DARKNESS VISIBLE

The culture of modern societies seems, on first glance, to be imbued with science. Technological change rushes forth at an increasingly swift pace, even as advances in the hard sciences like chemistry and the biological sciences seem to be progressing according to a logic all their own. Our culture seamlessly has collapsed technology and science into a unitary reality. Science is, for far too many of us, reducible to the gadgets and mass computing systems that organize and dominate our world. Think of the technical filigree that confronts us at every turn: from how we communicate with friends and family to how global financial systems operate. But this merging of science and technology is a dangerous turn in the way that we think about our civilization, not because of some feeble Luddite appeal for social authenticity—although an argument can be made—but due to the fact that it has narrowed the actual purposes, methods, and style of thinking of science as a whole. Indeed, the erosion of science as a style of thinking, as an attitude toward the world—natural and social—is having deleterious effects on our democratic culture and on the project of a rational, democratic society.

But if we take a closer look, our society is evincing a stark decline in science as a stance in the world. In our culture, technology has become a kind of unwitting metaphor for science without most realizing that there exists a stark difference between the two, that technology is a particular application of the scientific mind-set that is applied in a narrow way to the manipulation of nature. This has done, I think, real violence to our ideas about science as a whole, for it closes off to us the idea that science can, and is, about anything other than manipulation of objects and the quantification of all things. My claim in this essay is simply this: science is a fundamental prerequisite to a rational democratic society. Science ought not to be reduced to or conflated with the features of technology and technological rationality, but rather be viewed as a means to foster reflection on objective forms of truth.

Science is a style of thinking, an attitude toward the world that grants us the power to think through our experiences of complex events, that not only fosters a sense of causal reasoning that grants us access to the mechanisms of power and constraint in the world but also cultivates an appreciation of truth as universal and objective as opposed to “truths” that are personal and particular. Even more, science is the very means by which human beings can formulate, construct, and sustain a democratic life together—one characterized by a commitment to a common life, to common purposes and goods that sustain a cooperative, interdependent society of equals. Indeed, lacking science as the basic mind-set of democratic citizenship we will be led toward a world that is narrow, fragmented, and infused by irrational beliefs, superstition, and false self-understanding, even as it continues to be suffused with technical rationality and instrumental reason. We can see the seeds of this world beginning to unfold, a kind of darkness that is becoming visible to us.

But even as the increasing dominance of technology and technological reason absorbs more and more of our culture, another force also operates against the scientific mind-set and democratic values and attitudes. This we can see in the cultivation of belief systems that seek to encourage the irrational in us, or that conform not to objective features of our lives but rather to the particular and subjective experiences we may have or the traditions and customs within which we may feel “at home.” Science, for many of this persuasion, is a threat, an expression of power over one's personal choices and over one's freedoms. This can be seen in the dogmatic parent refusing to vaccinate their child or in the ideologue who refuses to transform his political ideas even in the face of persuasive evidence or in the religious “person of faith” who asserts her “truth” at the expense of all others, as well as in the university professor embracing postmodernism and the social construction of reality against the contentions of objectivism and universalism. All share, despite their obvious differences, an antipathy to science as a means of grasping an objectively true world that we all share and with which we must come to terms. Forces on both the Right and Left of the political spectrum have taken up this anti-science banner. On the Right, science is viewed as a threat to the reservoirs of tradition and authority, of religion and hierarchical relations of power in traditional forms of family life, for instance. On the Left, science is now seen as a mask for power and domination, as an “ideology” or a “social construct,” a discourse like any other aspect of human culture. But this has only succeeded in highlighting the importance of the need to defend science not as a method of inquiry for the manipulation and instrumental domination of the natural world but as a style of thinking and an attitude toward the world that grants us access to truth-claims that are democratic insofar as they are universal, applied to all equally, and can be questioned and justified in objective terms.

But the opposition to science as a method of inquiry expresses itself as a cynicism of reason, of rationality more generally. Universals and objective truth-claims are seen by critics of science as violating particular beliefs and ideas. Science is cast as intolerant and imperious, brooking no compromise with the sensibilities of other cultures and those who choose to “think differently.” But this follows from an idea about science that conflates it with the technology and the metaphor of the machine that it engenders: one that is impersonal, efficient, and oblivious to human values. This has precipitated a kind of turn against science and perpetuates the false view that science itself, as a style of thought, has been eclipsed by its own absorption into technological reason. In this sense, the social theorist and critic of science Stanley Aronowitz emphasizes a point worth taking seriously. For Aronowitz, “the statement that science and technology have become inseparable is certainly controversial, especially among those who would insist that science is autonomous from the concerns of power and ideology.”1 Aronowitz raises what we can call the conflation fallacy, i.e., the idea that science and technology are identical with one another or, at least, interpenetrate one another in modern society so as to be essentially unified. The aim of the criticism is that science has become an ideology of control, and the means to dominate nature as well as society. But the conflation of these two spheres is not, in the end, convincing. One reason is that we can use science as a mode of reasoning to critique technology. If we grant that technology is the rationalization of mechanisms of control, then we can certainly say that science is implicated in this, but it is nevertheless not reducible to it. Hence, professional scientists such as a J. Robert Oppenheimer or a Carl Sagan can use scientific reason to argue against the abuses of technology—of nuclear weapons, for instance, or the abuse of the environment by technical and industrial systems.

