Science is Capital

Revolution can no longer be taken to mean just the destruction of all that is old and conservative, because capital has accomplished this itself. Rather it will appear as a return to something (a revolution in the mathematical sense of the term), a return to community though not in any form that has existed previously. Revolution will make itself felt in the destruction of all that is most “modern” and “progressive” because science is capital.

— Jacques Camatte [1]

Science is a system of knowledge acquisition that is based on empiricism, experimentation, atomization, rationalizing causality, and methodological naturalism and that is aimed at finding the truth. Theories — predictive hypotheses — are the basic unit of knowledge in this system. Science also refers to the bodies of knowledge achieved from this research.

Most scientists feel that scientific investigation must adhere to the scientific method, a process for evaluating empirical knowledge under the working assumption of methodological materialism, which explains observable events in nature by natural causes without assuming the existence or nonexistence or the supernatural. Particular specialized studies that make use of empirical methods are often referred to as sciences as well.

Conversations about science get complicated since the word refers to distinct yet connected things. For example, physics is a science (a field of specialized studies) that is not always scientific (according to the above definition), since quantum physics moves away from the distinction between observer and observed that is fundamental to experimentation. However, to the extent that physicists reject the implications of that moving away, physics continues in the trajectory that science (as a way of thinking) has established.

Science must be critiqued as the modern problem-solving technique. Science is so widely accepted that for many people it has in fact become synonymous with problem solving. Even people who are critical of most other aspects of the culture we live in, find themselves reverting to science when pushed to defend their ideas, e.g. anti-civilization anarchists who refer to biology when attempting to convince about an optimal diet, or to anthropology to prove the superiority of their blue print for future societies.

Of the various ways to critique science, the most fundamental addresses the scientific method, which emphasizes a) reproducibility, b) causality (that a thing or event causes another thing or event), and c) the relevance of things (material reality) over all else (more accurately, it emphasizes a specific perspective on material reality, the only perspective that science recognizes as valid). One problem with the scientific model is how it maintains and relies on a perspective of the world as a frozen (static) place. Also problematic is the idea that everything can be broken down into discrete, quantifiable parts, that the whole is never more than the sum of its parts. Underlying both of these perspectives are the premises that the best or only way to know the world is to distance ourselves from it, to be outside of it; that this distance allows us to use the world; that utility is, in fact, the appropriate relationship to have to the world.

On a practical level there is the understanding that scientists are operating within a system that is based as much (if not more) on hierarchy and funding as it is on paying attention to what is actually going on around us. There are multiple accounts (even from conventional sources) showing that who is funding a study has a substantive impact on what the study discovers, from tobacco’s impact on health to the possibility of restricting the spread of genetically modified organisms, but these examples are merely the most obvious.

The more subtle ones have to do with how we ask questions (“when did you stop beating your child?”), who we ask questions of (related to the questioner’s access, biases, language, etc.), what questions we think to ask, and how we understand the answers we get, as well as what meta-interests the questions serve (how are the assumptions of this culture fed and/or challenged by who, how, and of whom these questions get asked?).

Western education predisposes us to think of knowledge in terms of factual information, information that can be structured and passed on through books, lectures and programmed courses. Knowledge is something that can be acquired and accumulated, rather like stocks and bonds. By contrast, within the Indigenous world the act of coming to know something involves a personal transformation. The knower and the known are indissolubly linked and changed in a fundamental way. Coming to know Indigenous [ways of knowing] can never be reduced to a catalog of facts or a data base in a supercomputer; for it is a dynamical and living process, an aspect of the ever-changing, ever-renewing processes of nature. [2]

And on a philosophical level, knowledge is created from foundations that limit and construct it in specific ways. While on one hand science is a response to the superstition and hierarchy associated with religion, it also continues christianity’s theme of a pure abstract and universal truth, separate from the sludge of everyday life, with scientists and doctors in the position of clergy that is, people who know more about us than we do. Some people believe in science (as something they don’t understand that can solve their problems) in ways similar to how others believe in god. Some people cite scientific references the way that other people cite scripture.

Traditionally, science posits a neutral objective observer, a fantastical being to compare to any angel or demon: this neutral observer has no interest other than truth, which comes from information, and information is received inside of laboratories, with carefully identified variables and carefully maintained control sets. (The mystification of this awesome observer is only magnified, not ameliorated, by the addition of peer review, in which a body of knowledgeable colleagues examine the experiments and data to verify their validity). [3]

Science exemplifies this cultures tendency to specialize, and consequently to create experts, people who know every little thing about specific bits, but not how those bits interact with other things — clearly a result of thinking that is thing-based (vs. for example, relationship-based). So for instance, practitioners of allopathic medicine prescribe multiple medications to people, frequently without having any idea about how these specific drugs will interact with each other, much less any idea about how a person’s feelings or other life experiences are related to their physical health.

