Published 2019, at the sweet spot where the history of ideas, the philosophy of science, and cultural critique meet. Crease’s project counterposes two groups of thinkers: those who advocated for the pursuit of science as a social good (Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Comte) and those who decried the corrosive effects of scientific culture (Vico, Mary Shelley, Weber, Husserl, Arendt).

As Crease reminds us, Vico saw that once democracy and a belief in the power of reason & science become paramount values, the social bonds created by ‘poetic wisdom’ would begin to break down in a ‘barbarism of reflection,’ where individuals can think only in the light of their own conceptual scheme.

…For such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure. Thus in the midst of their greatest festivities, though physically thronging together, they live like wild beasts in a deep solitude of spirit and will, scarcely any two being able to agree since each follows his own pleasure or caprice… (Vico, The New Science)

In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber wrote that, once the scientific revolution gave rationality new power and ruthlessness, the only effective counterforce to rationalization and ‘disenchantment’ was the charismatic demagogue who stands with the people against the narrow view of technocratic ‘experts.’ The authority of science is no match for popular ‘convictions.’ Husserl, though his phenomenology was an extension of his study with the Göttingen mathematicians, came to see that the mathematization of science created the illusion that knowledge about reality was reality itself. Elevating the scientific explanation of the world (‘objective’ & ‘theoretical’) over the ‘nonscientific’ denigrates the subjective and the practical spheres of life and weakens the humanities. Those who value faith and feeling reject science as a detached, elitist practice.

Crease's thesis reaches a crescendo in the penultimate chapter on Hannah Arendt. The ‘cultural vacuousness’ described by Husserl made possible the career of a character like Eichmann, who 'owed his first job to family connections, pontificated in recycled stock phrases and clichés, borrowed then mangled ideas from others, and denied firmly established facts.' For Arendt, the crisis of antirationalism brings a deadly, sterile passivity that allows incompetents like Eichmann to dominate what’s left of the public space, ‘setting themselves up as umpires not simply of what’s allowable, but also of what’s just and what’s scientific.’ Crease points to Arendt’s essay “Truth and Politics,” where she notes the proliferation of religious and philosophical opinions—an indicator not of toleration but of confusion and disorientation, belief without a firm grounding in experience, so that ‘factual truth, if it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted with great hostility;’ uncomfortable facts are turned into opinions, which are then opposed to other opinions. In 1971, Arendt wrote “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” in which she lamented the ‘nonrelation between facts and decision’: while the intelligence community had produced accurate factual reports, political leaders had lied about them. But the lie did not creep into politics by some accident, she said—

Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason, than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. He has prepared his story for public consumption with a careful eye to making it credible, where as reality has the disconcerting habit of confronting us with the unexpected, for which we were not prepared.

In the last chapter, Crease suggests some short- and long-term tactics for fighting science denial. And while the denial of climate science is his focus, reading between the lines gives The Workshop and the World an eerie resonance in the weird 2020 Real Now. ( )

Crease explores how the authority of science has been undermined by the very qualities that make science authoritative. A nourishing blend of eccentric biography and erudite analysis.

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Crease discusses ten thinkers: Descartes, Galileo, Descartes, Vico, Mary Shelley, Comte, Weber, Ataturk, Husserl, and Arendt; one chapter each. The chapters are somewhat independent. The steady theme throughout the book is science denial and especially climate change denial, together with the grounds for the authority of science - authority in the sense of command, how folks should obey authority, obey science.

A major point here is that science denial is some kind of structural problem. Defending particular points, particular instances of science denial, isn't going to make a dent in the warped structures that promote science denial. Thus Crease gives us a book about the role of science in public policy, rather than a book on the details of climate change and how we have come to know those details.

This book reminds me of the cultural transformation around the World Trade Center attack of 9/11/2001. What I noticed is that the books of Heidegger just vanished from bookstores very soon after those attacks. Before the attacks, Cultural Theory of all sorts was quite hip. After the attacks, people seemed to feel a need for solidity. It's too scary to question the institutions we rely on, when those institutions are under deadly attack. Similarly here: Crease seems content to refer to the elements of present day scientific consensus as "facts". I'm sure he knows enough about the philosophy of science to realize that facts of all sorts are not as solid as we'd like them to be. With climate change, we have to up-end our entire way of life on the gamble that the present consensus is accurate. Of course that is vastly less risky than placing our bet on the consensus being utterly wrong! But it is dreadfully uncomfortable to talk about such a high stakes decision as being a gamble.

I see the situation as being considerable further along. It's hardly the case anymore that these decisions are in front of us. That climate change organization 350.org - what a quaint name! We're well over 400 ppm CO2 as 2019 is winding down. Hate to say it, but our goose is cooked! The real problem at this point is, to what extent can we salvage anything of value. We're going to need science in the future, quite desperately so. But the whole infrastructure that science has built, that will now collapse along with coastal cities, glaciers, etc. - science has come to depend on that infrastructure. If the electric power grid collapses, along with the internet etc., how can we continue to conduct science? Science is going to be blamed for leading us down the garden path, right into a solid century or two of misery. And yet minimizing that misery is going to require all the microscopes, centrifuges, chromatography units, voltmeters, etc. that we can somehow keep in operation.

Anyway I think Crease engaged in some useful thinking with this book, looking at the bigger picture behind science denial. Probably for lots of readers, as far as he went will be as far as they're ready to go. But seriously, what we really need is a much vaster perspective. ( )