There is no doubt that the central problem with the conflation fallacy is that it forces us into a false dichotomy: if we dislike the social consequences of technology, we must also oppose science itself and view it as a discourse of power. It asks us to see science and technology as a unified historical process. But science need not be bound to the economic imperatives of its time. There is little doubt that technology and the institutions of scientific research have become increasingly fused to the apparatus of capitalism and its need for control, profit, and efficiency, but this is not the same thing as saying that science as a whole, as a mode of reasoning and as a style of thought, are also captured by this process.

The dynamics of technical change, or the harnessing of scientific efforts, are largely determined and understandable via the social aims of those who seek to benefit from them. It is not only that there is a path to dependency on technological apparatuses, but also a human interest in control. Indeed, as political scientist Kurt Jacobsen has argued, “A technology is usually selected because it suits both the criteria of technical viability and the power designs of influential groups.”² But we can also argue that science is more than its absorption into technological logics. Science's roots in the Enlightenment were indeed contemporary with the development of modern republicanism and democratic political ideas and practices. The reason for this can be found in the new attitude that it displayed not only toward nature but also toward authority itself.3 Once we probe this dimension of science—beyond the constrained province of the natural scientist or the technical expert—we find that science and democracy have a fruitful if not essential relationship. Science as a method of knowledge is self-correcting, just as it is anti-authoritarian; it is self-revisable and questions its own assumptions, even as technological rationality is incapable of this. Technology is self-justifying insofar as it uses its own criterion for its operation and forces us into its own logic when we interact with it. In technological rationality, logic is machinelike, there is no room for speculation, for creativity, for questioning. Everything works according to an ironclad logic that works toward a specific goal or outcome. But science as a method of knowledge is not self-validating; rather, it takes the logic of objective facts and objective reality as the only criterion for truth. Herein lies the crucial distinction between science and technology and our reason to reject the conflation fallacy.

As I see it, there is in fact a crucial, even essential relation between scientific reason—by which I mean a kind of thinking about the world that is basically rational—and what I will call the democratic mind, or an attitude about norms, values, and social practices that demonstrate this rationality in human affairs. I want to explore what I see to be this democratic mind and show how science is its essential, distinguishing feature. My first burden will be to explore a concept of scientific reason that is not reducible to, nor conflated with, the natural sciences, but is instead a concept of rationality that is defined by four distinct features: objectivity, skepticism, causality, and universality. Thoughts about the world and our conduct in it can be seen as rational only when these features of reason are in play. The claim I want to defend here is that this conception of rationality is rooted in a scientific mind-set and is cultivated by a scientific attitude and can be traced through the development and evolution of modern, as well as classical, forms of science and rationality.

My next task will be to show how this mind-set is inherently democratic in nature. I will do this by pointing to its anti-authoritarian impulse, its egalitarian impulse, and its transformative impulse. Taken together, these three applications of the rational-scientific form of thinking constitute a critical-democratic stance in the world by breaking down forms of thought that hold back our ability to critique, to judge, and to transform our world. We lose the ability and the style of thought necessary to be able to think democratically, that is, in objective, universal, and open-ended terms. The ability to scrutinize power, to terminate the plague of superstition and irrational traditions, and to be able to think in a way that has the common interest of society in view: these are the aims of a democratic life buttressed by the scientific attitude.

“…THEIR MINDS MUST BE IMPROVED…”

Once we explore what the scientific mind-set actually is, then we are on our way to constructing a connection between science and democracy. Historically, there is ample evidence that advocates of modern democracy were also concerned with the idea that common citizens would be able to participate in the decision-making processes of their community. The Enlightenment ideal was expressed as the aspiration that the minds of citizens could be perfected, or at least be brought to a standard where leaders or elites could not claim power or rule as a result of a public incapacity to criticize and to question their legitimacy to hold power. Reason—the modern reason of the Enlightenment—was now allied with the impulse of democracy and the challenging of traditional authority and hierarchy. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1792, in his defense of the dawning democratic age The Rights of Man, “The insulted German and the enslaved Spaniard, the Russ and the Pole, are beginning to think. The present age will hereafter merit to be called the Age of Reason, and the present generation will appear to the future as the Adam of a new world.”4 Thomas Jefferson also expressed this Enlightenment principle of the political efficacy of blending science and democracy when he wrote in his Notes on the State of Virginia:

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate, and improve. Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories. And to render even them safe their minds must be improved.5