In The Origins of Authoritarianism, Hannah Arendt uses the word scientism to express the logical extension of scientific thinking, which makes otherwise impossible moral or ethical questions (such as, “Can someone be worthless? And if so, can that person be euthanized?”) easily resolvable. In other words, the inhuman aspects of totalitarian states are related to the reliance of those states on science as the ultimate arbiter of value: indeed, the idea that everything must be of measurable value is part of the scientific paradigm.

Fragments on Why Anthropology Cant be Anarchist

By definition, anthropologists scientifically study groups of people — relationships, customs, behaviors, and social patterns.

(The “scientifically” is what separates anthropologists from say artists, comedians... or just curious people.) The history of anthropology is of civilized men and the occasional woman going to cultures foreign to them and reporting back about these cultures to their funders. As scientists — with all the quantifying and rationalist implications of that word — anthropologists are responsible for interpreting primitive/ Other peoples to the mainstream. To the extent that anthropologists are mediators between the civilized and the barbaric, they are also part of a cultural trajectory that includes missionaries.

Anthropologists, as well as other social scientists, extend the realm of science by making people’s homes into laboratories, by presuming that it is possible and appropriate to engage objectively with people in cultures very different from their own (or even people from their own culture), for the purpose of distilling the most meaningful information. And, as with all sciences, what is considered most meaningful is part of an on-going debate (with many unexplored and unquestioned assumptions), a debate ultimately framed by funders — from private grantors to universities. Why do people get paid to study people? What do the funders get for their money? They get increased markets (in the form of the studied), increased control of existing markets (more information about what motivates people — thus how to sell more effectively), and more products (from tourism to books to drugs).

As a discipline, anthropology is compelling for a number of mostly obvious reasons, including that it provides a more holistic view of people than the views from economics, political science, sociology, etc. More significantly, it provides evidence that our options as a species are more varied than we are taught to believe. Because anthropology provides people (who become anthropologists) with a funded way to do interesting things and have interesting conversations, and the kind of people who want to find out about other cultures can be intriguing people, it is tempting to conflate the people, and their experiences, with anthropology itself. But the study of people scientifically, the creation of experts, the context of meeting and learning about people while being funded by corporations, is inherently skewed and manipulative, no matter the intentions or integrity of the people involved.

In “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” esteemed American Indian writer Vine Deloria Jr. brilliantly refutes the possibility of exploring people in a vacuum, by describing the reciprocal creation that happens between agents of mediation (in this case, anthropologists) and the mediated (in this case, Indians). Deloria examines how the anthropologists, by having clear ideas about what Indians do (ie, who is Authentic) and by attending only to those Indians who are willing to act the way they’re supposed to, encourage those Indians to continue acting Authentically, which then reinforces the anthropologists in their definitions and expectations. This creates a self-perpetuating cycle — a closed loop in which people from two groups create and support mutual judgments (which they take as fact). Two of these judgments are “real Indians do specific kinds of rituals” and “real anthropologists are experts in the culture that they study.” It is the very premise of purity of a static identity (a premise required by science), that is so falsifying to experience and so limiting to the sort of information that studiers can gather about the studied. (This model of knowledge creates a similar dynamic between activists and the targets of their activism — leading people to embrace concepts like “real women,” “the real working class,” and “real wildness.”) To the extent that an activist is interacting — in theory or practice — with abstractions rather than with actual relationships, to that extent activists become invested in maintaining the distance between themselves and what — or whomever they are attempting to save. And interaction with abstractions (vs. relationships) is what is required for things like funding and school credit; it is what makes a work scientific.

Anthropologists will always emphasize the difference between the studied and the studier. This tendency is also demonstrated by all people who want (for reasons of money or status, or both) to be experts on another group of people and it usually means reifying (or freezing) the studied, attempting to keep them distinct, pure, Authentic.

In Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, David Graeber encourages us to “break down the wall” between cultures studied by anthropologists (cultures frequently described by words like “primitive” and “kin-based”) and modern societies. He posits this wall as the belief that some inherent, essential shift occurred to create modern cultures as fundamentally different from previous cultures. He suggests that it is much more interesting and relevant to look at the ways that we are the same as the people being studied. While his point about the usefulness of “the wall” is unassailable, the point is that creating and maintaining this wall is exactly what anthropology is for. As Graeber himself notes, it’s anthropology when people are talking about “primitives,” but sociology, political science, economics, architecture, psychology, etc. when talking about people like the studiers. Science insists that we distance ourselves — both as groups and as individuals — from the rest of the world, so as to more effectively use it. The social role of anthropologists is that particular category of distancing that involves cultures that are different along specifically those “primitive” and “kin-based” lines.

