I met Roger Lewis through the GolemXIV blog. Roger was a long time reader and astute commenter on the blog, throughout the financial crisis. He also, it turned out, knew that GolemXIV and David Malone the film maker are the same person. So we ended up having conversations about the things I was talking about in the films. One of his favourite - I think I’m right in saying - was the Horizon 30th Anniversary film. He even wrote a long review of it.
Both of us have grave concerns about the state of modern western science. Where our concerns overlap is not so much on any particular piece of science, so much as on what we both see as the increasingly dangerous politicisation of science. And the question, “Do we control science and technology or are we increasingly controlled by them?”
We discuss the infamous Milgram experiments and some almost completely unknown experiments done at the same time which were ignored, I argue, because they did not fit the political desires of their times, the way Milgrams’ experiments did.
We talk about some of the ‘banned’ horizons and about the powerful role that official narratives have always had in science. Science may be objective in the lab but when it comes to how those results are used, how science chooses which questions to regard as ‘scientific’, and which are not, the way authority is used in science to dismiss data that challenges the narrative - in all these ways science is not objective.
Science has, in my opinion always been enmeshed in the politics of its time. And that was what the 30th Anniversary of Horizon film, whose subtitle was ‘The Far Side’, was about. I tried to show how science reflected the broader attitudes of its time and often was the actual architect of those attitudes. And where science was the architect of those attitudes it gave those attitudes an aura of objective truth.
In our times science has become steadily drawn into the most political questions we face: How to protect ourselves from pandemic diseases, How to feed a hungry world, How to power our homes, cars and industries, and how to understand the causes of and how to best deal with climate change.
In all these areas there are scientists who have become seduced but power and money. Covid has been a particularly painful and destructive example of the corruption of science.
So in this episode Roger joined the boys to chat about the uneasy relationship of science to power, politics and money and to wonder who does control who?
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