With this principle now in view, I want to defend the thesis of the democratic purpose of science. To do this, it will be important to point to the salient features of science as a way of thinking. Let's go back to my basic contention that the conflation of science and technology is a crucial error in how we view and understand what science really is. As a form of reason, science is essentially characterized by four core features. First is the idea that science addresses an objective world and that its claims must be objective in order to be valid, i.e., for them to have warrant for us to accept them as truth-claims. Objectivity is a slippery concept, but at its heart is the idea that for a notion or idea to be true in any basic sense, it must first concern an objective reality that is not compromised by our subjectivity. This should not be confused with materialism, which holds that anything true is composed of materia, of tangible entities (atoms, molecules, physical forces, etc.). Indeed, we can make scientific claims about more than material objects. We can say that a certain law exists, or a certain norm exists, and so on. These are not material things by any means, nor are they composed of material substrates or components. They are nevertheless objective in the sense that they are made real in the world through our acceptance of them as rules by which we all abide. This is different from, say, unicorns, which may exist in our heads but have neither objective nor material reality.

Objectivity is therefore opposed to relativism, to the notion that there can be, and that there essentially are, multiple realities or truths that are incommensurable with one another. The pursuit of science is therefore a pursuit of reasons that are independent of our subjective, particular views and ideas about how the world works. The problem of relativism is a crucial one since it opens up the possibility that reasons that cannot be scrutinized based on some rational standard. The emergence of scientific truths has generally been accompanied by disruptions in the traditional and religious belief systems of the society as a whole. The Copernican model of a heliocentric solar system, the evolutionary morphology of biological forms, and so on, all had, and in some instances continue to have, disruptive effects on traditional beliefs. But this is precisely the point: the commitment to objectivity makes the world knowable and corrects for error because our subjective ideas about the world often are tied to the traditions we have inherited as well as the errors of perception that we all make.

A second crucial feature of the scientific mind-set is that of skepticism. To embrace skepticism is to see any kind of truth-claim as inherently susceptible to questioning and testing. Skepticism means that nothing can be taken as legitimate simply based on its mere existence or because it is the expression or feature of an authority of some kind. Skepticism is involved whenever we look for justifications, whenever we seek to know whether that which is given to us is really what it seems to be or what others tell us it is. Skepticism is the essential nucleus of science since it is always seeking to revise the accepted truths or the accepted ideas that are used to justify and buttress our understanding of the world we inhabit. Indeed, as Carl Sagan once pointed out about the power of skepticism:

The business of skepticism is to be dangerous. Skepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of skeptical thought, they will probably not restrict their skepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials, and 35,000-year old channelees. Maybe they'll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they'll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where will we be?6

Skepticism is therefore not only a feature of the scientific method; it also permeates outward. The key idea here is that science is not simply a method of inquiry into the natural world, it is also a means of testing claims to knowledge; it means producing a kind of knowledge that is rational, in the sense that is passes the test of objectivity, and can withstand the skepticism of others, in the sense that reasons are given, justifications provided.

Third, another of the central features of science is the search for causality as the threshold for explanatory validity. To know something in a scientific sense is to be able to grasp the causal relations and causal mechanisms that make phenomena occur. Causal reasoning is linked to the features of objectivity and skepticism I explored above, in that it forces our ideas about the world to adhere to objective processes and mechanisms that cause or in some way generate the phenomena we experience. This is a central feature of rational explanation as opposed to traditional forms of explanation based on superstition, imagination, or reasoning by analogy. Hence the relation to skepticism: once we know to look for causal claims and causal mechanisms, we become increasingly suspicious of those existent explanations that fail to make convincing causal claims. One reason for the importance of causality is the fact that the appearance of phenomena in the world and the essence of those phenomena are rarely, if ever, coincident with each another. What appears to us to be the movement of the sun—we still say that the sun “rises” and “sets”—is in fact anathema to the true mechanism of the earth's relation to it.

Explanation through causal mechanism thereby reveals and demystifies the experiences we have of phenomena in the world. Our modern language still retains traces of these past prescientific ways of thinking. The flu, or “influenza,” is from the Italian word for “influence,” since premodern European culture saw the illness as the result of influence from unknown forces or from the malocchio, or “evil eye,” a spell cast from the jealousy of another member of the community. Of course, knowledge of the objective causal mechanism of the illness yields a very different explanation, one that demystifies the world, one that allows us to grasp the real cause and force behind the phenomenon. We now have the capacity to act to prevent or minimize the spread of the illness as a result. We can see the same thing in the social and political world. Patterns of income inequality or of educational outcomes and so on all have causes that are social and structural in nature. Generally speaking, when we lack causal reasoning skills, we tend to fall back on ad hoc and traditional ideas to “explain” these phenomena. Perhaps equally as bad, when we lack causal reasoning skills as well as a strong sense of skepticism, we may be seduced into pseudoscientific arguments about these phenomena, such as genetic explanations, or arguments about the logics of markets, and so on. Whatever the case, causality and sensitivity to causal reasoning is a central aspect to a scientific and rational comprehension of the world and our experiences of it.

