Dass viele Anhänger politischer Rechtsparteien seit eh und je Probleme mit der Offenheit, der Riskofreude und der geistigen Freiheit der wissenschaftlichen Debattenkultur haben, ist allgemein bekannt. Dass auch viele Linke sich schwer tun mit dem Geist wissenschaftlichen Freidenkertums und dem humanistischen Universalismus ist weniger geläufig. Jetzt hat Yuval Levin in The New Atlantis einen erhellenden und sehr lesenswerten Essay zum Thema “Science and the Left” publiziert:

(...) The great original appeal of the scientific enterprise was its potential to empower man over nature. Francis Bacon set out the conquest of nature as his aim. René Descartes sought to make human beings “masters and possessors of nature.” And the scientific community they helped to found has since continued to pursue these twin objectives: expanding human power and conquering nature.

But for the modern left, each of these key aims of modern science has grown deeply problematic. To begin with, over the past century the left has come to take a rather complicated view of power. It has become highly suspicious of certain kinds of power: the power of nations, of corporations, of the rich over the poor, of man over nature (or as it has been renamed, to make it passive, “the environment”).

Much of this change took place in course of the twentieth century—a time of previously unimaginable inhumanity and villainy. Shaken by examples of power run amok, and by exposure to and interaction with postmodernism (with its excessive and blinding obsession with power), many on the left became opponents of power as such, in ways that earlier progressives had decidedly not been. This is evident in the ethic of the environmental movement, in progressive views of foreign policy and economics, and in the general tenor of the left.

But this suspicion of power seems not to have made much headway in the left’s views about the two most powerful institutions of the age: the state and science. This is easier to explain when it comes to the state, which American liberals and progressives have taken to be the essential institution of social solidarity, political expression, material improvement, and justice. The ideology of the left is centered upon a proper employment of the power of the state, and so the left is naturally disinclined to turn against the use of such power.

But blindness to the power of science is a more perplexing quandary, and one not yet seriously faced by the left. Science (as the true postmodernists know) is the foremost font of modern power, and the underlying source of almost all the expressions and incarnations of power the left does find troubling: industrial power, corporate power, military power, imperial power, and especially human power over the natural world.

Indeed, it is in the arena of environmentalism, more than anywhere else, that this blind spot of the party of science is most pronounced. There, the left’s problem with power and the left’s problem with conquering nature become one—yet the role science plays in making both possible has never come front and center.