Prometheus Bedeviled
Prometheus Bedeviled
Science and the Contradictions of Contemporary Culture
In this lucid critique, Norman Levitt examines the strained relations between science and contemporary society. For the most part, Levitt states, we idolize musicians and cheer on athletes, yet we view scientists with a mixture of awe and unease. Significantly, too, we are unsure how scientific discovery actually fits into the broader schemes of politics, and policy. Even beyond pragmatic questions, we remain anxious about the implications of science for our basic understanding of human values and purpose.
One result of this uncertainty about scientific work is an ill-informed crusade to “democratize” science. It has become fashionable lately, Levitt states, for non-scientists to attempt to intervene in science policy, which often results in methodologically unsound decisions. The embrace of "alternative medicine" is a particularly ominous example.
Levitt suggests that science, by virtue of its accuracy and reliability, deserves to be at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge, and that our social institutions ought to take this fact strongly into account. Levitt hopes that Americans will become aware of the limitations of unchecked populism and will be willing to yield a bit of “democratic” control over certain questions in order to minimize the danger that sound science will be ignored or overridden. However, this trust in scientific methodology must be part of a broader understanding. Science must not only act responsibly toward our democratic institutions; it must also concede that our society has the right to decide what kinds of research are most consistent with larger goals and therefore deserve the most support.
Levitt suggests that science, by virtue of its accuracy and reliability, deserves to be at the top of the hierarchy of knowledge, and that our social institutions ought to take this fact strongly into account.
Levitt examines the increasingly troubled relationship between two of the resonant symbols for the promotion of humanity's control over its own fate, science and democracy....This book...is well documented and includes a constructive call for an improved educational overview of science and an increased public sophistication to combat the antiscience trend fostered by religious traditionalists, political conservatives, and academic nihilists.
Should the opinions of people who think that life was divinely created in 4004 B.C., or that it was planted on earth by little green men, have the same weight in the debate over the genetic modification of food as the views of highly trained geneticists and nutritionists? Levitt thinks not, and he presents an impassioned and sometimes compelling argument for his case. He documents the hostility of the general public toward science and mathematics, and its ignorance of them; the failure of the educational system to instill anything approaching scientific literary in most of its charges . . . and so on. And he plausibly describes the growth of a degenerate form of democracy, in the United States, at least, and perhaps much more widespread, in which every opinion, however stupid and ignorant, is given equal weight, and in which the hard work needed to acquire skill and expertise is increasingly disrespected.
Norman Levitt is a new enlightenment hero, a post-postmodern Prometheus bringing fire to the bellies of scholars and students intimidated by obscurantist intellectual bullies and needing encouragement to fight back. There is a real world, we live in it, true and false things can be said about it, science is how we find out about it, and it really matters.
An eminently readable and even exciting contribution to a topic that seems ever more intensely active, in and beyond academe.
Since we live in the Age of Science, of all the burning issues in our culture today none stands out in scope and magnitude more than the 'science wars,' and no one has been in the thick of the fight more than Norman Levitt. Prometheus Bedeviled cuts to the heart of the issue like no other book before. Levitt has taken the debate to a new level and Prometheus Bedeviled will become a watershed work that forces fence-sitting science critics to get off the fence.
What is the role of science in a wise democracy? What goes awry when empirical values are disprized? In Prometheus Bedeviled, Norman Levitt joins common sense to passion. In the process, he shows himself to be an exemplary scholar-citizen.
NORMAN LEVITT is professor of mathematics at Rutgers University. He has co-authored Higher Superstition (with Paul R. Gross), and has co-edited The Flight from Science and Reason. He has written many articles on science and society for leading journals.
