By the nakedness of our faces we encounter one another as individuals, and in doing so we experience fleeting moments of grace and trust. “Perhaps the pandemic has merely accelerated, and given official warrant to, our long slide toward atomisation. Ominously, we are being prepared for ‘climate lockdowns.’ “ In the first week of the Biden administration, the Senate majority leader urged the president to declare a “climate emergency” and assume powers that would authorise him to sidestep Congress and rule by executive fiat. “The spectacular success of ‘public health’ in generating fearful acquiescence in the population during the pandemic has created a rush to take every technocratic-progressive project that would have poor chances if pursued democratically, and cast it as a response to some existential threat. Indeed, the institutionalized enterprise of science, the combination of government agencies and private industries amassing greater technocratic measures to lay claim over a widening realm of matters: As a way of generating knowledge, it is the pride of science to be falsifiable (unlike religion).” The ‘anti-science’ tendencies of populism are in significant measure a response to the gap that has opened up between the practice of science and the ideal that underwrites its authority. This contradiction is now out in the open. But it is precisely the apolitical image of science, as disinterested arbiter of reality, that makes it such a powerful instrument of politics. As a practical matter, ‘politicised science’ is the only kind there is (or rather, the only kind you are likely to hear about).
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