reason of state – Close Read

NYT’s ISRO coverage continues assault on sense

The New York Times refuses to learn, perpetuating views of ISRO that are equal parts blurry and illiterate, and often missing points that become clearer with just a little bit of closer reading. The launch and subsequent success of Chandrayaan 3 brought its annoying gaze the way of India and its space programme, about which it published at least one article whose interpretation was at odds with reality. But for the newspaper’s stubbornness, and unmindful of the impact it has on the minds of its large audience in India, pushback is important, even just a little, when and where possible. This is another such attempt. On August 24, the day after the Chandrayaan 3 lander module descended on the moon’s surface in the south polar region, The New York Times published an article trying to tie the mission’s success with India’s ascendancy aspirations. Annotated excerpts follow:

Meet frugality porn – when this style of administration and work is exalted without acknowledging the restrictions it imposes. We see more of it in the coming paragraphs.

It’s amusing how this question – once rightly derided as superficial – has of late come to be legitimised in articles by the BBC and now The New York Times.

Just one ISRO success and this is the crap we need to deal with. What “deeply rooted tradition”? What “pillar” of India’s rise? Name one field of research and I will point you to articles discussing deep-seated problems in it, ranging from paucity of funds for research to academic freedom, from shortcomings in research infrastructure and environments that are overcome almost entirely by enterprising researchers going out of their way to help others to bureaucratic and government interference that vitiates the uptake of research findings in the public sphere. If anything, the article suggests that the blueprint India is offering other nations is: “Get one pretty important moon mission right and the world’s most read newspaper will pretend that you have arisen, to the ignorance of very real, very bad problems.”

a) The governments of India and the US have allocated to ISRO and NASA similar fractions of their national budgets. b) Scientists are paid much better in the US than in India, at all levels, after adjusting for differences in purchasing power. c) NASA operates one of the world’s best public outreach efforts for a state-run entity while ISRO has no such department. The “potent message” that The New York Times is tooting is, in sum, hard to understand and potentially dangerous.

This is the same Modi who thought it best to plaster his portrait on all vaccination certificates (instead of photos of the respective vaccinees) but refused to investigate the Adani Group after Hindenburg’s allegations, who didn’t utter a peep about the incidents of brutal violence in Delhi, Hathras, Manipur or Nuh but whose giant face appeared on the screen about to show the last few – and most important – seconds of the Chandrayaan 3 lander’s descent on the moon’s surface, sending almost every viewer nationwide into paroxysms of rage. I’m not sure of the purpose of describing him in such positive terms vis-à-vis his communication.

The outcome of the Chandrayaan 3 mission created something that has become extremely rare in India since 2014: a success that could be celebrated sans any reservations. But it didn’t prove a way to overcome the “fiercely fractious politics”; in fact, it became yet another point – among the extant thousands – over which to deepen divisions and render impotent the effects of public debate on governance. In fact, absolutely every major national success since 2014 has been used to fuel the fire that is the “fiercely fractious politics”. And again, I fail to see these resources that India “is finally getting”.

Get a historian of science and technology in India since independence – i.e. someone who studies these things closely, going beyond appearances to examine the effects of scientific and/or technological development and practices on all classes of society – to say the same thing, and then we’ll talk. Until then, spare me the superficial and status-quoist reading of the place of science in India. Some suggested reading here, here, and here.

Finally, an acknowledgment of the problem with “frugality” and “shoestring” budgets, yet not nearly in the same context. And the second highlighted line is either a bald-faced fabrication or a reluctance to acknowledge reality: that scientists have been discouraged, silenced and/or harassed when their work is something a) that the state doesn’t know how to integrate into its nationalist narratives, b) that disputes, negates or complicates something whose public understanding the state would like to control but isn’t able to, or c) that the state simply cares little for.

The highlighted portion? True everywhere, all the time. Commendable, but not special.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Here we have The New York Times reviving the desiccated corpse of the beast that so many laboured to kill and bury: the comparison of ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) with the 2013 film Gravity and, by implication, NASA’s MAVEN mission. MOM was a technology demonstrator that cost Rs 454 crore (around $57 million), and whose scientific results did little to advance humankind’s understanding of Mars. Its principal accomplishment is that it got into orbit around Mars. MAVEN cost $582.5 million, or Rs 3,410.53 crore (assuming a conversion rate of Rs 58.55 to a dollar in 2013). For that its scientific output was orders of magnitude more notable than that from MOM.

