Thinking what we do: Politics vs Science

29 Nov, 2020 - 00:11 0 Views
Thinking what we do: Politics vs Science

The Sunday News

POLITICAL Science as an academic discipline and a professional practice tends to criminally simplify the complex and much troubling relationship between politics and science.

I refer to science here in its two majors senses: Science as technological thinking and action and science as know-how, which is a methodological way of seeking, finding and keeping knowledge. To think scientifically is to engage the world and human experience theoretically and also methodologically, making observations, arguments and conclusions that can be reliable and defendable as standing truths.

By politics itself I do not simply refer to party and power politics that is a very small province of the political that has been mistaken in the media and the academy itself for the whole of politics. Yes, that arena of the political where groups and individual men and women jostle for political office and the power that comes with it is a rather very small part of the political which has been tragically taken much too seriously.

Too seriously like any other form of human employment that delivers bread and butter, even if corruptly and by use of evil. Politics proper and real political contemplation and action do not happen in political parties, governments and their parliaments, no. Yes, I am saying it here that professional politicians, their organisations and partisans are not the real actors in politics they are only agents, and most times only the problems of politics.

They are mostly the people that use systems and structures of power that have made politics the proverbial dirty game.

The Tyranny of Science
In this short article I am thinking with Hannah Arendt. She prominently and much provocatively noted the contestations and conspiracies between politics and science, especially in her inimitable classic essay: The Human Condition of 1958. It was her capital observation that science provided human beings with temptations and dangers, rewards and deadly punishments.

Arendt wrote her treatise a few months after the Soviet Union’s satellite, Sputnik, the very first man-made object to orbit the earth was launched. In that event science fiction had come to fact. The possibility that one day human beings will escape the prison of the earth and advance to other realms using scientific thought and invention became real.

The temptation to trust more in science than in religion and God was never more forceful. Science as know-how and science as invention became arrogant and tyrannical with the encouragement of that achievement where human beings proved that they can contribute to and even change nature and creation in previously unimaginable ways.

But that was not the only achievement of the epoch that science had delivered. Not even automation was the only progress that science was making to improve human life and mobility. Something much darker and deadly had been set afoot, the splitting of the atom and the dark generation of the unforgettable mushroom cloud was a compelling presence.

Science had construction and destruction walking side by side. One can mention the ecological crisis that threatens to end human life and the earth that has accompanied all the knowable industrial, technological and therefore scientific revolutions of the world.

I believe it with Arendt that science became too important, too good and way too dangerous to be left to itself and to scientists. In that way science became an important political question. As a political theorist and philosopher Arendt could not be escaped by the irony that the scientists could invent the nuclear bomb and still be the last ones to be consulted on the uses and abuses of the gadgets of mass destruction.

Every day we hear of scientific advancements in engineering, communications technology and medical inventions. What the hoi polloi, the masses of the world, are not being informed of is the weapons of mass destruction that are presently being produced, and their power to reduce the planet to dust with the press of a button. Why humans will invest so much thought and invention in destruction is another political question. Arendt attempts to answer this question in her 1951 book: The Origins of Totalitarianism. Human ambitions and convictions, combined with the scientific belief that anything is possible makes the animals that human beings actually are experiment with everything including their own death.

Sigmund Freud in his exploration of the unconscious world of men and women and their passions taught us about the “death-drive,” which refers to the paradox that in their fullest enjoyment and celebration of life human beings are unconsciously being driven and driving themselves to inevitable death. Maybe that is why all scientific advancements and developments seem to carry deep within them seeds of the death of Man.

Human beings, after all, are born with seeds of their death inside themselves. The scientific belief that we are way different from other animals might be a huge exaggeration. The social and political animalism of Man, otherwise, is very real.
That is why Arendt thought that science should not be allowed to move ahead of political thinking, political thought should guide science and not science lead political action. By political thought I do not mean party and power political thought, that thought is guided not by philosophy but it’s much inferior and mostly evil cousin, ideology.

Thinking what we do
When Arendt gifted philosophy with the idea of doing something by the act of “doing nothing, but think,” she did two bold and important things which are to discourage thoughtless action and actionless thought combined. In her contemplation of the “human condition” in the world she emphasised the importance of “thinking what we do” as serious political work that professional politicians and political scientists seem to neglect and leave behind in their political activities that are mainly for ‘bread’ and not for life and the happiness of humans.

Thinking what we do as political work is related, in my view, to what Immanuel Kant called the important philosophical and political work of the “public use of reason,” which is engaging with the world, building it and bettering it by use of the valuable human faculty of thinking straight and reasonably.

In that way, science as knowledge production and philosophy as the search for truth, besides the scientific production of gadgets and softwares done by science, are important and relevant to the real politics of the world.

In her contemplation of the human experience and condition Arendt made three telling distinctions by which we can achieve a handle of politics and life.

The first quality of the human condition which is also an occupation is true labour, which is the biological task of giving birth to each other and keeping ourselves and others alive under the sun, human reproduction and preservation as a priority that is. The second distinction is work. Work in the sense of being creative and constructive in the production of physical and cultural objects that life demands. The third and the last distinction is action that refers to doing something about the world and life, solving problems and creating opportunities for ourselves as communities.

Arendt suggested that men and women are not only political animals, as Aristotle thought, but are also social animals first and foremost.

Human beings are plural and diverse, human differences are natural, so political work involves labouring, working and acting to preserve life and the world for ourselves and others. Others here are in the sense of other human beings, animals, plants, water, the air and the soil that is the land as a world not just a natural resource, umhlaba.

The Centrality of Politics
Political activity is clearly wider and deeper than party and power politics as we understand and practice them daily. Scrambling for political seats and offices, and the power, responsibility and irresponsibilities, are a very small but still too dangerous part of the whole of politics. If we “think what we do” and make “public use of reason” we begin to see and experience it that there is more to politics than organisations, parties, power and hegemony.

Science in its tyranny and attempt to replace God himself and the gods themselves has pretended that it can solve the world’s problems and free men and women from the prison of the earth. The same way some philosophers thought that the mind and the soul are prisoners that need to be freed by thought from the prison of the human body science as technological invention and know-how carries an attitude that nature should be conquered, overcome and mastered to free human beings from its many prisons.

Science should be doing the opposite, assisting and supporting politics to create a world of labour, work and action that reproduces and preserves human beings and their others under the sun. Perhaps, what Socrates classically called an “examined life” which is the only life that is worth living is a life of scientifically and philosophically labouring, working and acting for the production and preservation of human lives and the lives of other things and beings.

Political science, as know-how, frequently seems unequal and unable for the real politics of the world and of life. Because we are not thinking what we are doing even if we know exactly what we are doing we frequently use science, as technological endeavour and know-how combined, for purposes that look progressive when they are in actuality destructive.

By not thinking what we are doing we abuse science. In technological and medical sciences for instance, the same know-how that produces great gadgets and medicines, is the same that produces nuclear bombs and poisons. It is our great science that has polluted the earth almost beyond repair. Scientific genius that does not think what it does delivers progress accompanied by evil.
It is some political scientists and ideologues that imagined and brought to life ideas that led to the Holocaust and many genocides in the world.

Science is therefore as good and as bad as what it is used for. It is only higher politics of life and the world that labours, works and acts for good and liberation that can deploy science for the greater good.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from Gezina in Pretoria, South Africa: [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>

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