While major paradigms will always have offshoots that grow in tangential directions, these branches grow only to the extent that they are useful to the main body. Interesting people will want to do interesting things to and with the tradition, but to the extent that these people expect and work for recognition within the field, to the extent that they are judged by standards set within the field, to the extent that their work is used by corporations — then they are part of the scientific trajectory with all that that implies.

The only reason to stay distant from the Other, the whole purpose of an Other, is for control and manipulation, of both the Other and the Same. Put simply, Others are easier to kill (however that killing might look in different circumstances), and the easier they are to kill, the more both sides of the Same/ Other split feel the pressure to conform.

Anthropology, like the other sciences, is useful to the status quo in its ability to make the studied into objects that can be manipulated and consumed by the current system, and in its ability to increase control over the studiers.

Responses to Science is Capital

bob on science as capital:

Dear Bay Area Anarchist Collective,

I enjoy enigmatic epigrams as much as the next guy, but what does it mean, actually, to say that “Science is Capital”? That it’s expensive? Dot Matrix seems to think that saying science is based on “funding” is some sort of objection to it. Anarchist magazines are also based on funding, only not as much. Envy, however, is not argument. “Funding and school credit” are the obsessions of a failed graduate student.

Theories cannot be both “predictive hypotheses” and “unit[s] of knowledge” (why not call them facts?), because no amount or arrangement of facts is predictive of anything. Science does not assume that “the world is a frozen (static) place,” because it includes dynamic relationships and developmental processes. Since a primary object of scientific study is natural systems, it is of course absurd to fault it as static. Dot’s idea of science went out with Linnaeus, if indeed it ever went in.

Anthropology is not “by definition” the scientific study of human groups — all the social sciences do that — it is by definition the study of man by the various methods of biology, archaeology, linguistics and ethnology. The latter, the least scientific variety, is the only one Dot is talking about. (Few scientists, incidentally, still speak, as does Dot, of the scientific method.) I have no idea what it means to call even cultural anthropologists “mediators between the civilized and the barbaric,” falsely implying that they use this pejorative terminology, nor what it means to say they “are also part of a cultural trajectory that includes missionaries? (Who among us isn’t?) Missionaries try to change the natives; ethnographers try not to. Neither missionaries nor anthropologists are mediators, because both communicate cross-culturally in only one direction — but in opposite directions.

The best thinking in the essay is “mediated” from Vine Deloria, Jr., whose polemic against anthropologists would have furnished a far better text. Even his criticisms, however, are outdated commonplaces. Everything he and Dot have to say may be found in the discipline’s rich penitential literature going back fifty years. In fact, every thing factual Dot says is out of date by fifty to one hundred years. The societies anthropologists study are not frequently described as “primitive,” and they have not been exclusively “kin-based” for eighty years. Anthropologists like Robert Redfield and Oscar Lewis noticed that the method of embedded fieldwork is suitable to all kinds of face-to-face communities, not just bands and tribes. They have produced countless studies of peasant communities (in Mexico, India, Sicily, etc.) and more recently urban neighborhoods. They have followed the Indians from the reservations to the big cities.

“The only reason to stay distant from the Other, the whole purpose of an Other, is for control and manipulation? What extravagant nonsense. Has not Dot identified other purposes, such as careerism? Has Dot ever ridden a bus? Or been bothered by salesmen, panhandlers or police? (In Berkeley, of course, these things never happen.) Often you want to keep the Other an Other, not for control or manipulation, but to avoid it.

It is Dot Matrix, not the typical anthropologist, who essentializes the natives by positing an Authenticity which the anthropologists (Other to the Other) with their metaphorical test tubes will never experience. Has Dot experienced it? If not, how does Dot know that they falsify? By now, a lot of anthropologists, especially in the United States, are natives (Jomo Kenyatta, first president of Kenya, was a British-trained social anthropologist), and many natives read the books written about them. Jack Goode returned after twenty years to the African scene of his original fieldwork to find that the locals were citing his monographs in lawsuits.

To me, there is nothing scandalous about supposing that someone from another culture might understand it better, on some levels, than some or all of those who live it. Any economist of any nationality understands important aspects of my country better than I do.

In some ways, from reading maybe twenty books, I understand the Roman Empire better than any Roman ever could. A Swedish economist, Gunnar Myrdal, probably understood American race relations in the 1940s better than any American, black or white. The “emic” and “etic” (internal and external) perspectives are complementary; neither should be privileged. Dot is a hierarch. Trying to come across as a champion (self-appointed) of the native experience, Dot instead exhibits intolerant hostility toward epistemological pluralism, and should stand in the corner reading Paul Feyerabend to Ferd Woodworth. But I have a question which I answered, I suspect, in my first paragraph. Do you have to be an anthropologist to understand the culture called anthropology? Is Dot an anthropologist? Or maybe a failed graduate student?

It’s tremendously exciting writing this, not knowing whom I am insulting!

Hurrah for Captain Spaulding!

Bob Black