Lastly, there is the importance of universalism for any kind of scientific reasoning and criterion for acceptable knowledge. In its most orthodox form, we see this whenever we assert that 2 + 2 = 4 and consider the statement true because of its universalism, i.e., that 2 + 2 can never equal 3 or 5 or any number other than 4. If it did, and if it could, then the very operation of addition would cease to be an actual process. It would be essentially meaningless, nonsense. In the same fashion, whenever we define a triangle as a three-sided shape with the sum of the interior angles being 90 degrees, we are making a universal claim about the property of triangles. In other words, triangles are not conceivable or rationally knowable outside of this universal feature. What these two examples illustrate is the feature of universalism as an attribute of a scientific claim. For something to be rational it must indeed, in some basic sense, be universalizable. If it lacks this quality, it cannot be a truth-claim. Even in the weaker claims about social facts or morals we cannot say that “all citizens have a right to X” and then deny the right to X to some members of the community based on some arbitrary or ascriptive trait. Once we are able to spot contradictions within any proposition and its application we are able to critique that proposition as irrational. The move toward a more democratic society is premised on this as a basic criterion: that the norms and ideas that guide our social relations and institutions must be universal, applicable to all, or at least possess or instantiate a principle that is applicable to all. Universalism is a feature of a reason that ought to count, that ought to be taken as asserting a valid truth-claim or proposition.

These four features of scientific thinking are non-reducible to technological logic. We need not commit ourselves to the conflation fallacy and assume that science and technology are collapsed into a unified social construction. Rather, these four features of science capture the essence of a kind of rationalism that can be used not only for the understanding of the natural world but also the social world. But unlike technology, this knowledge need not be instrumental in nature; in other words, this kind of reasoning and thinking does not need to be tethered to an interest in manipulating and controlling the natural or social world. The tendency of scientific institutions and efforts to be harnessed by social forces—of military and corporate interests, for example—is no fault of science per se. It is rather the result of the imperatives of elites who orient and shape the practices of science and technology toward their own interests and purposes. This is the great fear that motivates some critics of science: that it has within it an intrinsic logic toward instrumental reason, or a kind of rationality that is defined by a single goal or outcome, and is really only an expression of social power. But the four features of scientific thinking that I have pointed to above are not reducible to instrumental reason nor do they play into the hands of the powerful. Rather, what seems to be most relevant here is the capacity to generate forms of knowledge that can be tied to a different set of values other than profit, efficiency, social control, or destructive power. What I have in mind here are democratic values, and these values and features of democracy should be seen as essentially coexistent with the scientific mode of thinking.

AN ANATOMY OF THE DEMOCRATIC MIND

If the scientific mind-set, as I have outlined it above, is to have any importance for democratic life and modern citizenship then we must see how these ideas about objectivity, causality, and universality are to be translated into a democratic and political context. Science, as I have been framing it here, sets up for us an objective context within which claims to truth and claims to valid arguments can be asserted, defended, and accepted. This has become the focus of many thinkers in contemporary political philosophy. The twentieth century witnessed a turn toward understanding democracy as deliberative, as a set of practices that allow citizens to exchange reasons and justifications for their beliefs or ideas about moral and political affairs. The problem with this academic trend is that it generally overlooked the fact that the actual institutions, culture, and social order of modern capitalist societies do not demonstrate or encourage the kind of scientific mind-set required for such practices to produce rational, democratic outcomes. When we consider the relation between science and democracy, we must therefore move beyond the idea that science is solely a method and one that can be sustained within a social context that is itself irrational without some sense of conflict and struggle.

The relation between science and democracy is a root problem because in many ways democracy is a problem of knowledge. To be a democrat (in the general sense not specific to a particular political party) it is not necessary to be a scientist, but it is necessary to think a certain way, to think about the social world not in narrow, personal terms but in objective and common terms. This is a change in thinking style, in the attitudes that underwrite our thinking, not a more demanding or unrealistic epistemological level of thinking. Objectivity as opposed to subjectivity as a style of thought is a great challenge for modern, postindustrial cultures, particularly because of their greater emphasis on personal experience and self-expression as cultural ideals. But, as the Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal rightly pointed out, “Ignorance, like knowledge, is purposefully directed. An emotional load of valuation conflicts presses for rationalization, creating blindness in some spots, stimulating an urge for knowledge at others, and, in general, causing conceptions of reality to deviate from truth in determined directions.”7 What this means is that objectivity—one of the core features of the scientific mind-set and an attitude that science cultivates within our thinking—is directly related to the ways that we relate to the world: how we understand social problems, social power, and other features of our community. Relating science and democracy is therefore not a matter of training people to be scientists, it is a matter of holding the ideas of citizens and institutions to a standard of reason.

