On sustaining scientific progress in a liberal democracy; and On what The Science is, how and why it diverges from actual science, and how to improve the current state of The Science

I am switching back to writing about nutrition and health science because these monograph-length posts on ancient Greek science may not be what my subscribers signed up for.

I am going to post more of them after I write about health and nutrition for a while.

But I do want to share some of the things I (think I) have learned while writing 20% of a book’s worth of material about Ancient Greece over the past month.

For clarity, I am going to write my thoughts concisely in sequential form. There will be a part 1 and part 2 of this post, corresponding to the two different areas of my recent insights.

Part 1. On sustaining scientific progress in a liberal democracy

1. Tradition is the source of shared norms among a people;

2. Democracy liberates a people’s creative forces and in the right circumstances can lead to breathlessly rapid scientific, cultural, and technological innovation;

3. The quality of democracy—its liberalism—that liberates people’s creative forces does so because it liberates people from the binding of tradition. People are therefore free to innovate outside of traditional boundaries. Ancient Athens is a classic example. Meanwhile, while Imperial Germany was not a liberal society, its universities were, following as they did strong principles of academic freedom, leading it to be a powerhouse of science and culture in the late 19th and early 20th centuries;

4. The downside of liberating people from tradition is that it degrades shared norms—i.e., it introduces new gods and sets them against the old gods, threatening the former pantheon, that is, the former hierarchy of values, introducing heterogeneous norms;

5. With the loss of shared norms comes the loss of shared social, cultural, and political goals;

6. This loss of shared social, cultural, and political goals undermines the ability for people to communicate meaningfully with each other politically and to make compromises for the greater good;

7. A great deal of communication is possible when many norms shared in common between individuals or groups who do not share all such norms in common;

8. But as fewer norms come to be shared in common, communication becomes increasingly difficult or even impossible;

9. Strong mechanisms for inculcating shared norms are a characteristic of pre-modern societies and necessary for social cohesion and reducing political conflict;

10. Weak mechanisms for inculcating shared norms are a characteristic of modern society and liberalization and necessary for the development of art, science, philosophy, etc.;

11. In societies where there are powerful mechanisms for inculcating shared norms among the majority, minorities whose norms differ in politically meaningful ways from the majority are persecuted, i.e. exiled or murdered;

12. In societies where there are weak mechanisms for inculcating shared norms among the majority, widespread social conflict ensues. At worst: civil war;

13. Crisis intensifies a society’s pre-existing conflicts, causing escalation of that pre-existing conflict;

14. Ancient Athens had powerful such mechanisms among the democratic masses, but weak such mechanisms among the intellectual and aristocratic elites, leading to the persecution of these intellectual and aristocratic elites after the Athenian plague of 431 BCE;

15. Something similar occurred in the wake of the catastrophe of WW1 in Germany, specifically the Weimar Republic and the consequent backlash;

16. A loss of shared norms will lead to a loss of tolerance for liberal values and a demand for a savior figure, who will re-establish a clear set of social norms—a theme that ran through the work of Eric Hoffer. That is, a loss of shared norms will create anxiety and uncertainty in the population, leading to a loss of tolerance for uncertainty, leading to a loss of tolerance for liberal values;

17. The question arises: how does one achieve weak mechanisms for inculcating shared norms among scientists, intellectuals, etc., in order to promote scientific progress, while achieving strong such mechanisms among the masses, in order to promote social cohesion and avoiding political dysfunction? Is it possible to liberalize a society without ultimately leading to political and social disintegration? If so, what are the mechanisms that would achieve this?

    Additional notes:

18. Ancient Athens was an important failed attempt. It failed because Athenian thinkers and progressive politicians had enormous, unconcealed public influence and became targets of more traditionally minded Athenian masses;

19. Other important failed attempts include Nazi Germany and Soviet communism, which failed in the other direction: by imposing the will of (some) intellectuals onto the German and Russian masses;

20. An apparent success (so far) is Chinese communism. Of course Chinese communism is despotic, and it’s not yet clear whether China will emerge as a leader in science and technology;

21. America is following the same model as the above three states. Its fate seems uncertain, given a) growing resistance and b) the impractical nature of the ideology that the ruling classes are trying to impose.