As for Gravity: I’ve never understood this comparison. The film cost $80-130 million to make, according to Wikipedia; that’s 468.40-761.15 crore rupees. So what? Gattaca cost $36 million and Interstellar cost $165 million. Moon cost $5 million and Into Darkness cost $185 million. Can someone explain the comparison to me and actually have it make sense?

This is the note on which the article ends, which matters because what goes here has the privilege of delivering a psychologically impactful blow, and the writer (and/or editor) has to be careful to choose something for this portion whose blow will line up with the whole article’s overarching message. I’m disappointed that The New York Times picked this because it’s of a piece with the same casteist and classist politics and policies that, for India’s non-elite hundreds-of-millions, have disconnected “working hard” from financial, educational, biomedical, and social success even while keeping up the myth of the wholesomely gainful productivity.

The importance of sensible politics to good science

Stuart Ritchie writes a newsletter-blog that I quite like, called Science Fictions. On May 30, he published a post on this blog entitled ‘Science is political – and that’s a bad thing’. I thought the post missed some important points, which I want to set out here. First, the gist of his argument:

[About the “argument from inevitability”] After a decade of discussion about the replication crisis, open science, and all the ways we could reform the way we do research, we’re more aware than ever of how biases can distort things – but also how we can improve the system. So throwing up our hands and saying “science is always political! There’s nothing we can do!” is the very last thing we want to be telling aspiring scientists, who should be using and developing all these new techniques to improve their objectivity. … [About the “activist’s argument”] If you think it’s bad that politics are being injected into science, it’s jarringly nonsensical to argue that “leaving politics out of science” is a bad thing. Isn’t the more obvious conclusion that we should endeavour to lessen the influence of politics and ideology on science across the board? If you think it’s bad when other people do it, you should think it’s bad when you do it yourself. … If we encourage scientists to bring their political ideology to the lab, do we think groupthink—a very common human problem which in at least some scientific fields seems to have stifled debate and held back progress—will get better, or worse?

There’s also a useful list of what people mean when they say “science is political”:

Ritchie writes below the list: “There’s no argument from me about any of those points. These are all absolutely true. … But these are just factual statements – and I don’t think the people who always tell you that ‘science is political’ are just idly chatting sociology-of-science for the fun of it. They want to make one of two points” – referring to the inevitability and activism argument-types.

I agree with some of his positions here, not all, but I also think it might be useful to specify an important set of differences with the way the terms “politics” and “science” are used, and in the contexts in which they’re used. The latter are particularly important.

The statement “science is political” is undeniably legitimate in India – a country defined by its inequalities. Science and technology have historically enjoyed the patronage of the Indian state (in the post-war period) and the many effects of this relationship are visible to this day. State-sanctioned S&T-related projects are often opaque (e.g. ISRO, DAE and DRDO), top-down (e.g. Challakere and INO) and presume importance (e.g. Kudankulam and most other power-generation projects).

India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru baked science into the Indian nation-project with his stress on the “scientific temper”; his setting up of institutes of higher science education and research; and the greater liberty – and protection from having to justify their priorities – he accorded the nuclear and space programmes (yoking them to the nation’s prosperity but whose work and machinations today are not publicly accessible).

But counterproductively, the Nehru government’s policies also stunted the diffusion of ‘higher’ technologies into society. Currently, this access is stratified by class, caste, location and gender: wealthy upper-caste men in cities and poor lower-caste women in villages lie at the two extremes of a spectrum that defines access to literacy and numeracy, healthcare, public transport, electricity and water, financial services, etc.

Second, asking the question “is science political?” in some country in which English is the first language is different from asking it in a Commonwealth country. Pre-Independence and for many years after, English-speakers in government were typically Brahmins hired to help run the colonial government; outside of government, access to the English language was limited, though not uncommon. Today, access to English – the language of science’s practice – is controlled through the institutions that teach and/or regularly use the language to conduct trade and research. Yet English is also the language that millions aspire to learn because it’s the gateway to better wages and working conditions, and the means by which one might navigate the bureaucracy and laws more effectively.

In these ways, a question arises of who can access the fruits of the scientific enterprise – as well as, perhaps more importantly, whether one or a few caste-class groups are cornering the skills and benefits relevant to scientific work for ends that their members deem to be worthier. When a member of an outgroup thus breaks into a so-called “top” research institute with the characteristics described above, their practice of science – including the identifies of existing scientists, and their languages, aspirations, beliefs and rituals – is inevitably going to be a political experience as well. Put another way, as access to science (knowledge, tools, skills, findings, rewards) expands, there are also going to be political tensions, questions and ultimately reorganisations, if we take ‘politics’ to mean the methods by which we govern ourselves.

