The following comments refer to Mathieu Slama’s “How Brilliant Scientists Damage Democracy,” which appears here.

Among the many features of the COVID crisis, one stands out as particularly consequential: the attribution of ultimate and exclusive authority to science. Public statements abounded urging that we “follow the science,” and signs popped up on front lawns across the country advertising that the residents “believe in science”—as if science were a matter of belief rather than skepticism, observation, and experimentation. There was of course little attention to alternative scientific claims or debates within science. Instead of a scientific event, we witnessed the assertion of authority by way of the invocation of science or of what came to pass as “science.” The mandate to “follow the science” blindly has come to mean “follow the leader,” with no questions asked.

For large swaths of the public, the scientific label carries with it the implication of veracity: science, as opposed to religion (which is otherwise the proper subject matter of belief), is truth. Indeed the equation is a formula for modernity, which is why bizarre variants of modernization repeatedly cast themselves in the role of science: for Communism, the “science of Marxism-Leninism,” and for Nazis, “race science.” Nor do we have to look that far afield to those extreme cases in order to find reason to question the absolute truth claim of science. One can point to scandals like the Tuskegee experiment and to the regular reports of fraud and retractions, even in the most prestigious scientific journals. Just recently one reads that research reported in the journal Nature concerning Alzheimer’s may have been fraudulent. Following that science probably wasted millions of research dollars.

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