Black Triangle

Godwin’s justly celebrated law states that as an online debate grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving the Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

After having explained Godwin’s Law Nick Cohen goes on to give an example of Godwin’s law in The Daily Mail, where AN Wilson attempts to equate the recently sacked Nutt with Nazi scientists. At this point you should stop reading him, as Nick Cohen suggests:

Readers versed in Godwin’s Law would stop reading as soon as they saw Wilson compare Professor Nutt to Dr Mengle. They would conclude that the professor was right to say that cannabis was not particularly harmful and that the government should reclassify it. After resolving never to read another word by Wilson, they could then enjoy the delights of liberation as they turned their minds away from the arguments about drugs and towards new challenges.

AN Wilson’s article is possibly the worst attack on science since Melanie Phillips turned her blunt rusty spoon of an intellect on science and argued science was the enemy of reason. AN Wilson argues that a babyish credulous worshipping of science is the danger, which he ascribes to the National Socialist movement in Germany. It’s true the Nazis did make some breakthroughs in science: epidemiological research showing the harms of smoking, jet aircraft, guided missiles, magnetic tape recording, and the nerve gas Sarin. However, Wilson is fundamentally wrong about the Nazis’ relationship to science, and to ethics in particular.

The only difference between Hitler and previous governments was that he believed, with babyish credulity, in science as the only truth. He allowed scientists freedoms which a civilised government would have checked.

I am not suggesting that any British scientists are currently conducting experiments comparable to those which were allowed in Nazi Germany or in Soviet Russia.

But I see the same habit of mind at work in Professor Nutt and his colleagues as made those mad scientists of the 20th century think they were above the moral law which governs the rest of us mortals.

The worship of science is the great superstition of our age. The scientific adviser speaks and we are all supposed to believe him, whether he is promoting crops genetically modified to withstand huge doses of poisonous weedkillers and pesticides, or tampering with the origin of human life itself in so-called stem cell research.

Wilson argues that a lack of constraint on scientists led to the excesses under Hitler, a situation he suggests exists now in our own society, but in fact there were ethical standards in Nazi Germany:

It might be hard to believe, but there were, in fact, ethical standards that governed medical research and the practice of medicine in the Third Reich. Medical students took courses on medical ethics; medical textbooks in Nazi Germany discussed medical ethics. There was a great deal of attention given to the obligations of physicians to society, the state, and sometimes even to the individual. Nazi medical philosophers were critical of the ideal of value-free science, which was often equated with useless ivory-tower liberal — or Jewish — “science for its own sake.” Science was supposed to be “for the people,” though not of course for all people: Science was supposed to be at the service of the German Volk, the healthy and productive white races of Europe. Nazi medical ethics was underpinned by sexist paternalism, Nordic supremacy, cleanliness, punctuality, orderliness, unquestioned obedience to authority, and public and environmental health. It tended to emphasize preventive medicine, cost efficiency, the natural lifestyle, and the superiority of the productive worker. Clearly, Nazi medicine was imbued with ethical principles — some admirable, some despicable.

So the problem was not unrestrained science, but science carried out in the service of a racist ideology. Scientists were no more likely to be enthralled to fascist and totalitarian regimes than other intellectuals groups or wider society. Scientists are afterall only human. National Socialism wasn’t enslaved by science, science was enslaved by National Socialism.

Where I do have some sympathy with arguments about science is with the concern that scientific advice should not be the ultimate arbitor of public policy. My position (for what it is worth) is as follows.

Governments should take into account scientific advice, and be willing to explain the reasons for decisions which appear to go against that advice (in the recent Nutt case, perhaps an acknowledgement of socio-political context making reclassification difficult in the government view).

Scientists should also take account of the fact they live in democratic societies and that elected representatives should be able to make judgements that balance scientific advice against other considerations (in the recent Nutt case, it is quite clear that the classification of a drug is not the same as the molecular weight of a compound – there is space for disagreement).

At times, tension and outright disagreement between the scientific advice and what politicians (and by extension wider society) are willing to do may arise. That’s not necessarily a bad thing for a variety of reasons. However, the fact that the Brown government was unwilling to live with that, rejected the evidence, and then sacked Nutt is clearly not the way forward.