Science and Democracy

PART 1: The Beginnings of Science and Democracy

“Blessed is he who learns how to engage in inquiry, with no impulse to harm his countrymen or to pursue wrongful actions, but perceives the order of immortal and ageless nature, how it is structured.”  

The words are those of a poet named Euripides. They were sung in 400 BC by the chorus in a play performed in an outdoor theatre built by citizens of the world’s first democracy in ancient  Greece.

“The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view, the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god.”

The words are those of Thomas Jefferson, Enlightenment philosopher and one of the founding fathers of the first modern democracy in the United States of America.

This “light of science,” this “blessed inquiry,” is indeed central to the blessings of democracy. How so? Let’s trace the connections.

Science got its start at the same time religion and capitalism got their start, in prehistoric times. 100,000 years ago our Homo sapiens ancestors, lived in caves and rude shelters. These first humans survived by hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods.

Anthropologists have been able to learn quite a bit about these ancestors by analyzing bones, tools and other remains in burial sites as well as by studying primitive tribes still surviving today in remote regions of the Amazon, the South Pacific and Africa.  

Partly because of a high rate of violence, but also because of high rates of starvation, malnutrition, disease and accidents, they found that the average life expectancy was less than 30 years.  

And yet, surprisingly enough, they found that people then may have had more leisure than most people do today!  

Homo sapiens individuals of 100,000 years ago had minds pretty much like ours today. They used this mind and a unique hand (unique among animals in having an opposable thumb) to invent tools like fire, spears, bow and arrows, better kinds of shelters, and new and better ways of hunting, fishing and gathering wild foods. And so in the broadest sense science and technology were born.  

In some parts of the world around 10,000 years ago some humans made a major advance using these same science and technology skills. They found ways to grow food and husband animals. The Agricultural Revolution began and over the next few thousand years spread to all the continents..  

This agricultural revolution has lasted 10,000 years, all the way up to the 21st century. In many parts of the modern world today (though not everywhere) it has been replaced by an Industrial Revolution that began only a few hundred years ago.  

During this long 10,000 year time many civilizations in Africa, Asia, Europe, the South Pacific and the Americas rose and fell. All of them made advances in what we would today call science and technology.  

Weather, seasons, soils, sun and stars, are all of prime importance in agriculture as well as in navigation on land and sea. And all agricultural kingdoms on all continents made discoveries important to the beginnings of earth science, astronomy and chemistry..  

All agricultural kingdoms by necessity also learned more about the natural living world of plants and animals and so laid a base for what would come to be called today the life sciences of biology, ecology and agriculture.  

Unfortunately all agricultural civilizations also fought frequent wars with one another and in the process laid a base for much of what would today be called physical science, engineering and metallurgy..  

Similarly all kingdoms by necessity learned more about the human body and about disease and health. Even though much of this knowledge (like their knowledge in earth science, astronomy and biology) was entwined with magical and religion-based error, it was the beginning of what we would today call medicine.  

The Chinese people, in particular, created a rich civilization that for many centuries surpassed all others in science, in the arts, in organization and in trade. The first printing presses, the first magnetic compasses, the finest ceramics and metal work, gunpowder, porcelain, silk and paper, the largest and best sailing ships all came to the world first in China.  

Similar advanced agricultural kingdoms flourished in India. One of the most important scientific ideas from India was the invention of what came to be misnamed “Arabic” numerals, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. including the most important numeral of all, zero.   

All of these agriculturally-based ancient civilizations had political systems that featured strong class divisions, powerful religions, slave labor, frequent wars and tyrannical governments. Unfortunately most of these traits worked against more rapid progress in what we today call science and technology.  

Reliance on slave (or serf) labor, for instance, universal in all agriculturally-based civilizations, made for little incentive to improve technology. Why bother when there were plenty of slaves or serfs to do the work.  

Powerful religions too did little to encourage unbiased inquiry into the mysteries of the natural world. A god or gods made the world the way it is. Humans can do nothing about it. Except perhaps pray to the gods to bring peace and prosperity and to take away pain and adversity. An early 6th century Christian bishop and philosopher in North Africa, later canonized as  Saint Augustine, put it this way:  

“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”  

Similar opinions were held in most other religions. To inquire why or how might offend the gods. And since tyrannical governments relied on religious myths to enhance and uphold their power, science and invention were again the losers.  

The sad truth is that frequent wars were one of the few places where there were natural incentives to improve weaponry and were thus a boon to science and invention.  

At least one agriculturally-based civilization in the ancient world did do more to encourage unbiased inquiry into the natural world--as well as to introduce a new way of governing. That rare combination of natural science and political innovation was in ancient Greece and it turned out to be a powerful inspiration for civilizations of much later times.  

