each of the above cases, new knowledge was gained by applying the scientific method of making careful observations and measurements of nature and recording the data, then testing and drawing conclusions based on the results instead of on assumptions or beliefs, and then publishing those conclusions about how things really appear to be in nature for others to review and attempt to disprove if they can. The knowledge gained through this incredible process has given us new power over the physical world, but it also forces us to reevaluate our intuitive assumptions, and to refine—and, in some cases, redefine—the meanings of words and values we thought we understood when we didn’t know what was really going on.
This power and these new definitions have moral, ethical, and legal implications for how we conduct our lives, and this is where science, democracy, and our legal system can come into conflict. As our knowledge becomes more refined and precise, so too must our social contract, and this process is disruptive to moral, ethical, economic, and political authority based on prior definitions and understandings. Science itself is inherently political, and inherently antiauthoritarian.
Antiauthoritarian Politics
Because this is the case, it’s reasonable to ask how science fits into political thought. As science writer Timothy Ferris pointed out, in politics there are not just two forces, the progressive left (encouraging change) and the conservative right (encouraging retention). In fact, there are four. Imagined on a vertical axis, there are also the authoritarian (totalitarian, closed, and controlling, at the bottom of the axis) and the antiauthoritarian (liberal, open, and freedom-loving, at the top), which one can argue have actually played much more fundamental roles in human history. Politics, then, can be more accurately thought of as a box with four quadrants rather than as a linear continuum from left to right. Any one of the infinite gradations of political thought can be placed on the plane around these axes.
When looked at in historical perspective, it’s clear that while science and republican democracy are antiauthoritarian systems of knowledge and of governance, respectively, they are neither progressive nor conservative, but are both. Both communism on the left and fascism on the right are authoritarian and opposed to the freedom of inquiry and expression that characterize science and democracy, just as fundamentalist and authoritarian religions are.
Alternatively, left-leaning progressives and right-leaning conservatives can find common cause in the antiauthoritarian principles of freedom of inquiry and expression, universal education, and individual human rights that go hand in hand with the liberal (meaning “free”) thinking that informs science and democracy. The life of conservative writer David Horowitz, who was a part of the radical US new-left movement in the late 1960s but is now on the radical right, provides an example of how one can move 180 degrees ideologically from left to right, but still maintain the same general level of liberal antiauthoritarianism vertically.
Democracy: An Endangered Species?
The challenge to authority that science presents is one of many reasons why it has flourished in free, democratic societies, and why those same societies have fallen when they have turned their backs on the freedom science requires in favor of authoritarianism. Nazi Germany is an excellent example. In the 1930s, Berlin was the world pinnacle of science, art, and culture. As we will see later, it was the power of new technology created by that liberal culture that allowed Hitler to come to power, and it was a cultural turn away from freedom that then led to the fleeing of Germany’s scientists and artists, and its eventual downfall. It is not a coincidence that the ongoing scientific revolution has been led in significant part by the United States and other free, democratic societies. But it is also partly why, since the late twentieth century, the political climate has increasingly hampered US policymakers and those in other leading democracies in dealing with so many critical science policy issues, and why, by turning away from it, the United States may soon cede both its leadership in scientific research and development and the economic, social, and cultural influence that leadership provides.
Without a well-informed voter, the very exercise of democracy becomes removed from the problems it is charged with solving. The more complex the world becomes, the more challenging it is for democracy to function, because it places an increased burden of education and information upon the people—and in the twenty-first century, that includes science education and science reporting. Without the mooring provided by the well-informed opinion of the people, governments may become paralyzed or, worse, corrupted by powerful interests seeking to oppress and enslave.
For this reason and others, Jefferson was a staunch advocate of free public education and freedom of the press, the primary purposes of which were to ensure an educated and well-informed people. In 1787, he wrote to James Madison,
And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to the government, or information to the people. This last is the most certain, and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.
But what do we do when the level of complexity actually does require a “very high degree of education”? Can democracy still function effectively?
The History of Modern Science Politics
The value of science to a republican people, the security it gives to liberty by enlightening the minds of its citizens, the protection it affords against foreign power, the virtue it inculcates, the just emulation of the distinction it confers on nations foremost in it; in short, its identification with power, morals, order and happiness (which merits to it premiums of encouragement rather than repressive taxes), are topics, which your petitioners do not permit themselves to urge on the wisdom of Congress, before whose minds these considerations are always present, and bearing with their just weight.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1821
In the Beginning
To understand the ironic situation in which modern democracies find themselves—their major challenges largely revolving around science, yet few elected leaders understanding these issues and few political reporters reporting on them—we have to understand what makes the relationship what it is, and the best place to start is to look at how science shaped or didn’t shape the forming of the world’s oldest democracy: the United States of America, on which so many other democracies are patterned.
Was America always a nation of science? Or was it founded as a Christian nation? Has there always been a conflict between religion and science? What, exactly, are the relationships among science, politics, freedom, and religion in America and, by extension, in other democracies? Why did science get so advanced there? Most important, why do we keep having conflicts over it? Can democracy—and Earth’s ecosystem—survive them?
Contrary to what many fundamentalist politicians and televangelists have claimed, America was not founded as a Christian nation. The land was initially settled by Puritans, but the country was founded on the principles of science, something the Puritans valued greatly. In fact, 150 years after the Pilgrims’ arrival, the Founding Fathers took great pains to expunge religious thinking from the writings that laid the legal and philosophical foundations for the country they wished to form, beginning with the Declaration of Independence.
They carefully carved out a new, secular form of government based on limited powers for the authorities and reservation of most freedoms for the people, including