Institutions and Language

When a friend and I started getting to know some homeless folks that lived around our neighborhood, we developed a distinctly anti-institutional bias when it comes to relationships with the poor. That is not a bias against the existence of any institutions. It is rather a bias against filtering relationships through institutional allegiances. The clearest example is that of the social worker. Again, this is not to say that we shouldn't have social workers or that they do a bad job. It's just to make the point that the relationship between social worker and client (i.e., poor person) should not be the norm for relationships between poor and middle class people. That is to say, while poor people may lack many things and middle class graduate students may have a lot of things, it's a mistake to let this define the relationship. There's no possibility of friendship if the poor person is always the beneficiary and the middle class person is the benefactor. Nor is there the possibility of friendship if the relationship is based in the interaction between an institution (gov't or charity) and a poor person. Because, as I heard straight from the mouth of a charity worker, at the end of the day they go home. The poor are clients not friends.

Today I ran across a quote from Peter Winch, a Wittgensteinian philosopher, that was very much along these lines:

"Take the notion of friendship; we read in Penelope Hall’s book The Social Services of Modern England (Routledge) that it is the duty of a social worker to establish a relationship of friendship with her clients; but that she must never forget that her first duty is to the policy of the agency by which she is employed. Now that is a debasement of the notion of friendship as it has been understood, which has excluded this sort of divided loyalty, not to say double dealing. To the extent to which the old idea gives way to this new one social relationships are impoverished (or if anyone objects to the interpolation of personal moral attitudes, at least they are changed). It will not do, either, to say that the mere change in the meaning of a word need not prevent people from having the relations to each other they want to have, for this is to overlook the fact that our language and our social relations are just two different sides of the same coin. To give an account of the meaning of a word is to describe how it is used; and to describe how it is used is to describe the social intercourse into which it enters."

Now, that's the background on my attitude toward institutions. I'm wondering today if there isn't similarly problematic aspects of "institutional language" in science. I mean, is it helpful to talk about "science" at all. It seems to me that "science" has itself taken an almost institutional form (I'll refer to this institutional notion of science as Science from here on). For example, we refer to "science" all the time when justifying positions. "Modern science has taught us..." or "The methods of science ensure that..." So, what is this Science to which we refer? Do scientists serve Science by conducting their work in a way that is similar, say, to a social worker's work serving the government? At the end of the day, what relationship obtains between a scientist and his/her work and is it helpful to refer to Science? Is there the danger of a sort of "double dealing" in the scientist?

One danger that is similar to that of the social worker is that the attribution of an institutional allegiance (however abstract the institution) only seems to muddy the waters of person-to-person interactions. I would state it as virtually axiomatic, if not just obvious, that allegiance to Science cannot trump the demands of basic person-to-person interaction. This is, however, not an obvious claim to many scientists and I think that many would outright disagree with me. But what is it about Science that trumps person-to-person relationships? We're getting at the heart of utilitarianism here, I think. My relationship with you, my friend, is expendable (if not to say that you are yourself also expendable) for the sake of Science because the results will serve so many people. Science demands it. But who is Science to demand it? That's a deep question. Does society demand it of you via the institution of Science? Would our whole society be disappointed in a scientist if he did not sacrifice personal relationships for Science? In practice this seems not to be the case, but the standards are pretty low. Rather, society often just offers very heavy rewards to those who have sacrificed much in the service of Science.

But again, what is Science? Does the scientist do something fundamentally different from everyone else - that is, in service to Science?

If we take my tack from earlier and suggest that science is just careful reasoning and experimentation, then it seems more than a little awkward to suggest to my friend that "careful reasoning and experiment demand that I betray my friendship to you". You may think that the example is melodramatic, but my point is that we are, even scientists, always dealing directly with immediate human relationships and should avoid the temptation to abstract them. And so, when does careful reasoning lead one to betrayal? We can hope that it does so only very very rarely.

At the end of the day I'm wondering a couple of things. (1) Does utilitarian reasoning require this sort of institutional abstraction? Do I have to be able to separate "the issues" from my particular relationship and consequent duties to you in order to think in terms of the "greater good". (2) Is talk of institutionalized Science just a vehicle for this sort of utilitarianism. If so, then maybe the personalism of Peter Maurin and the integral humanism of Jacques Maritain have very serious implications for the practice of science.

At the end of the day I think we have to face the possibility that a scientist is never in service to Science. He is rather in service to truth. If you're a Christian then, that means being in service to God and neighbor. I could go on by talking about abstracting the term "neighbor", a practice that I think is similarly a vehicle for utilitarianism. However, I don't think it is right to abstract it, or institutionalize it, and I think it's clear why.

So a scientist is someone who uses careful reasoning and experimentation to pursue the truth. Well then, I reckon a scientist is pretty much just like everyone else. In practice, scientists specialize on a particular topic. This specialization does not, however, introduce any new allegiances to Science or anything else. Nor does the norm of specialization become an allegiance itself. We try to hard to institutionalize roles in our society. In doing so we create duplicitous relationships because of divided allegiances. It's latent in the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" because it sets before us a set of recognized possibilities, institutions. Those become our goals, they receive our allegiance.

Instead, perhaps we can just encourage our children to think carefully and experiment with the world around them, not for the sake of manipulation but for understanding, paying careful attention to their neighbor so that when they are older they are continually learning how to live better. Then maybe they can claim really to be a scientist, even if they have no formal education, no job, and no money.