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From the Introduction

The debate that the essays in this volume address is, in a certain respect, an old one. Among its most recent manifestations were the so-called “science wars” of the 1990s, which pitted defenders of scientific rationality against postmodernists and relativists. This was coupled with the efforts on the part of conservative evangelical Christians, whose new political self-assertiveness was a product of Ronald Reagan’s election, to remount the battle against the teaching of evolution. The book therefore picks up on these older debates insofar as a certain brand of postmodern thinking remains prevalent in academia and the pseudo debate over the teaching of evolution persists and is now joined by climate-change denial. However, we believe that current manifestations of anti-science views have helped to forge a political crisis. Not only have the anti-science views of postmodernists come to inform democratic political theory, but also these more academic concerns complement a broader political climate in which a resistance to science shapes public opinion and a more general hostility to scientific reason.

The defense of creationism and resistance to the realities of climate change, for example, threaten both the capacity of the next generation to comprehend and employ rational arguments as well as its ability to confront the ways anti-science worldviews prevent us from dealing with environmental crises. In effect, postmodern theories on the Left and religiously influenced policy proposals on the Right have become unlikely allies with one another, even if not in intent. For these reasons, the essays in this volume put a particular emphasis on the political implications of anti- science thought, while the older “science wars” were conducted around more philosophical questions of method and epistemology. The new realities of anti-science policy—the withdrawal of funding from agencies that rely on the sciences, the effort to redesign school curricula, and many related concerns—speak to a political terrain in which anti- science views are reshaping our institutions, our culture, and our sensibilities.

Moreover, the issue of an anti-scientific worldview and its accompanying dismissal of the importance of reason have had an impact on contemporary political discourse. In a context where notions such as “alternative facts” have helped to foster populist political sentiment, we believe that the defense of a scientific worldview helps to oppose this broader social tendency to privilege ungrounded belief over reasoned argument and evidence. As we are now witnessing, this carries dangerous consequences for environmental policy and the health and well-being of citizens. Such political trends, we argue, are symptomatic of the bolstering of modes of thought that reject the values behind good science. Hence, when contributors to this volume speak of science, they not only have in mind knowledge of the laws and theories in the natural sciences, but, in addition, the type of intellectual procedures and forms of inquiry upon which the discovery of such laws and the development of such theories are founded. Viewed from this vantage point, postmodernist claims about the overlapping of power and knowledge finds their political expression in a more eneral tendency to view expertise as a form of elitism and the arguments of scientists as an attempt to forcibly impose beliefs. The degradation of science in academia, at best, leaves the next generation ignorant and, at worst, incapacitates the ability to combat irrationalism in civil society.

This is a problem that has only gotten worse with time. As democratic engagement and attitudes have eroded in American society so has investment in public education. Our public school systems are being starved of funding, and students are forced to share outdated textbooks that are literally coming apart at the seams. Meanwhile, wealthy donors with fundamentalist beliefs—whether of religion or the market—are seeking to lure the most vulnerable students into charter schools where they can more easily influence the curriculum. At the same time, they seek to use their wealth to infiltrate the boards of our great public institutions that sought to inspire wonder and curiosity in all citizens, regardless of class, such as the American Museum of Natural History. Add to this the spreading phenomenon of the corrosive effects of a commodified popular culture and we begin to grasp the extent to which reason—the cradle of science—has been receding. This culture of commodification has even transformed the popular mind’s conception of what constitutes intellectual achievement, with more and more young people looking to Silicon Valley elites and the production of ever-more time-wasting features for their smartphones as marks of intellectual contributions to the social good.

Technological society has become increasingly dominant and with it an atrophy of the individual’s moral and cognitive faculties. Students at universities can scarcely endure their lectures without attempting to clandestinely play the latest video game on their phone. Adults, in turn, are infantilized by these same technologies and are as addicted to social media as young people. The dominance of technique—with its emphasis on means over ends, prescribed processes over creative experiment, and conformity over creativity and spontaneity—means that the well-springs of political judgment are drying up. With these new realities in mind, the basic question and problem the essays assembled here seek to examine is the extent to which we can draw upon the relationship between science and democracy. More specifically, we want to explore the ways that science—as an attitude as well as an epistemic style of thought—is in retreat in modern societies. We therefore seek not only to polemically critique the anti-scientific cast of different features of modern culture and politics, but also to stake out a defense of rational, scientific dimensions to democratic life and a democratic society.

The essays collected here probe the problem of how these trends are affecting democratic society. The collective thesis of the essays that follow maintains that democracy is withering due in no small part to our culture’s drifting away from the scientific mind-set and the erosion of reason that results from it. What is the relation between science and democracy? What is the difference between science and its technological-industrial expressions? What are the consequences and implications of opposition to science for political life? How does a rational-scientific attitude aid in core democratic values such as objective social knowledge, tolerance, just institutions, the promotion of a common interest, and so on? In the end, the fundamental question is: How does science—and the distinctive form of rationality that it promotes—underwrite a democratic society? For the essays in this book, science is more than a technical enterprise, it is an attitude toward reason, toward the importance of objective knowledge and the kind of inquiry that calls into question the traditions and practices taken for granted or as without justification by the community as a whole or by one’s tradition or group in particular. We therefore insist that science, in the end, must be viewed as a core feature of a modern, democratic society and that its erosion in our culture is having, and will continue to have, grave political consequences. If the essays presented here go in any small way toward a reconstruction of democracy, we will all be the better for it.