entire book - Chris Hables Gray

Chapter Twelve
Future Peace:
The Remaking of Scientists
and Soldiers
The Politics of Science
Science is the most prestigious world view today in both the developed and
the undeveloped worlds. Marxist or capitalist, Shiite or Sunni, Protestant or
Catholic, all pay a certain homage to science. Many people, especially
scientists, give it the role of their personal defining ideology or religion.
Therapies, policies, and countless other systems seek its mantle, from astrology
to psychiatry to Stalinism to UFOlogy. Whether or not they are indeed
sciences depends on one's definition of a science, but they wish to be.
The legitimizing power of science has been claimed by many political
viewpoints. This is certainly true of most variations of capitalist ideology.
Whether sympathetic to the state or not, from Democratic liberals to
free-market libertarians, the vast majority of the ideological supporters of
capitalism give science a central role in their cosmology.
But this is just as true of almost all of the Western alternatives to
capitalism, such as early anarchism and almost all brands of Marxism. Peter
Kropotkin, a world-famous geographer in his own right, argued that science
supported anarchism and anarchism was scientific (1970). While Mikhail
Bakunin also felt undistorted science supported anarchism, he was less naive
about the possible misuse of science's material and moral power. He warned
against the authoritarian tendencies of scientists and the misuse of science
by governments. Most importantly, he validated the importance of unscientific
abstractions, such as passion and justice, for analyzing and changing the
social system (1953). Postmodern anarchists are very skeptical of science,
and many have fully taken up the critique of the postmodern feminists and
anarchist theorists such as Paul Goodman, who even in the 1950s disputed
science's claims to normative truth and disinterested good (1964).
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