Part 2. On what The Science is, how and why it diverges from actual science, and how to improve the current state of The Science

1. Tradition is the source of shared norms among a people;

2. These shared norms widely diverge across cultures and are for practical purposes impossible to be arrived at through purely rational argument;

3. The basis of shared norms in a religious society is that society’s god or gods;

4. The basis of shared norms in a secular society is that society’s shared principles, values, and beliefs;

5. In a religious society, the gods are explained to a population through mythological stories that are incomplete and flawed—they are educational devices;

6. In a secular society, principles and values are explained to the population through rational stories that are incomplete and flawed—they are educational devices;

7. The underpinning of all norms are stories, the acceptance of which is a fundamentally non-rational process involving widespread repetition;

8. In secular societies, norms appear to be rationally grounded, but this is an illusion—although rational explanations can be provided, such explanations are never the true basis for a people’s shared commitment to those norms—non-rational inculcation is;

9. Gods have personhood, while principles and values are abstract conceptual entities. This is the only difference;

10. The role that the gods play and the role that principles and values play in conveying a society’s norms to individuals is fundamentally the same. The function and “location” in organizing human psychology and behavior is the same;

11. All societies in history are polytheistic theocracies. Some are secular. Others are explicitly religious;

12. In traditional polytheistic societies, shared gods are deeply embedded in political life;

13. In secular polytheistic societies, shared values and principles are deeply embedded in political life;

14. Secular polytheist theocracy is a political system grounded in and requiring obedience—in belief and practice—to abstract conceptual entities widely shared in common;

15. Traditional polytheistic theocracy is a political system grounded in and requiring obedience—in belief in practice—to person-like gods widely shared in common;

16. For brevity’s sake, abstract conceptual entities—principles, values, secular beliefs—will hitherto simply be called gods. Again, these are identical to traditional gods for the purposes of justifying social and political organization—the only difference is that abstract conceptual entities lack personhood;

17. Modern, secular American gods include some of but are not limited to the following: Freedom and the subordinate gods Autonomy, Free Speech and Freedom of Religion; Science and the subordinate gods Medicine, Climate Science, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, etc.; Equality and the subordinate and sometimes warring gods Equity, Equal Opportunity, Colorblindness, Antiracism, Socialism, etc.

18. There are still other subordinate gods to Medicine, including but not limited to Public Health, Pharmaceuticals, Vaccines, Psychotherapy, Masks, and Lockdowns;

19. All of the above are gods rather than science per se because the public discourse about them is fundamentally religious-political in nature, that is, what these gods are represents a compromise between legitimate scientific knowledge, institutional interests, political interests, ideological interests, etc.

20. Actual science is largely an insular affair involving scientists, who rationally and empirically discuss their fields, independent of public discourse, i.e., independent of the influence of the gods, that is, independent of religious-political considerations;

21. As a result, science per se is the best approach known for approximating and modeling reality. On average, having views based on science means having views that are the closest to approximating and modeling reality of any views currently available;

22. Scientists still are subjected to political and social factors, but not in a religious manner, i.e., there are no orthodoxies, nor priesthoods, that impact the discussion of science privately, at least in some places and some institutions, though knowledge generation through actual science can be influenced by the above factors, in some fields more than others. That is, political-religious orthodoxies and priesthoods can still dominate the scientific production of some fields;

23. Nonetheless, it is not uncommon to be able to find space to discuss science independent of these orthodoxies and priesthoods among fellow scientists in private. These discussions are what is meant by actual science;

24. There is therefore a substantial gap between the religion of The Science, that is, the received political-religious entity known as Science as spoken about in public discourse, and the actual conversations and conduct of science done privately. In some cases, this gap is large, in other cases much smaller. The size of the gap depends on the extent to which religious-political actors exploit and distort for religious-political ends any one subfield of science per se in the public discourse (thereby generating The Science);

