Governing science before it governs us

Abstract

In this article I reflect on the motivation behind my latest book, ‘The governance of science: ideology and the future of the open society’, which is traceable to Karl Popper's dictum that scientists let their ideas die in their stead. I take this insight as the mark of our humanity more generally, even though we are on the verge of losing it. I argue that this is because, over the past century, the material and psychic investments in particular research trajectories have made it increasingly difficult to envisage what it would be like to pursue scientific inquiry in a substantially different way. I begin by discussing the historical significance of rhetoric in distinguishing between our privately held beliefs and publicly expressed theories, and then showing how this necessary – albeit morally ambivalent – distinction has been compromised with the onset of ‘big science’, first in physics and now in biology. We are thus saddled with a conception of scientific progress that threatens to render us, in evolutionary terms, overadapted to our environments. At the end of the article, I suggest some ways in which we may overcome the problem, at least in terms of the emerging ‘bioliberal’ regime.