When Jefferson argued that for a democratic society to work its members’ “minds must be improved,” it necessitated the cultivation of a scientific way of thinking that was rooted in the institutions and education and practices of the society as a whole. After I explore what I see to be the basic features of the democratic mind, I will return to this problem, since it is perhaps the most important problem facing modern democratic societies. The features of the democratic mind that I would like to highlight derive from the core features of the scientific mind-set I sketched above. First, there is its anti-authoritarian impulse, the idea that all forms of authority and power are to be shared in the sense that each of us grants legitimate authority to others or to institutions based on our rational consent and that any claim to authority is not accepted without rational reasons. Second is the openness to either question power or to submit to it based on this criterion of rational legitimacy and acceptance. The democratic mind knows how and when, to use Aristotle's phrase, “to rule and be ruled,” i.e., knows when to follow the better idea or principle and when to seek to propose one that is better for all concerned. Last, I want to point to a desire for universalism. The democratic mind and democratic attitude is one that embraces what is good for the whole community and what is right, should be right for all.

Taken together, these three features of the democratic mind possess radical implications and they are rooted, in an essential way, in the scientific mind-set itself. Let's examine each of these features of the democratic mind in turn and explore how they, taken together, are not only rooted in the scientific mind-set but also help us get a clearer view of democracy as a political form. Take the first feature of the democratic mind, what we can call its anti-authoritarian stance. Any scientific attitude must be skeptical of authority—that is, skeptical of the prevailing ideas that are put forth as valid and legitimate. Immanuel Kant made this a central idea in his epistemological theory of rationality. For him, reason and freedom were both mutually necessary concepts: rationality was in fact dependent on our ability to use our reason freely. A mind that was dependent on authority—ecclesiastical, political, moral, technical, or whatever—was essentially incapable of reason since reason itself depended on the capacity to question the constraints of tradition that is exerted on thought. “Freedom,” he wrote in the preface to his Critique of Practical Reason, “constitutes the keystone of the whole structure of a system of pure reason,”8 and this expressed the view that for the mind to be rational it had to wrest itself from the external authorities on which it depended. This had not only epistemological but also moral and political implications that are inherently democratic. We not only resist authority for the libertarian sake of resisting authority, we resist authorities that cannot justify a law, a norm, an idea, or proposition. For reason to be possible, we need to be free: we need to be free from our dependence on ideas and ways of thinking that are not our own, that are imposed on us by tradition, by fear, or by conformity to the ideas of the community.

This idea has a strong relation to the next feature of the democratic mind. Aristotle—no great friend of democracy as a pure system of government—nevertheless argued that a central feature of how free citizens govern themselves must be found in a principle that any reasoned citizen would follow: that of the ability to “rule and be ruled.” As he puts it in his Politics:

There is a rule…that is exercised over free men and equals by birth, a constitutional rule, which the ruler must learn by obeying, as he would learn the duties of a general of cavalry by being under the orders of a general of cavalry, or the duties of a general of infantry by being under the orders of a general of infantry, and by having had the command of a regiment and of a company. It has been well said that he who has never learned to obey cannot be a good commander. The excellence (aretē) is not the same, but the good citizen should be capable of both—he should know how to govern like a free man, and how to obey like a free man. These are the excellences of a citizen.9

Aristotle's basic principle here is predicated on the assumption that free people follow reason, that in order for them to realize and keep the common interest of the community in view, each would need to be able to accept the rule of the best idea, the best reason, and perhaps even the best person. This was not a dogmatic, passive acceptance of authority, but was rather a means of generating agreement on forms of cooperation that are intrinsic to political life. True democracy is not only a challenge to authority because it is authority; it must also be a search for legitimate, rational forms of authority that can serve common interests with which each member of society can identify.

In this sense, the democratic mind is not only resistant to any passive acceptance of authority, it is willing to accept as legitimate only those ideas that are justified based on the inspection of reason. This reason becomes democratic not from our mere agreement, but once it can be demonstrated that a given norm or institution satisfies the common interest of its members. If we combine Aristotle's thesis with the Enlightenment, scientific idea of anti-authority in knowledge and moral-political life, then we can see that a more democratic principle begins to emerge: an openness to the most rational ideas that are best for our living together in a rational, self-governing community. To privilege tradition, to make a claim for the exception of any individual or group, or to accept passively the ideas, claims, norms, and justifications of those in power or that which merely exists, is a decidedly anti-democratic kind of thinking and attitude. It is also, as I have been trying to show, deeply anti-scientific. The democratic mind is not a closed mind, it is not committed to only one principle—say the narrow libertarian idea of being against all authority—it is an open mind: one that will revise its ideas, values, and norms based on new evidence and more compelling reasons. Reason therefore does not only challenge ossified forms of power, it also can provide the criteria for new forms of life, more democratic, egalitarian, inclusive forms of life and politics.