A few hundred years before the birth of Jesus, in small city-states like Miletus, and later in larger city-states like Athens, a new idea for governing based on reason and experience was tried. The Greeks called it “democracy.”  

Here in Athens, for instance, every citizen would gather in the center of town to pass laws, make judgments on disputes, assess taxes, and vote for war or peace. The duties and offices of government were assigned by lot.  Every citizen was free to pursue his own interests so long as they did not interfere with others. Every citizen had the right to his own private property.  

This direct democracy of the ancient Greek city-states had severe limitations. While citizens of the city-state were free and equal, citizens did not include women nor did it include slaves.  

At the height of Athens’ democratic glory, out of an estimated population of 400,000 people, there were only about 40,000 citizens. Even for these citizens, it was a democracy of majority rule, with little attention paid to the rights and civil liberties of minorities. One of their most illustrious citizens for instance, a philosopher named Socrates, was sentenced to death for “corrupting the youth.” There were as yet no such thing as “inalienable rights.”  

The Greek democracy, however, did nourish an environment that encouraged rational inquiry. Natural philosophers like Thales, Anaximander, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Hippocrates were among the first humans to look at the natural world and try to construct theories to explain why and how it worked the way it did, without invoking supernatural forces. Probably because of their reliance on slave labor these early natural philosophers never quite made the solid connection between theory and experiment that characterizes modern science. But it was a start.  

Rome, founded as a small city-state in Italy, began as an aristocratic republic. Rome borrowed and built on some of the cultural riches of Greece and in some important ways advanced its democratic ideas as well as improving some technologies and advancing science.  

In the process of founding and governing their empire, for instance, the Romans developed a system of Roman law based on nature and reason that has had great influence in the Western world. Romans were also the first to separate the government into executive, legislative and judicial branches.  

Romans were also the world’s greatest engineers when it came to roads, water supply, sanitation systems and civic architecture, as well as the world’s greatest bureaucrats when it came to administering their empire.  

The enduring ideas that led to these achievements have had and still have great influence in the Western world of today. We still speak of senators, consuls, constitutions, republics--all words derived from their Latin Roman roots. Travel to Paris or London or Berlin or Ottawa or to Washington and you will see many examples of the Roman architectural influence.  

Unfortunately as Rome prospered it became more imperial and tyrannical. It grew into an empire that eventually included most of the land around the Mediterranean Sea, going as far north as Great Britain, as far east as Persia, and as far south as North Africa. Slavery also increased as equality and liberty were crushed under the boots of the marching imperial legions.  

 In the 5th and 6th centuries AD the Roman Empire collapsed and splintered into a multitude of small feudal states often at war with one another. There followed a serious decline in living standards—for the elite rulers. The peasants, serfs and slaves had always had a subsistence life of course, but even that life became more precarious in what followed, sometimes called the “dark ages” of Europe from the 5th to the 10th century.  

Many historians today who have made studies of that time in Western Europe dislike that term. Instead they call the entire period from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance in Northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries Medieval, divided into early medieval and late medieval.   

Whatever you call it, during this long 1000 year period, science did make some advances in the western world even though it lagged behind the Islamic, Indian and Chinese civilizations for many centuries.  

What the western world did have that the other civilizations lacked though was a culture that gradually abandoned slavery, a culture that gradually came to respect women (at least far more so than the other non-western cultures did), and some scholars think most important of all -- a culture that began to accept reason as an important route to understanding and truth. Reason was not the only route to be sure, (divine revelation was still given first place as it was in almost all agricultural kingdoms) but nevertheless reason was a valued and necessary virtue.  

This last trait, respect for reason, was not absolute. Thomas Aquinas, considered the greatest of the Roman Catholic philosophers of medieval times, struggled to reconcile the natural reason of Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle with divine revelation from the Christian Bible. Philosophers a few hundreds years later in what is called the western Enlightenment would build on his work with natural reason but discard the need to reconcile reason with  revelation.  

For most people life was a desperate struggle for survival in the Middle Ages. Christian monasteries, and later the first universities in Europe sometimes managed to escape the worst of the chaos, poverty and ignorance. In these early universities logic, reason and a respect for learning were kept alive  In the monasteries slow but steady progress was made in technology and science and indeed an early form of capitalism was invented.  

Wheelbarrows; rotation of crops; the spinning wheel; heavy plows; better horse collars that enabled a medieval horse to do ten times the work that a Roman horse could do without choking himself; water wheels and windmills. By 1080 in England alone the Domesday Book recorded 5624 water mills in operation.  

Monasteries also stimulated a closer contact between work and thought where the power of practical invention could be yoked with the wonder of God’s world. They believed it was a world one could understand with the gift of reason if one worked at it. It was in these monasteries as well as in the universities of the later medieval times that scholars like Gerald of Cremona spent their lives translating works of ancient authors like Aristotle, Euclid, Ptolemy and Archimedes. Translating them from Arabic (note the Islamic contribution) into the scholarly language of the west, Latin.  

