Matthew Crawford, on the problem of science being wielded as a form of authority—in service of technocratic ends—rather than utilized as a mode of inquiry:

As authority, Science is invoked to legitimize the transfer of sovereignty from democratic to technocratic bodies, and as a device for insulating such moves from the realm of political contest. During the pandemic, a fearful public acquiesced to an extraordinary extension of expert jurisdiction over every domain of life. A pattern of “government by emergency” has become prominent, in which resistance to such incursions are characterized as “anti-science”.

One of the most striking features of the present, for anyone alert to politics, is that we are increasingly governed by this device. An emergency “state of exception” is declared to renew acquiescence in a public that has grown skeptical of institutions built on claims of expertise. And this is happening across many domains. Policy challenges from outsiders presented through fact and argument, offering some picture of what is going on in the world that is rival to the prevailing one, are not answered in kind, but are met rather with denunciation. In this way, epistemic threats to institutional authority are resolved into moral conflicts between good people and bad people.