Once we consider the problem of an open and a closed mind, we come to the problem of universalism versus particularism in human affairs. Basically stated, universalism in moral terms means that there are certain values that apply to all persons. Cultures can therefore be judged according to their ability to engender values that respect its members based on universal, objective criteria instead of their own particularist traditions, values, and ideas. The problem here is not only a meta-problem, it is also, and perhaps more centrally, a problem of how an individual thinks about the world, his community, and the fabric of norms and values that pervade them both. Seen in this way, the scientific mind and the democratic mind find an special resonance with one another. The main reason for this is that our knowledge about things is highly dependent on the values we carry with us. As social psychologist Milton Rokeach points out:

Every person may be assumed to have formed early in life some set of beliefs about the world he lives in, the validity of which he does not question and, in the ordinary course of events, is not prepared to question. Such beliefs are unstated but basic. It is out of some such set of “pre-ideological” primitive beliefs that the total belief-disbelief system grows.10

The values that we learn early in life and through exposure to the social and cultural norms and traditions around us shape us and form our ideas about the world—not only our normative ideas, about what the world ought to be, but our descriptive ideas as well, i.e., our ideas about what the world actually is. Our beliefs about the world, embedded deep in our psyche, therefore are a constraint on our ability to think objectively and scientifically about it.

This idea is an important one since perhaps one of the most powerful implications of the scientific mind-set and its relation to the democratic mind is its ability to break down these latent values and beliefs. Greek philosophy, one of the first expressions of a scientific mind-set and its relation to practical questions, was also deeply committed to this view. Plato—no advocate of democracy, to be sure—was nevertheless prescient about reason's ability to move our ideas away from subjective error toward objective claims. In the Republic he refers to this as “dialectic” and describes it as a process of self-transformation through the purging of all presupposed beliefs:

The dialectical method is the only one which in its determination to make itself secure proceeds by this route: doing away with its assumptions until it reaches the first principle itself. Dialectic finds the eye of the soul buried firmly in a kind of morass of philistinism. Gently it pulls it free and leads it upward, using the disciplines we have described as its allies and assistants in the process of conversion.¹¹

Plato's idea here is a powerful one. Dialectic is a kind of reasoning that breaks down the assumptions and presuppositions that affect knowledge and bias our ideas about the world. It is a process that constitutes self-transformation. The thesis is that reason's most powerful, perhaps highest role, is to dissolve our assumptions and presuppositions that prefigure our knowledge about the world. This is one way of thinking about the capacity of science to equip the democratic mind with the need to search for universals, or what Plato calls “first principles.” These universal values and norms transcend the particular views that we carry with us and to which we are, more often than not, not only cognitively and morally committed, but emotionally committed as well. It is perhaps for this reason that, in his construction of democratic personhood, Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarks on the importance of truth as impersonal and objective: “I know only that truth is in things and not in the mind that judges them, and that the less of myself I put in the judgments I make, the more sure I am of approaching the truth.”12

THE CULTURE OF ANTI-SCIENCE AND THE FATE OF MODERN DEMOCRACY

If my argument above has any meaning today, it can be glimpsed in the disturbing trends toward anti-science that grip modern societies. The fate of modern democracy is, I assert, endangered to the extent that the scientific mind-set and the democratic mind do not reinforce one another. Today, a culture of anti-science is growing in its reach and in its influence. There is an increasing ignorance on the part of the public of the essential components of scientific reasoning, even as there is a growth in the technical apparatus of modern societies. But the attitudes and thinking of the public have been deleteriously affected by the growing influence of anti-science viewpoints and anti-rationalist beliefs about the natural and social world. Any time we encounter denial about human-made climate change, the belief in racial causes for social pathologies, religious denial of scientific fact such as in evolution or cosmology, or the legitimacy of conspiracy theories, we are glimpsing the face of anti-science.

Many contemporary critics of science often point to the cultural diversity of ideas and beliefs and to the richness and value of this diversity of moral, religious, and knowledge systems, arguing that the acceptance of these diverse ideas is itself a democratic value. “A free society,” writes philosopher Paul Feyerabend, “is a society in which all traditions have equal rights and equal access to the centers of power.”13 But we should examine this claim carefully. The relativists’ challenge to universalism works only insofar as the society within which it operates has fragmented to the point where common ends and purposes have lost their normative legitimacy. I can claim my own truth, in this sense, only when there are no shared truths in which the society I live in is invested. When we give up on the objective worldview and move away from universalism as a category of validity for our ideas about the world, we lose the capacity to critique the forms of power that our social world manifests. If we assert the primacy of our traditions, we lose sight of the biases of those traditions. The universals that we come to accept via our rational faculties are foundations for the kinds of ethical life and institutions we find valid. The democratic mind is one that is able to move outside of egoistic interests alone, one that is able to transcend the biases of one's cultural and traditional belief systems, and one that places emphasis on the goods, ends, and purposes that are shared in common with others. The scientific mind-set is therefore the undergirding style of thinking that grants the democratic mind its shape and its function. Indeed, it is an essential feature of a democratic culture and polity.

