Concerning Science

Abstract

Concerning Science David K. Hecht (bio) Andrew Jewett,Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020. 356 pp. Notes and index. $42.00 Science matters. In his impressive Science under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America, Andrew Jewett skillfully explores a variety of different critiques of science across twentieth-century United States history. These critiques do not always align in their particulars: some are based in religion, while others are secular. Some come from the political right, others from the left. Some seem to originate from the cultural margins, whereas others were mainstream. Moreover, as Jewett acknowledges, there is no consistent definition of science that runs through all the critiques. What unites them is a sense that there is something amiss in the world—modernity, secularism, amorality, dehumanization, totalitarianism, materialism, technocracy—and that science is to blame. Science matters, for these critics, and in all the wrong ways. Science under Fire can be profitably read as a comprehensive treatment of science skepticism in modern U.S. history. Jewett effectively distills the essences of a staggeringly wide range of thinkers and writers across many decades. “Although a concern with science’s corrupting cultural effects has never been the dominant strain in American thinking about science,” he writes, “it has been persistent, influential, and consequential for nearly a century—above all, in the post-World War II ‘golden age’” (p. 16). Having accelerated after 1945, such skepticism has become entrenched in recent decades and one of its most prominent manifestations—climate change denial—is proving to have planetary implications. However, Jewett, counterintuitively but powerfully, scarcely mentions climate change. While some readers might wish for a greater engagement with our contemporary crisis, I welcomed Jewett’s more historical focus. After all, we have any number of thoughtful analyses concerning the origin and nature of climate change denial.1 What we don’t have is exactly what Science under Fire provides: a synthesis of science skepticism before the current era. Like all good history, this book demonstrates that its subject is far more complicated than we might assume simply by considering its most recent form. [End Page 389] This is an important contribution. But science also matters here in a deeper and more methodologically novel way. Jewett uses “science” as a tool with which to explore American intellectual history more broadly. This is not a history of science, but rather an account of the many ways in which American thinkers, writers, clergyman, and educators mobilized science as a rhetorical concept in defining and pressing their social visions. Jewett explains: “this book explores conceptions of science as a social and cultural force, rather than a method or a subject” (p. 5). Precisely because these actors’ ultimate concerns lay outside of science, the stakes of the debate were monumental. Jewett writes, for example, of the concerns of many American Catholics that teaching evolution was just one more expression “of a materialistic, self-divinizing form of rationalism that had plagued the West for centuries” (p. 61). Similarly, he contends that after World War II “it became a matter of simple common sense for many scholars that the Western world was experiencing an epochal modern crisis and that scientism lay at its root” (p. 123). Few of the critics who populate the pages of Science under Fire saw their concerns in narrow, policy terms; even those who offered political critiques did so with an eye toward epic battles between democracy and freedom on one hand with totalitarianism and repression on the other. Science under Fire is thus an intellectual history of (perceived) cultural and intellectual crisis. As such, it should be read alongside such books as Andrew Hartman’s A War for the Soul of America (2015), Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas that Made America (2019), or Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of Fracture (2011). All three of these books—and there are certainly others—are ambitious and impressive syntheses of much intellectual history (and historiography) in the service of understanding the grand sweep of American culture and ideas. Jewett’s contribution to this literature is to focus on science. Of course, he is not the first intellectual historian...