How Cold War politics forged to the doctrine of scientific neutrality

Michael D. Gordon reviews Audra J. Wolfe, Freedom’s Laboratory: The Cold War Struggle for the Soul of Science, in the Boston Review, August 21, 2019.

In her new book Freedom’s Laboratory, Audra Wolfe tells the story of how U.S. politicians and diplomats during the Cold War sought to mobilize apolitical science for ideological ends. As she shows, while there may have been roots of this twinned political/apolitical story going back to the age of Galileo and Newton, the confrontation with Communism sent the process into overdrive.

Through careful reading of reams of Anglophone materials culled from federal records, private correspondence, and newly declassified intelligence briefings, Wolfe unravels the distinctive meanings science took on within an American political and scientific elite at pains to distinguish “the West,” symbolically as well as substantially, from the Soviet Union. As Wolfe chronicles, the insistence that scientists must enjoy the freedom to pursue knowledge without political interference came to be deployed as an anti-communist weapon, winning so much support that it was able to underwrite (the concept “political interference” was deliberately silent on funding) much of the infrastructure of science as we know it—including the National Science Foundation (NSF). The separation many take for granted between science and politics, Wolfe thus shows, has a political history: it is partly “constructed and maintained through a series of political choices.”

Dialectical materialism made claims on the aims of scientific inquiry:

The official philosophy of science of the Soviet Union was dialectical materialism. In heated moments Soviet philosophers would argue whether cutting-edge scientific theories—relativity or quantum mechanics in physics, say, or resonance theory in chemistry—were compatible with the tenets of Lenin or Friedrich Engels. (Marx had comparatively little to say about such matters.) If a doctrine was found wanting—as happened with Freudian psychoanalysis in the face of Pavlov-inspired behaviorism—it was tragically suppressed, and its adherents occasionally brutally repressed. More frequently than not the demonized doctrines found champions who succeeded in averting the cudgel.

Then there was genetics—the most extreme ideological showdown in Soviet science, which set the terms for a dispute that would reverberate for decades. [...] Lysenko sold his theories as the only correct dialectical-materialist understanding of heredity, one based on the inheritance of acquired characteristics rather than Gregor Mendel’s particles of heredity (known since 1905 as “genes”).

I certainly remembering being taught about Lysenko in secondary school, with the point being made that we don't do that in America.

Germany and the bomb:

Wolfe also mentions briefly how many physicists found cause to criticize politicized science—to their minds, synonymous with science in totalitarian states—on rather different grounds. To them, at least initially, the great foil to the success of American science lay not in Stalin’s Soviet Union but in Hitler’s Germany, whose scientists had demonstrably failed to produce an atomic bomb. According to physicist Samuel Goudsmit, who had been sent on the heels of the troops into liberated Europe to acquire intelligence on Nazi nuclear efforts, the Germans had only their the anti-intellectual and anti-Semitic ideology to blame.

And then there's the CIA:

The range of the CIA’s sponsored activities is truly staggering: translating biology textbooks, funding conferences, subsidizing academic publications, promoting nuclear disarmament (Pugwash again), and more. The scientists felt that they were doing their own work and promoting their own disciplines, and the CIA got what it wanted without anyone being the wiser—until Ramparts magazine and the New York Times blew the covers in 1967, that is. This moment is the climax of Wolfe’s narrative.

Wolfe is outraged at the opportunism of the CIA’s under-the-table promotion of science. But even after the exposés, many of the scientists who were unwittingly the instruments of this CIA largesse did not share her consternation. Science continued to be lavishly funded and to play an important role in Cold War politics. The story gradually becomes less how diplomats used scientists than how scientists used diplomats.

The political nature of science:

One upshot of Wolfe’s history is that it may unsettle those who assume that any assertion that “science is political” is an attack on science. That science is political is irrefutable and not connected to the reliability of the knowledge it produces. Insisting that science is apolitical cannot make it so, but it can and does keep us from better understanding the political conditions that make science possible, the political choices involved in organizing and administering it, as well as the political ideologies and structures that threaten it.

H/t 3QD.