Science as a mind-set and as an attitude about objectivity, universalism, causality, and skepticism is therefore more than a methodology for the practice of scientific investigation. This attitude is not empty of value; it is in fact value-laden once we consider that it is an attitude about how we should relate to knowledge claims as well as to the world in general. Science is not neutral to democratic practice and a democratic style of thinking. Indeed, science may not be able to provide us with the content of our moral concepts, but it is necessary for a democratic ethical life and polity. Max Weber's thesis that science and philosophy need to be kept separate cannot be maintained since science is not merely a formal method but also an attitude and orientation that the mind takes in its relation to the world.¹⁴ In this sense, the boundary between science and democracy begins to break down. Once we see democracy merely as a competition between different interests and worldviews, we have committed ourselves to an irrational view of democracy—indeed, to a premodern conception of democracy. The modern theory of democracy, premised on the Enlightenment conception of the democratic citizen as possessing rational agency, an interest in the common good, and an antipathy to irrational authority (oligarchic, tyrannical, or populist) is therefore equivalent to the scientific attitude.

Leo Tolstoy once remarked that science is meaningless “because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’”15 But even though we can agree with the claim that science cannot provide us with the values for such normative questions, we can still say that science—as I have been describing it here—provides us with values in the sense that it cultivates an attitude with respect to authority, to valid knowledge, and to our relation to our and others’ beliefs. Science does not provide us with values, but it embodies a set of attitudes toward the world and, in so doing, can be said to manifest values of universalism, objectivity, and inquiry. These may not be substantive values, but they are values nevertheless in the sense that they provide us with a preference for skepticism over faith, for universalism over particularism, and with objective facts rather than subjective preferences and predilections. The scientific attitude and mind-set is itself a commitment to a set of values about how we should relate to evidence, to reality, to decision-making, and so on. This does not mean that we obliterate our values or that we suppress our interests; it does not mean that we erase our subjectivity or our agency. It does mean, however, that in democratic affairs, we must be willing to leave our purely personal perspective and think in a more expanded, objective way in light of more rational, more universal interests—that our subjectivity should change in its relation to our rational comprehension of objectivity and that our agency should be shaped by our cognitive powers to inquire and to transform our thinking in accordance with new, more compelling truths. What it means, in the end, is that we relate to our values and interests rationally, i.e., with a critical attitude that will either force us to revise them in light of better reasons or to defend them in universal terms that others within the community can accept as democratic.

Although this move toward a critical rationalism based in science was the hallmark of modern political thought, the appeal of the anti-science position does not seem to be diminishing. In postindustrial societies in particular, the emphasis on identity, self-expression, and personal experience has fragmented the cultural and political terrain. With the embracing of anti-science and anti-rationalist positions, a celebration of the particular now dominates much of contemporary thought. Stanley Aronowitz argues for “the rejection of universal reason as a foundation for human affairs.” As he elaborates this position:

Reason in this sense is a series of rules of thought that any ideal, rational person might adopt if his/her purpose was to achieve propositions of universal validity. Postmodern thought, on the contrary, is bound to discourse, literally narratives about the world that are admittedly partial. Indeed, one of the crucial features of discourse is the intimate tie between knowledge and interest, the latter being understood as a “standpoint” from which to grasp “reality.”16

So, for Aronowitz, the anti-science position is beneficial since it gives precedence to the identity of individuals and groups by undermining the theory of objective knowledge. What results is a proliferation of claims to particularist knowledge(s) rather than knowledge that can pass the test of reason thereby damaging democratic culture and thinking. This position only contributes to a culture that eschews rationality and the need to transcend the narrow confines of tradition, belief, and identity in order to critique social relations of power, control, and domination. Such a particularist and perspectival position can only lead to the shredding of political solidarity and a moral narcissism that fragments modern democratic life. Power can, and indeed must, be critiqued and questioned without the assumption of anti-scientific and anti-realist views.

Add to this the way that the shredding of scientific reason and respect for evidence has strengthened anti-democratic policies on the environment, workplace safety, drug policy, and other aspects of modern life. It has done this because, without a respect for objective facts and evidence, we fall back on alternate forms of authority for our knowledge claims and beliefs. We may fall back on our common experience, our traditions, or on religion or some other form of custom or authority that will give warrant to our beliefs and claims. But in doing this, we also fragment the very preconditions for a rational public sphere, for a set of attitudes, practices, and cognitive norms that allow for a democratic expansion of knowledge necessary for any community to govern itself rationally. Lacking this, our attachment to external and irrational authority, tradition, or “common sense” and “experience,” undermines our ability to exert democratic control over elites who control corporations and government, as well as democratic control over technological change, and the increasing powers of economy and the state. Disrespect for objective evidence, an antipathy toward the skepticism of views that resonate with one's intrinsic values and biases, is not a democratic defense of difference and the legitimacy of different traditions. A democratic society consists of members who rationally reflect on all forms of power, custom, and tradition and seek binding agreements on norms and institutions such that they fulfill the common good of its members. Democracy is only valuable to the extent that it fosters a self-critical attitude among all of its members.

