I understand an anarchist critique of science – science as esoteric, inaccessible, as closed-off and elite. I jive with this critique. I agree. However, I do not understand the anarchists who then reject science altogether.
If something of utility and value is seen, and upon sight, is forbidden – as many anarchists no doubt perceive science, a noun denied by formless gatekeepers – the anarchist who negates the desire for the forbidden will end up subsumed by leftism and authoritarian communism. The subtlety of coercive compromise of one’s desires, the incremental subsumption of the individual into the mass.
An anarchist who makes a virtue of their depravity and deprivation, who finds poverty to be worthy and somewhat soteriological, will find righteous obligation and honour in serving and appeasing the crowd. They will accept and rationalize why such things as science are forbidden and encourage their own, and others’, ignorance.
Ironically, the anarchist above often rejects science in pursuit of a more “natural” life. Ironic, because said anarchist (and I am obviously speaking in hypothetical generalities here) critiques science using a similar reasoning that will eventually rationalize finding solace and salvation in community. The same reasons that science is rejected become reasons to accept community patrols, spokes-councils, and majoritarian rule.
In this light, science excludes, community includes. The reasoning behind either’s acceptance lay in the subject’s relation to both, and how the subject perceives both. Community and science mean very different things to many different people. Here, the anarchist uses the reasoning of “belonging.” The age-old dichotomy of us and them. In-group/out-group bias. This reasoning, this bias, welcomes community and rejects science, as science is seen as separate from community.
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Science is forbidden to the anarchist for many reasons, but mainly, the anarchist accepts that it is forbidden. The anarchist justifies this acquiescence through a 3-step narrative:
1) The state and capital fund most research and, through universities and corporations, science becomes monopolized.
2) Through the commodification of science, methodology becomes dogma in pursuit of research and profit.
3) Science then, being a mechanism for the manufacturing of state and corporate utilities – from riot gear to sanitation – is to be rejected as a tool of the oppressor.
BUT, to get pedantic, science is a verb, not a noun. It is not a tool, as in a physical, tangible hammer or sickle. Science is best described as a methodology, pursuit, or passion. Science is not the hammer. Science is hammering. One does not gain access to science, one simply utilizes it.
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Like anarchism, science is a practice. One is not an anarchist or scientist unless one is doing. I am not an anarchist, I am a philosopher of anarchism. I become an anarchist if/when philosophizing affects reality. I am a scientist at times because I apply scientific methods in formulating opinions, hypotheses, conclusions, theories. The philosophy of anarchism lends critical perspective to the scientist – enabling the scientist to remain skeptical of authority (their own and other’s), allowing the scientist to see the perils of scientism and cognitive biases. Science enables the anarchist to engage in the anarchist process of self-reflection, doubt, critique and experimental (non)action.
Put in Marxist terms, science is the means of production and it would behoove anarchists
to seize these means.
There is no value in starvation, or pious Primitivism, or Luddism – in a rejection of science and technology wholesale – in light of (post)modernity and the evolution of the (liquid) state. The anarchists who refuse to become scientists are ill-prepared to foment changes in, adjustments to, and creative destruction of, the contemporary social order.
An anarchist who does not become a scientist once in a while cannot engage with relevant, pertinent concerns that anarchism aims to engage with, such as: “How will vaccinations work without centralized authority?”
A flat-out rejection of science gleefully cops out from answering the above from an anarchist perspective. Oftentimes coupled with conspiratorial rhetoric, many anarchists have and will see no need to confront such concerns because [insert justification here, such as vaccines are population control, toxins are bad because chemicals etc.].
This scene is repeated endlessly. It is pathetic.
The anarchist critique of science-as-noun is salient and poignant, but the failure to utilize science-as-method to anarchism’s benefit is unnecessary and obtuse.
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Education is not a right, it is an imperative the anarchist takes. Facetiously, rights are not backed by science.
Rejecting science is like rejecting education because of state-funded schools.
Anti-intellectualism becomes an intellectual position one defends on intellectual grounds.
Rejecting science in toto is indefensible.
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There is nothing virtuous in repressed desires.
Science is not forbidden.
Knowledge is not a commodity.
Power is not concentrated.
Knowledge is power and we must arm ourselves. Science is ONE way of attaining knowledge. Wrest science from the state and capital!
Love, Rage and Other Incendiary Intoxicants 
When I read C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination, it occurred to me that imagining our own story to have arisen from the tangled historical web of social processes was all it would take to define our praxis in the world. This is to say that understanding our own life to be intimately intertwined in historical contingency while simultaneously redefining that flow going into the future as we breathe and act is to understand ourselves as sociologists. Mills was trying to put forth an emancipatory sociology by convincing those who would listen that they were just involved in the game of sociology as the ‘experts’ on high. This was the essence of a liberation epistemology, and it was built on a subtle ontology of necessarily dispersed agency.
Feyerabend’s anarchist epistemology is cut from the same cloth. The argument of a lack of method is not an indictment of science as being disorganized, chaotic, or even obtuse; it is an adulation of the freedom of human thought that transcends time and place. New ideas spring from curious, open minds regardless of social standing, career path or funding. New ideas needn’t be correlated to technological breakthroughs as well, since many new technologies are geared towards perpetuating needless consumption in complete neglect of ecosystem carrying capacity. Real novelty in thought is likely best evaluated by how well it creates the conditions for further replication of further novelty. This could come in the form of innovations in social relations that set down basic rules for the equitable distribution of wealth; it could come as sustainable food production and distribution practices; or it could come as locally-oriented education solutions for the next generation. Innovation in this realm of socializing technologies has atrophied in comparison to the progress made in hardware technological development.
But the larger point remains: epistemology ought to be considered to arise from a firmer ontological basis than a concentrated nest of experts who bequeath their knowledge to the unwashed masses. This does not reflect reality at all, and is detrimental to any kind of sane epistemological development. The epistemology we seek to uncover is one that is grounded in a holist, non-centralized ontology that encompasses all people, everywhere, everywhen. We are all scientists, participating, observing and adding to epistemology (whether we are willing to accept this responsibility or not) just as we are all sociologists. No distinction can be made and no adequate demarcation can be drawn.
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Well stated. Can’t find much to disagree with except for the claim that expert “nests” bequeathing knowledge to the masses is not based on reality, though I think this disagreement stems from the difference between how pedagogy works anarchistically and how capitalism and the state monopolize pedagogy
… even though a total monopoly is impossible.
I would add that just as everyone is a scientist or sociologist people are also anarchists. What we lack is literacy in each of these fields and a coherent synthesis thereof.
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