AndrewJewettScience Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern AmericaHarvard University Press, 2020, 356 p., $39.95

Abstract

Rejection of science—or what is labeled as rejection of science—is a notorious feature of the contemporary cultural and political landscape in the United States. Highly visible instances are dismissals of evolutionary theory, climate change denial, and antivaccine movements. In this deeply researched and thoughtful book, Andrew Jewett describes tensions about science over the past century, with a focus on the 1920s, the 1960s and 1970s, and the present. Jewett argues that the 1920s witnessed the first intense and widespread disputes in the United States over scientific authority. The controversies in this period concerned not only evolutionary theory (e.g., Scopes Trial) but also, and more importantly, modern psychology, which became a fixture in widely read newspapers and periodicals, to the dismay of those attached to religiously grounded understandings of human personality and what constitutes proper child socialization. The second period of tension about science Jewett identifies and examines in depth was the post-WWII decades, especially the 1960s and 1970s. Ironically from the standpoint of the present, it was if anything public intellectuals on the left who expressed dismay and distrust of science. “scientism” was viewed as intrinsically hostile to humanistic values, with soulless technology and an implicitly materialistic worldview posing at least as much risk to the achievement of a just and compassionate society as conservative religious institutions. The final period that Jewett considers is the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The tensions he describes are entirely familiar, but they take on a fresh appearance with the historical backdrop he provides, and his nuanced portrait of the positions of the key protagonists produces a welcome respect for the complexity of ongoing intellectual and political controversies. Over the entire century from the 1920s to the present, the unifying theme in the questioning of scientific authority has been the allegation that scientists, while ostensibly value-neutral, have injected social philosophies into American life that have damaged the social and moral order. Jewett concludes with a plea to approach science more matter-of-factly. Scientific tools can be credited with producing tremendous gains in human well-being but within rather circumscribed domains. Much that is highly valued in the human experience lies outside the reach of modern science.