25. The Science is a religious-political discursive formation that is not significantly different from the mythologies of premodern societies, in terms of the religious-political convictions that members of the public hold toward The Science;

26. As we have said, The Science is a distortion sometimes having little to do with actual science, even as The Science parasitizes on the prestige of the achievements actual science for its religious-political legitimacy;

27. Scientific institutions, where actual science occurs, can also become to varying degrees religious-political institutions, where other gods, e.g. Freedom, Antiracism, Pharmaceuticals, Colorblindness, etc. can also be worshipped, even when science per se is being conducted at the same time and same place;

28. Debates about The Science in public discourse are largely religious-political debates about the nature of what kind of god The Science should be, and what kinds of other gods should be forming alliances with actual science to produce The Science. Remember that the other gods are also religious-political entities that have nothing to do with science per se. The Science is therefore very often a contamination of actual science with other religious-political values;

29. There are many scientists who promote The Science in order to increase their institutional power, since as a widely believed religious-political entity, promoting The Science can confer a great deal of prestige beyond what merely being a scientist would confer;

30. That is, while being a scientist confers prestige, being a promoter of The Science—i.e., being a priest (we call them science communicators) in addition to being a scientist—confers additional prestige;

31. The prestige that a scientist earns by being a public priest for The Science relies on a conflation between the scientist’s role as a legitimate scientist and his or her role in the public political-religious discourse that we call The Science;

32. The public believes that when a scientist conveys The Science, the scientist is merely conveying actual science, but much of the time, this is not true;

33. When The Science markedly diverges from actual science, the conflation between actual science and The Science confuses the public about what actual science really is and has concluded and does a disservice to actual science while enhancing that scientist/priest’s public profile and the political-religious interests that that scientist’s version of The Science promotes;

34. Although legitimate scientific discussion can occur in the public context—to bring The Science closer to actual science—nonetheless, due to the complexity of actual science and due to the religious-political forces impinging on the public debate, The Science can never perfectly map onto actual science. The Science is always to some extent a distortion of actual science;

35. What constitutes The Science is therefore a compromise between religious-political forces. The Science is a compromise, sorted out through public discourse, between a society’s gods (e.g., Freedom, Antiracism, Pharmaceuticals, Public Health, Equity, etc.) and actual science. This compromise takes place through the complex conflicts and alliances of the society’s gods, on the one hand, and actual science, on the other;

36. To the extent that The Science is the result of a contamination of other religious-political values, the public is unable to make objective assessments of the evidence and formulate rational policy;

37. That is, to the extent that The Science is contaminated, a society’s science-based policy decisions will be disconnected from reality;

38. To the extent that The Science is contaminated, that is, to the extent it diverges from actual science, a society’s ability to make rational policy decisions is undermined;

39. The goal of scientists who decide to take on a priesthood role should be to bring The Science closer to actual science—that is, the goal of scientists who take on a priesthood role should be to defy the other gods of a society and remain faithful only to science;

40. Scientists who take on a priesthood role and fulfill that role faithfully and without corruption, since they are defying a society’s gods, are embarking on a very dangerous task;

41. Many scientists who take on this priesthood role but fail to be faithful to actual science do so because they personally benefit from this failure. Thus, it’s not so much a failure to communicate a version of The Science that corresponds closely to actual science—it is, rather, a form of corruption being perpetrated by the scientist, who is abusing his prestige as a scientist to accumulate more prestige by pandering to a society’s other gods. This failure is inevitable so long as the incentives exist to contaminate The Science, and so long as a strong disincentive exists for a scientist to defy a society’s gods;

42. What are these incentives? How can they be reduced in order to make The Science closer to actual science? Can we reduce these incentives without harming other aspects of society? What about the disincentives: how can the disincentives to defy a society’s gods be reduced? How can scientists be protected in their defiance of a society’s gods, in order to best serve the public good through their promotion of a version of The Science that is close to actual science? These are some of the questions that I have.