Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
scientific institutions, was more likely to pour its rhetorical energies into
social, political, technological, and educational pursuits rather than scien-
tific ones.
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In this regard, Condorcet's Enlightenment narrative had some of the
same liabilities that Bacon's had as a rhetorical resource. The gains that
Bacon made by giving scientific practitioners a share in the ethos of the
clergy came at the price of continued dependence upon forms of social
authority not of their making. Condorcet's more thoroughly scientistic ide-
ology partially corrected for this by fashioning the emerging French Repub-
lic in the image of science, but, implicitly at least, this made something
more like political science the center of scientific authority. Certainly the
scientized polity he envisioned was one that might be expected to support
science, but in such an imagined world, the state itself was regarded as a sci-
entific authority. Followed through to its logical ends, a scientistic ideology
such as Condorcet's, much like the Marxist one I have also touched on in
this chapter, might easily give rise to a pattern like the one manifested in the
Soviet Union during the Lysenko affair in which the dictates of dialectical
materialism could freely override the intellectual autonomy of geneticists.
Societies like those of France, the Soviet Union, and the United States
that have taken up some version of Enlightenment scientism have often
shown themselves to be great patrons of science. But this support has also
been uneven. What is always wanted, more ideally, is an ideology that can
sustain faith in science's general social applicability, and thus a general sense
of indebtedness to science that will sustain its patronage, but which accom-
plishes this while maintaining the assumption that this authority is funda-
mentally rooted in the natural sciences. Ultimately the field best equipped
to sustain this would be evolutionary science. Because evolutionary science
purports to bring every subject within the purview of the natural sciences,
it has the capacity to universalize scientific authority without also distribut-
ing that authority into other fields, such as sociology or political science.
Classical positivism, as we will see in the next chapter, took an important
step in this direction by making the evolutionary aspects of Enlightenment
scientism more apparent. But by virtue of its social scientific origins, it was
itself only a transitional form.
