Throughout my education, the story of “The Galileo Affair” was routinely invoked, a trend which continues today in popular science programming and literature. In short, Galileo’s observations of various celestial phenomena, through the newly invented telescope, led him to support the heliocentric view of the cosmos, which placed the sun at the centre, rather than the earth. This put him at odds with the Catholic Church, and after a series of run-ins he was formally charged with heresy, and placed under arrest for his views. This tale was spun in a number of ways - in the more dramatic accounts he was presented with a room packed with fearful looking re-education machinery. And thus Galileo became a semi-mythological figure - a sort of secular saint upon whom we could anchor our uncompromising scepticism.

In the end Galileo won, of course. He was rehabilitated as the Church’s power faded. With a few modifications, his view of the cosmos broadly stands today, and his supposed rational absolutism is at the heart of our institutional mythology, which venerates what has become known as “The Science”. We had hoped that by secularising our power structure and building it around reason, not faith, we could inoculate ourselves against the recurrence of something like the Catholic truth regime, but the tension that existed between Galileo and the Church never left us. The logic of power does not follow the logic of reason that a secular view of man pretends to, because most of man is pre-“rational”. The rules to his power games were written in a hand far more venerable than that of his enlightenment epistemology. Ironically, we understand this from the scientific study of man himself.

Man is variable, unpredictable and much of his behaviour is motivated by subconscious forces. The original sin of enlightenment man is his fundamental irrationality, which undermines the conviction that one can formulate a comprehensive approach to life around enlightenment principles alone. And yet the value of these principles is unquestionable, because we have cast out all alternatives via the rigours of reason. Into the void science is forced, fulfilling a precarious dual role as the arbiter of both moral and empirical matters.

We think it progressive that our politics is becoming “more scientific”, but ignore the reciprocal effect that politics has on science, even as science is enervated in front of our very eyes.

And thus we find ourselves on a rather sticky wicket, subjecting nubile reason to the ancient logic of power. What we have learned is that science does not survive contact with power intact. If one invokes science in political decisions, then one makes science political. Such science will thus be engaged in the creation of power, not necessarily truth. And so we have designed the most marvellous Chimera - a mixture of science and power - “The Scientific Consensus"

As Brett Weinstein stated on one of his recent livestreams, the term “scientific consensus” is itself an oxymoron - the scientific method, by its very nature, represents a constant challenge to the consensus. The term “scientific consensus” is not a scientific form, it is a political form.

I am going to repeat that for emphasis - the scientific consensus is not a scientific form, it is a political form. It is utilised to do politics, not science. Any scientific discoveries which challenge the consensus will impair political projects that were predicated upon the truth of the consensus as was. There thus exists an incentive to reject difficult discoveries, even though such a move is explicitly unscientific. There have been myriad examples of this of late, not least throughout Covid crisis - most notably the early denigration of the lab leak hypothesis. It is now perfectly clear that much this hostility was an immune response from a coterie of elite scientists, who sought to deflect attention from their involvement in gain of function research. In this context, a gripping and pseudo-apocalyptic global event - the form of “The Science” truly flourished, dominating our media networks at the behest of the powerful.

“The Science” is a vernacular derivation of “The Scientific Consensus”. As a political form, one is either with the science or against it. Where science, as a process, can be performed by anyone, “The Science” is determined by the elite strata of the power structure - the realm of “experts”. Crucially, one’s expertise and continued position within the power structure depend upon one’s ability to correspond to the scientific consensus. A scientist who rejects the consensus is not an expert, because they are against “The Science”. They are in fact, “anti-science” or a “denier” - in essence a heretic. When the opinion of a compliant celebrity carries more weight than recalcitrant scientist, we are in the realm of pure dogma. The science is settled, as they say, and today’s Galileos must be shown the instruments of torture once more.

Though we have secularised our society in legal terms, a clandestine form of faith has been rolled into a scientific conception of the world by the logic of power. In the process, the scientific method, which undergirds the entire worldview, has been sidelined as a political necessity. Science, in its purest form, has certainly suffered from this synthesis. It has ossified into a mass operation, with obligations to uphold the consensus, not challenge it. As such it is subject to same inertia and perverse incentives as any other mass operation. Where the obligation to uphold the consensus contradicts the obligation to pursue the truth, scientific accuracy is eroded.

This is more than an epistemological problem, because much of the foundation of the modern world is composed of a technical apparatus which cannot function without an uncompromising attitude to scientific accuracy. For a scientific society this is both tragically funny and immensely dangerous. If the loss of accuracy undermines critical infrastructure, or results in the failure to produce essential new discoveries, then the political tension at the heart of our society will very rapidly give way to strife of a more pressing and material nature.