In this regard, the political experience of science in India is inevitable – but that doesn’t mean it will always be: the current historical era will eventually make way for a new one (how political the practice of science will be, and its desirability, in that period is a separate question). Nor does it mean we should lower the thresholds that define the quality of science (relevant to points 2, 6 and 8 in Ritchie’s list) in our country. But it does mean that the things about science that concern a country like ours (post-colonial/imperial, agricultural, economically developing, patriarchal, majoritarian, diverse) can be very different from those that concern the UK or the US, and which in turn also highlights the sort of political questions that concern a country the most.

With this in mind, I’d also contend against junking the “argument from inevitability” simply because, in India, it risks prioritising the needs of science over those of society. A very simple (and probably relatable) example: if a lab that has been producing good research in field X one day admits an ESL student belonging of a so-called “lower” caste, it has to be able to tolerate changes in its research output and quality until this individual has settled in, both administratively and in terms of their mental health. If the lab instead expects them to work at the same pace and with the same quality as existing members, the research output will suffer. The student will of course produce “sub-par” work, relative to what has been expected of the lab, and might be ejected while the institutional causes of her reasons to “fail” will be overlooked.

By undertaking such socially minded affirmative action, research labs can surmount the concerns Ritchie flags vis-à-vis the “argument from inevitability” (i.e. by recalibrating v. compromising their expected outcomes). They can also ensure the practice of science produces benefits to society at large, beyond scientific knowledge per se – by depoliticising science itself by admitting the political overtones mediating its practice and improving access to the methods by which good science is produced. It bears repeating, thus, that where science is a reason of state and daily life in all its spheres is governed by inequalities, science needs to be political.

Trump, science denial and violence

For a few days last week, before the mail-in votes had been counted in the US, the contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump seemed set for a nail-biting finish. In this time a lot of people expressed disappointment on Twitter that nearly half of all Americans who had voted (Trump’s share of the popular vote was 48% on November 5) had done so for anti-science and science denialism.

Quite a few commentators also went on to say that “denying science is not just another political view”, implying that Trump, who has repeatedly endorsed such denialism, isn’t being a part of the political right as much as stupid and irresponsible.

This is a reasonable deduction but I think it’s also a bit more complicated. To my mind, a belief that “denying science is not just another political view” could be unfair if it keeps us from addressing the violence perpetrated by some supporters of science, and the state in the name of science.

Almost nowhere does science live in a vacuum, churning out silver bullets to society’s various ills; and in the course of its relationship with the state, it is sometimes a source of distress as well. For example, when the scientific establishment adopts non-democratic tactics to set up R&D facilities, like in Challakere, Kudankulam and Theni (INO); when unscrupulous hospitals fleece patients by exploiting their medical illiteracy; and when ineffective communication and engagement in ‘peace time’ leads to impressions during ‘wartime’ that science serves only a particular group of people, or that ‘science knows best’. These are just a few examples.

Of course, belief in pseudo-Ayurvedic treatments and astrological predictions arise due to a complicated interplay of factors, including an uncritical engagement with the status quo and the tendency to sustain caste hierarchies. We must also ask who is being empowered and why, since Ayurveda and astrology also perpetrate violences of their own.

But in this mess, it’s important to remember that science can be political as well and that choosing science can be a political act, and that by extension opposing or denying science can be a political view as well – particularly if there is also an impression that science is something that the state uses to legitimise itself (as with poorly crafted disease transmission models), often by trampling over the rights of the weak.

This is ultimately important because erasing the political context in which science denialism persists could also blind us to the violence being perpetrated by the support for science and scientism, and its political context.

When I sent a draft of the post so far to a friend for feedback, he replied that “the sympathetic view of science denialism” that I take leads to a situation where “one both can and can’t reject science denialism as a viable political position.” That’s correct.

“Well, which one is it?”

Honestly, I don’t know, but I’m not in search of an answer either. I simply think non-scientific ideas and organisations are accused of perpetrating violence more often than scientific ones are, so it’s important to interrogate the latter as well lest we continue to believe that simply and uncritically rooting for science is sufficient and good.

The ignoble president and the Nobel Prize

What is the collective noun for a group of Nobel laureates? I’m considering ballast. A ballast of Nobel laureates is appealing because these people, especially if they are all white and male, often tend to take themselves too seriously and are taken so by others as well. I’m not saying they tend to say meaningless things but only that they – and we, speaking generally – overestimate the import of their words, mistaking them for substance when more often than not they are just air (often as a result of being dragged into, or being compelled to comment on, matters in which they may not have been involved if they hadn’t received Nobel Prizes).

