COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke “science” and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as “anti-science,” or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard. Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future. 

In 2007, I published Darwin Day in America, a critical history of social Darwinism in the United States and, more broadly, an exploration of the abuse of science in American public policy in the last century-and-a-half. In 2015, I wrote a new chapter for the paperback edition, highlighting a worrisome trend. I warned:

Our culture is witnessing the rise of what could be called totalitarian science — science so totalistic in its outlook that its defenders claim the right to remake every sphere of human life, from public policy and education to ethics and religion. PP. 385-386

Some predictions you don’t want to turn out to be true. Unfortunately, in my view we’ve gone pretty far down the path toward totalitarian science during the past two years.

I understand some readers may find this statement offensive. We have many different views about COVID-19 and the public policies designed to combat it. Our views are affected both by our understanding of the facts and by our own experiences. If someone you loved died from COVID-19, that tragedy will affect your view of the pandemic. If you or someone you love has been injured by a COVID-19 vaccine, that experience will influence you as well. If your small business or job did not survive the pandemic, ditto. Because of the pandemic’s deeply personal costs, it can be painful to engage in a candid discussion of the changes COVID-19 policies have wrought on our society.

Yet such a discussion is long overdue. Evolution News and Science Today focuses primarily on the scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical debates over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. But from the start, the impact of “scientism” on public policy, freedom of speech, and human dignity have been central to our mission as well. For the past two years, we’ve largely refrained from wading into the debates over COVID-19. In part this was because it was hard to weigh in on debates when the facts were so unclear. But it also was because the issue was so polarizing.

Now, after two years, facts are becoming clearer — and so are the momentous consequences of the pandemic for our culture. Those consequences are so serious that they can’t be ignored. That’s why from here on you can expect more coverage at Evolution News of the societal challenges raised by scientism during the COVID era. In this article, let me highlight just three.

1. The Dangerous Expansion of Government Power in the Name of Science

COVID-19 has been used as the rationale for an extraordinary expansion of government power in the name of science: lengthy “lockdowns” of businesses and churches, vaccination mandates, government-imposed discrimination against people based on their medical choices, government-encouraged censorship of dissenting scientific views, and more. Perhaps you support some of these policies as necessary. Perhaps you don’t. But even if you support each and every one of the policies adopted, you ought to be concerned by how they have been imposed. Almost none of the policies were enacted by legislative bodies after an open public debate. Almost all of the policies were enacted unilaterally by executive branch officials asserting emergency powers or by unelected public health officials immune from public accountability.

COVID has shown government officials how to do an end-run around the normal system of checks and balances. They simply need to invoke “science” and declare an emergency — and then extend their emergency orders time and again. Anyone who dares challenge the emergency orders will be stigmatized as “anti-science,” or they will be told they aren’t scientists so they have no right to be heard. Regardless of your view of specific anti-COVID policies, policymaking during the pandemic has set a terrible precedent for the future.

The genie of unaccountable government power in the name of science has been let out of the bottle. Will we be able to put it back in?

2. The Dramatic Rise of Censorship in the Name of Science

The COVID era also has seen a dramatic rise of censorship in the name of science. We are told continuously now that “misinformation” or “disinformation” must be stopped. No decent person favors the spread of “misinformation.” But who is to judge what constitutes “misinformation”? Those warning of “misinformation” seem to assume that existing elites are always right, and so they should be in charge of determining what is true or false. But anyone conversant with the history of science or government knows that this claim can’t hold up to scrutiny. Neither elite scientists nor government officials have a monopoly on the truth. Truth often arises from dissenters. That’s why we have free speech in the first place.

We are also told that allowing free speech about COVID and related policies is too dangerous to permit. But the claim that speech is too dangerous to permit is always the go-to argument for totalitarians. If they had their way, we wouldn’t have free speech about anything.

Yes, there is misinformation in public discussions of COVID and many other topics. Some of it comes from private parties. Some of it comes from government officials. But the way to combat such misinformation is by adding speech, not suppressing it. As John Milton wrote in his famous defense of free speech, we are wrong to restrict free speech because we “misdoubt” the strength of truth in open debate. “Let her [Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”

Unfortunately, instead of defending free speech, we are seeing increased demands for the censorship of disfavored speech in the name of science. Arguments for science censorship have been made before about Darwinian evolution and climate change. But COVID-19 has raised the lobbying for suppression to a whole new level. The President and the Surgeon General are now actively pressuring journalists and tech companies to censor messages disfavored by the government. Taxpayer-funded NPR has all but urged medical licensing boards to strip medical licenses from doctors who offer dissenting opinions about COVID and its treatments. According to the Washington Post, the former head of the NIH, Francis Collins, believes we should “identify those who are purposefully spreading false information online and bring them to justice.”

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