One always hears “follow the science” but often this is a sleight of hand to usher in a narrative without alarming the target audience to the goal of the people repeating the mantra. When they say “follow the science” it proposes that science has no inherent agenda thus to follow it is to be “rational” and “scientific”. But the very nature of science is to observe, to parametrize, to predict and to measure phenomena. When “science” as an agentic force proposes a solution, it assumes a telos, or an end goal. For example, in the past year during the Covid-19 lockdowns, the “science” (in other words the scientific establishment) rallied for lockdowns. This was not actually what the science said.

In America, and the West in general, the science said that if Covid-19 (as with any disease) runs its course through a population, there would be subgroups of a population that would be at risk of dying. In America a model projected that up to 3 million or 1 in every 100 person would die. The actions taken in response to the science held an inherent VALUE judgement that the vulnerable must be protected, that SAFETY is the highest value. It placed the physical health of vulnerable populations above the short and long-term emotional, spiritual, and financial health of the non-vulnerable populations of the West, and the world at large. More palpable was the dialectic between safety and freedom between Blue states (placing safety as higher) and Red states (placing freedom as higher). Hence, to “follow the science” meant to lockdown and grant unprecedented authoritative powers to governments to ensure the physical safety of the population.

Whenever a solution is proposed by scientists or “science” as an institution/ superorganism there is a value judgement implicit in that solution. A food scientist aiming to make better tasting apples assumes that better tasting is something closer to “heaven” than an apple that is not as palatable, heaven being the ideal and the good. Science itself cannot designate one apple as better than another but it can characterize the biochemical differences. Likewise an American eugenicist proposing to governments the sterilization of undesirable subpopulations assumes that allowing criminals, invalids, and cripples to reproduce is closer to “hell” than to not allow them, hell being unideal and bad. The placing of one outcome over another as desierable or undesirable proposes a hierarchical vision of the world, one that always designates a “heaven” and a “hell”, a utopia and a dystopia, a better and a worse. To reiterate… science, because it always involves people like you and me, always has an end.

But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Making qualitative judgements is fundamentally how we perceive the world, and is not something we can nor should dispense with. Science is a method of studying the world, and it is fundamentally one tool in the multitude of tools that humanity uses. Just as a hammer can be used productively to construct, aiding in the raising of a house or building, or to destroy, allowing us to bludgeon our enemies with blunt trauma, science can be used constructively or destructively. Science as a tool has brought an indefinite amount of benefit to humanity in medicine, transportation, agriculture etc, but it has exponentially multiplied the means by which we can harm one another through nuclear, biological, chemical weapons. Ultimately it depends on our assumptions of the good and the bad, which is outside the domain of science, and enters into the realm of philosophy, ethics, and especially religion.

So when you hear “follow the science” be very attentive to what is being said because often much more is packed into that statement than one may realize.

Based off of Pagaeu’s description of science in this video) from minutes 12 to 19.