Dr. Anthony Fauci recently testified during a House hearing about the Covid-19 pandemic. Fauci has been a favorite whipping boy for conservatives.
They have accused Fauci of inconsistent messaging. Masks are necessary? Wait, now they are not, but we should practice social distancing? Is it spread through hands? No, wait - through breathing?
They accused Fauci of supporting government overreach. Fauci was seen as the intellectual origin of business lockdowns, remote work and schooling, quarantining, and mask mandates.
Fauci is the face of “the jab.” Many conservatives, powered by personal values (which are by definition never wrong) and conspiracy theories (which by definition are always wrong), developed an unhealthy rejection of vaccines and vaccine mandates.
Prominent members of the Republican party, equal parts fomenting that discontent and finding value in pandering to it, saw the Fauci hearings as a time to virtue signal. Witness Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-GA) antics, including refusing to call Fauci a doctor during the hearings. No one was surprised when the delegate from Georgia opted for buffoonery.
As much as I find Taylor Greene and the man who made faces behind Fauci during the hearings detestable, the point of this piece is not to talk about Fauci’s testimony. Instead, this piece is me presenting how I understand science.
I know there are people out there who will demonize Fauci and other representatives of the scientific community no matter what. But there are folks out there who are genuinely confused about what “the experts” say about the economy, climate change, systemic social issues, and, yes, the COVID-19 pandemic. For those folks, viewing science the way I do may lead to less confusion and less demonizing of one’s fellow man.
What do I mean by “science” (as a sociologist)
Modern science requires being embedded in a community of people possessing a certain set of values about knowledge creation. When I teach this topic, I sometimes show the figure below from a textbook written by W. Lawrence Neumann of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. Neumann calls these norms, but I think of them as values - judging research based on its merits (universalism), challenging new claims and ideas (organized skepticism), being open to new ideas (disinterestedness), sharing knowledge with others (communalism), and honesty.
Modern science also requires the leveraging of processes and institutions that have developed over time to produce that knowledge. Some of these processes include yearly conferences where research is presented and the peer review process for publishing new research. Some of these institutions include professional organizations and, of course, colleges and universities.
I can summarize the above. To me, science is:
a collection of institutions, processes, and values adopted by a community to produce useful knowledge.
This simple definition - or maybe it is a description - is missing some elements that maybe some readers expected.
There are no references to numbers, instruments, dials, or diodes - the trappings of science. Yes, those things can make something look more “sciencey.” If you are designing a movie set and you want to connote science, then you pack that set full of scopes (micro, tele, stetho, etc), petri dishes, and whiteboards filled with equations and graphs. When you see those things, you know a lot of science is going down!
But science can happen without those things. Indeed, a pet peeve of mine is someone who (usually subconsciously) conflates the use of numbers or technology with something being scientific. However, a lot of good science is produced by someone taking a pen and a piece of paper, recording people’s words, feelings, and attitudes, and drawing conclusions. I highlight this type of science frequently in this newsletter because it is so insightful (consider a recent piece discussing research on mothering).
There is also no mention of specific occupations or positions. This is because science cannot be reduced to simply the products of people in certain positions - scientists, professors, doctors, or researchers. To put it another way, just because someone is employed as a scientist or researcher does not mean they are doing science. People can participate in this thing called science at any job or during their downtime when they are at home. It doesn’t matter where the science comes from.
The scientific method isn’t a part of this description either. Following the scientific method must be what science is, right? I mean, it is the scientific method, after all. If you don’t remember the scientific method, it’s that thing you learned in grade school where you make a hypothesis, collect data, and then accept or reject the hypothesis. Well, the scientific method is a fine way to produce knowledge, but it is not necessary for science.
No numbers needed. No telescopes. No hypotheses. No formulas. Those are all fine. But for me, what truly characterizes modern science is its community of practitioners sharing a certain set of values, which are then leveraged in a set of processes and institutions.
OK, so that is how I see science. How does this framing impact the way I think about public debates around science and the experts?
A collective, contingent social accomplishment
First, it makes no sense to get angry at one person for relaying the collective insights from a community. When you see an academic or scientist providing insight, know their ideas did not originate solely from them. Often, they are relaying conclusions that have come from numerous studies pointing in the same direction. These studies were critiqued at conferences and in peer review. Other knowledgeable people within that discipline have evaluated those studies and, in effect, given them upvotes by citing them and building on them in their research. In other words, if I explain to a parent how they can protect their children from a sextortion scam (a growing trend), those ideas are always a combination of what I have learned from reading about the trend and what other scholars have researched.
Even if the person is talking about their own original research, it is still a collective accomplishment. When I attempt to contribute to the scientific community with my own original research, I will get feedback and critique from peers, conference attendees, and of course the anonymous people who review my work for publication. This feedback then gets folded into later drafts.
The epidemiologists who comment on COVID-19, the meteorologists who comment on climate change, and the sociologists who comment on systemic racism are representatives of a community and are relaying the insights of that community. Even the scientists who came up with novel ideas built them on the shoulders of others, and their peers gave their work a thumbs up.
Second, I do not expect permanent answers because that is not how science works. Conclusions are always contingent and subject to change. Sure, it was frustrating during the pandemic to hear the experts, including Dr. Fauci, seem to change their minds so much. However, I knew the scientific community was attempting to understand a novel and fast-moving phenomenon that no one had experienced in modern times.
If Fauci’s recommendations changed, then ironically, this gave me more confidence in the scientific community’s response to Covid-19.
Why? The changing recommendations suggest a willingness to critique original ideas and modify them when the evidence from the scientific community warrants it. Moreover, he appeared to be quite open and honest as he and other scientists struggled with containing the pandemic. I did not think that Fauci was a “lying sack of shit”, as this person in the email below did.
If I have one fault with Fauci and others in similar positions, is that they do not do a good job of communicating the collective and contingent nature of scientific knowledge. I am not saying they should, with each public statement, do the equivalent of the warnings we get at the end of drug ads and say at double speed, “The preceding statements are subject to change and are a convergence of their own ideas and those of the particular scientific community they are embedded in.” But if a person has been selected by the media to contribute their scientific opinion on controversial issues of the day, then I think that person should, on occasion, remind their audience that they are relaying what we think we know right now, and that will likely change in the future.
In closing, there are real problems in the scientific community. Academics must publish or they perish (get fired). I believe this leads to weak research being published in academic journals. Governments are investing less in science. This means that researchers must cater to the whims of private business. The days of basic science (scientific discovery done for its own sake) are going the way of the dodo.
But my understanding of modern science suggests we are demonizing individuals when we should be focusing our concerns on systemic issues. For example, are we training future researchers with the right values to produce scientific knowledge? Or, are the institutions and processes we have relied on for centuries still capable of facilitating that knowledge? These are the questions we need to ask going forward.