NIHILISM AND UTOPIA

There is an ironic twist to the argument I have laid out in this essay. One of the core impulses of the critical reaction to science throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the charge of nihilism: that science would bleed ethical values and aesthetic sensibility from human life. Science was a quantifying, narrowing form of thinking that would squeeze out moral judgment from human affairs and serve as a procrustean bed on which all knowledge would be flattened. But as I have tried to show here, this charge—although not without merit—is misdirected about science and its relation to democracy. The main reason is that once we reject the conflation fallacy of the intrinsic merging of science and technology, we see that science is not an inherently instrumental attitude or mind-set. Rather, science asks us to think in a framework where only rational reasons count—and rational reasons have as their basic criterion of validity their claims to universality. This does not in any way invalidate our desire for toleration of different views or opinions as to certain moral choices. But it does invalidate the idea that there can be multiple truth-claims and that a hierarchy of what we deem valid can be established.

The problem of contemporary culture seems to be one where common values and assumptions about our institutions and the aims and purposes of our social world are evaporating. Much of this can be blamed on a culture that has embraced technique at the expense of the ends toward which our society is oriented. The idea that there are common social purposes and ends, indeed, a common good toward which our political, economic, and cultural institutions ought to be oriented has now disintegrated under the auspices of a concept of society that is highly atomistic and alienating. The forces of technology and unequal economic power continue to break down the civic life of modern society, but it is also evident that the spread of the technification of society—of our social relations, our work, and our daily interactions—has privileged means over ends. Disappearing are the spontaneous aspects of science: of experiment, of creativity and curiosity in the new and the impulse to know the unknown. We are becoming rigidly circumscribed by our conformity to technological imperatives. Technical reason is now becoming hegemonic over our rational abilities to control and direct it according to common goods and ends. Technology is not science—and it is not democratic. What is needed is the reconstitution a kind of rational democratic society that can orient technological change according to democratic ends.

The exacting nature of technology as a means of control—expressed as efficiency and predictability—has eroded our moral-reflective powers on the proper ends of our institutions and social roles.17 As such, technology and science are becoming increasingly a mechanism of control and of profit, absorbed into the cybernetic logic of technologized bureaucratic capitalism. Technological management in working life, education, and culture now alienate us even further from the concept of a society organized around a common good. The result is a stark nihilism: a reified form of consciousness where our concept of other people, ourselves, and the natural world are becoming increasingly the objects of manipulation and control. The breakdown of codified traditional belief systems through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has meant that a world that is calculable, predictable, and hence controllable has become more attractive to us. As Neil Postman correctly argued on this point, “The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in our belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in—technology.”18 The results of this nihilism have been severe. On the one hand, we cede our moral and critical capacities to technical systems, while on the other, we react to our social meaninglessness and move into the realm of tradition, religion, custom, and fabricated identities. We lack a common value system that can deal with these concerns and we seem increasingly to be giving ourselves over to the cybernetic logic of a society imbued by technology. A science and technology produced by and embedded in capitalist imperatives for profit and accumulation can only continue to grind down the autonomous self just as it erodes a value system that can give shape to a truly democratic and rational form of life.

The alternative impulse in modern society is toward what we could call a utopian idea about the future of technology and the application of science. According to this view, which is fundamentally ideological, technological change has its own logic that must be allowed to unfold. This applies to ideas not only about applied technologies in electronics, computing, artificial intelligence, and so on, it also applies to ideas our society tends to hold about the economy, “markets,” and trade. These entities are granted a status that likens them to organisms or autonomous systems, properties of nature rather than products of human artifice. But this is actually not the result of the spread of science but its narrowed use and capture by elites. Once we commit ourselves to the view that science is at its base a mode of inquiry, of thinking, an orientation toward the world—once we accept that what I have been arguing here is the intrinsic relation between science and democratic thinking, only then will we be able to explode the ways that science and technology have been and continue to be employed not for human betterment and emancipation, but rather for the expediency and interests of the powerful. Only then will we be able to counter the utopian ideology of technology and science and crack open the anti-democratic and hierarchical social structures the constrain a truly free, genuinely democratic society.

Nihilism and utopia are therefore two mutually supporting attitudes that pose real threats to the culture and politics of a democratic society. For both engender an anti-democratic worldview insofar as they surrender their powers of self-governing to some external authority or system. Both encourage a conformity to views and practices and norms that lure us into the technical systems of modernity. But how can we not mourn the loss of the autonomous self? How can we not avoid confronting the de-democratizing tendencies in modern culture no less than its de-rationalizing currents? Science needs to be rehabilitated, not as a mere tool for the domination of nature and the manipulation of society and individuals, but as a means of rational reflection and the examination of the ends and purposes toward which we orient our society. The continuing impact of technological control on modern civilization is such that it continually robs the individual of the capacities for cognitive reflection and the autonomous ability for critical judgment. Science, as I have described it in this essay, must therefore be rehabilitated in light of its democratic potential. Indeed, it must be rehabilitated as the very framework of rationality itself, as the surest means to secure our knowledge about the world. Both science and democracy are therefore ways of knowing and ways of acting. Only a political project that sees their mutual nurturing of each other will be able to preserve the hope and the vision for a free and rational society.