Science is Culture

...science, like art, is a cultural expression that makes a nation worth defending. Like great art and great music, its true value lies in exploring the unknown. Today, the opposite argument, the commoditization of science, is virtually the only one heard. It has metastasized from the smaller-minded appeals of the cold war to all of human learning and higher education. Education and knowledge are no longer values of truth and beauty that make life worth living, they are means to the ends of greater pay and more consumption, which somehow are supposed to make life worth living.

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The one thing we d0 know about science, the one thing that is predictable about it, is that if we don't value it, if we become inhospitable to the tolerance, freedom, and open exchange of ideas that stimulates it, if we wall it off and call it a separate culture instead of something we all should do, if we cease funding it, if we try to be overly directive of it, if we elevate ideology over science in our public policies, we will stifle creativity and science will go away. We won't t the big breakthroughs. We won't get the economic boons. We won't get the national defense advantages. We won't get the clean environment or healthy children. Germany already proved this can happen with its precipitous fall from arguably the most powerful science nation on Earth to a nation bereft of scientific enterprise in a single decade of Nazi ideological intolerance. China proved it under Mao. The Soviets proved it with Lysenko. The Vatican proved it with Galileo.

Science has values, it provides meaning, and it can quickly be destroyed through tyranny.