On September 7, Physics World reported that 81 Nobel laureates had “voiced their support” for Joe Biden ahead of the impending presidential elections in the US. This move, so to speak, echoed a letter authored by a group of 150 or so well-known Indian scientists ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in India. The Indian group had asked that the people “vote wisely”, principally in order to protect constitutional safeguards and against those who violated or would abrogate them. This was sage advice – even though the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose actions and policies in its first term in power from 2014 to 2019 had dismissed just this wisdom, won a thumping majority – but it was jarring on one count.

The letter’s authors taken together constituted an important subset of the national community of scientists – a community that had stayed largely silent through a spate of horrific incidents of violence, harassment and subversion of institutions and people alike for five years or so. Though it was courageous to have spoken up at a crucial moment (even if the letter didn’t directly name the party or those political candidates whose ideologies were evidently opposed to the ethos the letter’s authors advocated), there was a nagging feeling that perhaps it was too little too late. And in a way, it was.

In addition, the advantages of scientists grouping together as such wasn’t clear – if only to me. Scientists are members of society just as much as most other people are. While it makes sense to come together as scientists, especially as scientists in the same field, to oppose or support an idea that defies or benefits that field, to accumulate as scientists to offer advice on a matter that they haven’t spoken up about before and on which they have as much authority as non-scientists sounds like a plea – apart from broadcasting their support for Biden or saying “vote wisely” or whatever – to defer to their especial authority as scientists, in particular as ‘leading scientists’, as they say, or as Nobel laureates, with emphases on the ‘leading’ and ‘Nobel’.

Otherwise, what does a group of scientists really mean? The Nobel laureates who have spoken up now in favour of Biden offer a similarly confusing proposition. The citizens of a democratic country coming together to vote means they are governing themselves. They are engaging in a specifically defined activity part of a suite of processes the traversal of which gives rise to effective, politically legitimate governments. The employees of a factory coming together to protest their wages (while forsaking them) means they are striving to uphold their rights as labourers. Twenty-two people coming onto a large, grassy field to kick one ball around according to a prefixed and predetermined rule-set means they are playing football. What does a group of Nobel laureates coming together to endorse a presidential candidate mean – other than the moment being crafted to attract the press’s attention?

The fact of their being Nobel laureates does not qualify their endorsement for any different or higher recognition than, say, the endorsement of a businessperson, a badminton champion or a poet, or in fact the many, many scientists who are being good in ways that no award can measure. (Whether the laureates themselves aspire to such relevance is moot.) And this is true from both the electoral and civilian perspectives: neither Trump nor Modi are going to rue the lack of scientists’ support if only because, ironically, the scientists would rather wait to organise among themselves on rare occasions instead of speaking up as often as is necessary or even diffuse into the superseding community of ‘protestors’ to oppose injustice. Just as much as a biologist needs to have studied evolution as well as have successfully demonstrated their proficiency in order to be acknowledged as an expert on evolution – so that they may then dispense thoughts and ideas on the topic that could be taken seriously – good political guidance needs to emerge from a similar enterprise, grounded in knowledge of public affairs and civic engagement.

This also means speaking up once in a while can only influence one’s audience so much. Generic appeals to “vote wisely” are well-taken but, considered in context, their potential to change minds is bound to be awfully finite, or even patronising, depending on the context. For example, Physics World quoted Bill Foster, the Democratic representative from Illinois, reportedly the “only physicist in Congress” and the person who canvassed the laureates, saying:

[Asking the laureates to back Biden] was like pushing at an open door. … there was a lot of enthusiasm because of the difference [the laureates] perceive in the scientific understanding [between Biden and Trump]. … They recognise the harm being done by ignoring science in public policy. And it’s not only science; it’s logic and integrity. The scientific community wants to get to a situation in which they trust people’s word. … The only reason we’re in a position to develop vaccines rapidly is decades of scientific research. This may be an opportunity for the scientific community to remind everyone about long-term investment in science.

Foster’s effort is clearly aimed at hitting the limelight – which it did; getting 81 Nobel laureates is more glamorous than getting 81 well-regarded principal investigators, scientist-communicators, lecturers or postdocs. However, the extent to which such an exercise will be able to sway public opinion is hard to say. I personally can’t imagine, assuming for a moment that we are all Americans as well, that I, my father (a libertarian of sorts), my mother (a devout Hindu), one of her brothers (a staunch BJP supporter) or my father’s brother-in-law (a seemingly committed centrist) would ever think, “Oh, a Nobel laureate has vouched for Biden (or a group of scientists have recommended against Narendra Modi). I should think about whether or not I wish to vote for him (or not for the other).”

