. However, he was investigated by Arizona State University for misconduct in 2017 – and in 2018 agreed to retire after it was found he had breached the school’s policies on sexual harassment, although he continues to deny the allegations. The cosmologist has also been linked to Jeffrey Epstein.
For some readers, separating this information from the evidence presented by each of the essay authors will be challenging. Nevertheless, with our scientific institutions under threat, it is necessary to critically evaluate the arguments they make.
Like all good scientific experiments, The War on Science has a hypothesis at its core. It argues university and funding body policies rooted in postmodern ways of knowing restrict rational enquiry and freedom of expression.
Postmodernism is a philosophical framework based on the principle that truth is subjective and relative, and scientific rationality represents an oppressive power structure that demands revolution. The fundamental tenet of postmodernism, argues this book, is heretical to science’s fundamental assumption: truth is objective and knowable.
Each essay can be viewed as its own individual experiment. We are invited to weigh the evidence, evaluate each author’s experimental method – then decide.
Essays vacillate from culture war talking points to academic critique, pointed commentary to dry academic rigour – and from agreeable to edgy. Discussions of the definition of “woman” nestle alongside serious critiques of university executives, and academic societies and institutions, who have constrained academic freedom of expression.
I believe it is important to resist the temptation to dismiss this book as a relic of the culture war – and consider it as a whole. That way, we can draw our own conclusions according to the substance of its ideas.
