As we watch the United States – our closest neighbour and gargantuan cultural influence – descend into fascism, science has come under unprecedented fire from its federal government. From slashing federal science funding to allowing a political appointee to decide which science needs to be “corrected,” the Trump administration has been abundantly clear: scientists pose a threat to far-right values. In a world where truths – for example, the difference between sex and gender – are constantly subject to ideological debate, science may seem more political than ever before. To the mainstream, this probably feels deeply wrong. “Science should be objective,” you cry, “not political!”
But as historically marginalized people know, science has always been political. And while the right currently sees scientific progress as undermining their anti-truth dogma, science has also been weaponized by right-wing oppressive powers since its inception.
The scientific method we know today is based on inductive reasoning, meaning the extrapolation of general principles from specific observations. Our modern inductive scientific method was pioneered by Francis Bacon, 17th-century lawyer, philosopher and politician. He was also a major proponent of British imperialism and colonialism. At a glance, the development of the scientific method and the expansion of the British empire might seem to be two unrelated branches of Bacon’s career. But Bacon’s scientific method embodies an ethos which can be applied to imperial projects: if we can classify and catalogue the world, we can control it.
When science emerged as the dominant epistemology in Western Europe, colonialism was already in full swing, and the two complemented each other well: colonies provided numerous specimens – human and nonhuman – for scientific research. Indigenous knowledge was also co-opted and re-packaged as scientific findings, as seen in the 19th century “discovery” of the antimalarial compound quinine (which was introduced to Jesuits by the Indigenous population of Peru).
The Baconian catalogue-and-control ethos drove the work of countless future imperialist-cum scientists, including the fathers of scientific racism Carl Linnaeus and Samuel George Morton. Carl Linnaeus, the 17th-century father of taxonomy (the classification of living things into groups), classified human races as taxonomic groups with behavioural and moral differences which he believed were rooted in biology – he refers to Europeans as “wise” and “inventors,” while referring to Africans as “sluggish” and “sly.” Samuel George Morton, meanwhile, wrote extensively in the 19th century on the idea that cranial differences in races were correlated with intelligence levels.
History saw countless examples of oppressive and exploitative science. These ranged from pioneer gynecologist James Marion Sims’s brutal experimentation on enslaved Black women in the 19th century to alleged CIA-funded brainwashing experiments done on McGill campus in the 1950s and 60s, which used Indigenous children as test subjects. Sure, these cases could be dismissed as pseudoscience, rather than treated as evidence that science is inherently oppressive. But within the scientific community at the time, these ideologies and actions were excused as reasonable, necessary even, in the name of progress. And a “progress” which systemically exploits the bottom rungs of fabricated social hierarchies is inarguably political.
Don’t get me wrong: the scientific method, and the technological and epistemological advancements it has allowed, are incredibly important. Far be it from this humble writer to contribute to the spread of anti-science rhetoric. As we saw firsthand during the COVID-19 pandemic, and continue to see in vaccine denialism and a host of other anti-science behaviours, mistrust in science and scientists can be disastrous. But we cannot pretend that science is somehow divorced from the hierarchical and oppressive power dynamics of our society. And as we would regard any institution which has repeatedly justified enslavement, racism, and torture with a critical eye, so should we regard the institution of science.
So get your vaccines, folks! And vote for administrations who don’t de-fund research. Science is a pillar of our society. But as many students (myself included) pursue our science degrees, we must remember: our field has oppressive roots, and its nature is perennially political. By thinking critically, recognizing oppressive structures, and denouncing them, we can try to make science a little bit better.