Science and Democracy
Posted on January 27th, 2009
There’s a lovely essay in the NYT celebrating the restoration of scientists into the halls of goverment.
The article makes the usual case that science is a way of thinking about the world rather than a collection of facts
Science teaches facts, not values, the story goes.
Worse, not only does it not provide any values of its own, say its detractors, it also undermines the ones we already have, devaluing anything it can’t measure, reducing sunsets to wavelengths and romance to jiggly hormones. It destroys myths and robs the universe of its magic and mystery.
So the story goes.
But this is balderdash. Science is not a monument of received Truth but something that people do to look for truth.
That endeavor, which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view.
but then takes a surprising turn and compares the values of science with democracy itself.
But nobody was ever sent to prison for espousing the wrong value for the Hubble constant. There is always room for more data to argue over.
So if you’re going to get gooey about something, that’s not so bad.
It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.