ALISON GOPNIK is a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a coauthor (with Andrew N. Meltzoff and Patricia K. Kuhl) of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind.
It may not be a good idea to encourage scientists to articulate dangerous ideas.
Good scientists, almost by definition, tend toward the contrarian and ornery; nothing gives them more pleasure than holding to an unconventional idea in the face of opposition. Indeed, orneriness and contrarianism are almost prerequisites for science—nobody wants to have an idea that everyone else has, too. Scientists are always constructing a straw-man establishment opponent whom they can then fearlessly demolish. If you combine that with defying the conventional wisdom of nonscientists, you have a recipe for a distinctive kind of scientific smugness and self-righteousness. We scientists see this contrarian habit grinning back at us in a particularly hideous and distorted form when global-warming opponents or intelligent-design advocates invoke the unpopularity of their ideas as evidence that they should be accepted or at least discussed.
The problem is exacerbated for public intellectuals. For the media, too, would far rather hear about contrarian or unpopular or morally dubious or “controversial” ideas than about ideas that are congruent with everyday morality and wisdom. No one writes a newspaper article about a study showing that girls are just as good at some task as boys, that there aren’t IQ differences between races, or that children are influenced by their parents.
It is certainly true that there is no reason that scientifically valid results should have morally comforting consequences—but there’s no reason why they shouldn’t, either. Unpopularity or shock is no more a sign of truth than popularity is. More to the point, when scientists do have ideas that are potentially morally dangerous, they should approach those ideas with hesitancy and humility. And they should do so in full recognition of the great human tragedy that, as Isaiah Berlin pointed out, there can be genuinely conflicting goods and that humans are often in situations of conflict for which there is no simple or obvious answer.
Truth and morality may indeed in some cases be competing values, but that is a tragedy, not a cause for self-congratulation. Humility and empathy come less easily to most scientists (most certainly including me) than pride and self-confidence, but perhaps for that very reason those are the virtues we should pursue.
This is, of course, itself a dangerous idea. Orneriness and contrarianism are genuine scientific virtues, too. And in the current profoundly antiscientific political climate, it is terribly dangerous to do anything that might give comfort to the enemies of science. But I think the peril to science actually doesn’t lie in timidity or self-censorship. It is much more likely to lie in a cacophony of “controversy.”