And while I don’t presume to know why each of these laureates endorsed Biden’s candidature, their combined support – as compiled on Foster’s initiative – together with Foster’s words indicate that the community of laureates is simply looking out for itself, just as much as every other community is, but in its case wielding the COVID-19 pandemic and its ‘pre-approval’ of anything scientific to press its point that Trump, in its view, is not fit to be president. It is easy to agree that Trump should go but impossible to agree that he must go because science is not in charge! Science is not supposed to be in charge; this – whether the US or India – is a democracy, not a scientocracy, and the government constituted by the performance of democratic rights and responsibilities must not function to the exclusion of disciplines, considerations or even knowledge other than those with a scientific basis. The Physics World article also quotes Carol Greider, a 2009 medicine laureate, thus:

[She] asserted that elected leaders “should be making decisions based on facts and science,” adding that she “strongly endorses” Biden, in particular because of his “commitment to putting public health professionals, not politicians, back in charge”.

This is a dangerously sweeping statement. The pandemic has temporarily legitimised a heightened alertness to the prescriptions of science, at pain of death in many cases, but it can be no excuse – even if pandemics are expected to become more common and/or more dangerous – to substitute broad-based decision-making to that based only on “facts and science”, nor to substitute politicians with public health professionals as the people in charge. In fact, and ultimately, if the laureates’ endorsement this year parallels Greider’s thoughts, it would seem there is an opinion among some of these scientists that “facts and science” ought to constitute the foundations of all political decision-making. Many Indian scientists are already of this view.

The social scientist Prakash Kashwan discussed a similar issue in the context of climate geoengineering in The Wire in December 2018; his conclusions, outlined in the short excerpt below, apply just as well to the pandemic:

Decisions about which unresolved questions of geoengineering deserve public investment can’t be left only to the scientists and policymakers. The community of climate engineering scientists tends to frame geoengineering in certain ways over other equally valid alternatives. This includes considering the global average surface temperature as the central climate impact indicator and ignoring vested interests linked to capital-intensive geoengineering infrastructure. This could bias future R&D trajectories in this area. And these priorities, together with the assessments produced by eminent scientific bodies, have contributed to the rise of a de facto form of governance. In other words, some ‘high-level’ scientific pronouncements have assumed stewardship of climate geoengineering in the absence of other agents. Such technocratic modes of governance don’t enjoy broad-based social or political legitimacy.

Yes, pseudoscience during the pandemic is bad; denying the reality of climate change is bad. But speaking out solely against these ills – in much the same way the ‘Marches for Science’ in India have seemed to do, by drawing scientists out onto streets to (rightfully) demand better pay for scientists and more respect for scientific prescriptions even as the community of scientists has not featured prominently in protests against other excesses by the Government of India, especially the persecution of Muslims and Dalits – suggests a refusal to see oneself as citizen first, as being committed to the accomplishment of one’s goals as a scientist ahead of being concerned with direr issues that predominantly affect the minority or, more worryingly, to see in science alone the solutions to all of our social ills. (Young scientists have been the exception by far.)

Disabusing those who cling to this view and persuading them of the reality that their authority is a dream-state maintained by science’s privileged relationship with the modern state and capitalism’s exploitative relationship with the scientific enterprise is a monumental task, requiring decades of sustained interrogation, dialogue and reflection. Thankfully, we have a cheap and very-short-term substitute in our midst for now: on September 9, news reports emerged that a Norwegian politician named Christian Tybring-Gjedde had nominated Trump for the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, allegedly for brokering the peace agreement between Israel and the UAE. I really hope the prize-awarding committee takes the nomination seriously and that Trump receives the prize. Irrespective of what consequences such an event will have on American politics, it will be a golden opportunity for the world – and especially India – to see that the Nobel Prizes are a deeply human and therefore uniquely flawed enterprise, as much as any other award or recognition, that they are capable of being wrong or even just plain stupid.

The Pakistani physicist Abdus Salam did the Nobel Prizes a big favour when he received the physics prize in 1979. But by and large, motivated by Henry Kissinger winning the peace prize six years earlier and Barack Obama doing so in 2009, the popular perception of these prizes has only become increasingly irredeemable since. I have full confidence in His Laureateship Donald J. Trump being able to tear down this false edifice – by winning it, and then endorsing himself.