Monasteries also began to experiment with production for profit and free trade, becoming some of the world’s first capitalists. They also formed banks that lent money to the Pope as well as to other monasteries and to nobles and kings.  

All of this scholarly and technical progress in Christian monasteries and universities laid the base for a remarkable flowering of human invention and progress in what is called the European Renaissance. And it was in 16th and 17th century Renaissance Europe that modern science was born.  

In northern Italy a man named Galileo Galilei was one of the most important of the new natural philosophers who for the first time did combine natural reason with experimental observation. We call him today one of the world’s first scientists, though that name was not used while he was alive. Galileo, along with other science pioneers like Nicolas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler and a little later, Isaac Newton, changed radically the way human beings looked on the world and began a quest and a revolution that is still going on today.  

Before Galileo’s time, for instance, everyone in the world knew for sure that our earth was the center of the universe. Everyone knew for sure that the sun and stars were “out there,” some fixed and some revolving around our central stationary earth.  

The thought and experiments of these first scientists proved that what everyone knew for sure was not true.    

The earth is not standing still nor is it at the center of the solar system, much less the universe. Instead the earth, they proved, was moving! And very fast! It was in fact spinning around once every day on its own axis.  

And instead of being at the center, it was also moving around a central sun, taking 365 and 1/4 days to make a complete circuit. (Later astronomers proved  that even this solar system of ours is only a tiny part of the wider Milky Way Galaxy that has billions of stars in it, and this Milky Way Galaxy is itself moving as only one of billions of galaxies more in the known universe.)  

Quite a change you’ll have admit from what everyone knew was true just a few hundred years ago..  

If all of that was true, and their experiments and reasoning were convincing to anyone who took the trouble to investigate, it was a serious challenge to all religions of that day. All religions as well as pretty much all human beings had always assumed we on earth were special, central, to God’s plan. And indeed Galileo was brought before a church court of the Inquisition and convicted of heresy for claiming that the earth was not the center of the universe. Faced with such a serious charge as heresy (that could lead to his being burned at the stake,) Galileo recanted and was let off with house arrest on the condition that he refrain from making such absurd claims again.  

Other thinkers, like the Catholic monk Giordano Bruno, who refused to deny their scientific convictions, were convicted of heresy. Bruno, for instance, was brought to a central Roman market square, his tongue in a gag (to prevent him from spreading his heretical views,) tied naked to a pole and burned at the stake on February 17, 1600.  

Despite the efforts to suppress it by the Church and secular authorities the explosion of interest in this new way of thinking, science, began to spread over the next centuries first throughout Europe and later throughout the entire world. This interest and its consequences were powerful for two reasons.  

(1) Science worked. That is, it led to new knowledge and to new technologies that were of obvious benefit to people.  

And (2) Science had a new way to spread its working knowledge—the newly invented printing press.  

The work of Galileo, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton and the physicists and chemists and earth scientists who followed them, for instance, soon led to better calendars, better maps, better artillery, better vehicles, better mines, better sanitation, better machinery of all kinds, huge increases in available energy, and eventually to electricity, automobiles, airplanes, earth satellites, computers and the Internet.  

Similarly, the work of life scientists like Andreas Vesalius in Italy, William Harvey in England, Anton van Leeuwenhoek in Holland, Louis Pasteur in France, Robert Koch in Germany and Charles Darwin in England soon led to less disease, better crops, less pollution, better understanding of the human body and brain, an enormous increase in life span from less than 30 to more than 70 years of life for the average human being. And in the case of Charles Darwin, it led to a revolution in the way educated humans viewed the natural organic world just as revolutionary as the one started by Galileo, Copernicus and Newton..  

This remarkable progress might not have happened had it not been for that late medieval invention-- the printing press. Had it not been for printing, the insights of Copernicus might have gone unnoticed for centuries by the world at large. That was after all the fate of many of the insights and inventions of Chinese, Islamic, Mayan, African, Indian and Japanese thinkers and inventors of earlier centuries and civilizations. Because of  printed publications after 1450 ideas and inventions could be shared comparatively quickly and widely throughout the literate world. And so they were.  

What does this scientific and technical progress have to do with democracy? Let’s explore that question in Part 2 of this program.  

              PART 2: Science and Democracy in the Modern World  

  In the heady days of the Italian Renaissance when Galileo lived and worked, Italy and the rest of the world were still living and working in an agriculturally-based feudal system. This feudal system was built on the labor of peasants, serfs and slaves and the authority of nobility and clergy. However as Thomas Jefferson wrote a few centuries later: “the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs.” Things could change. And stirred by a beginnings of merchant capitalism and reborn science, things did change.  

The stirrings of merchant capitalism and modern banking, begun in late medieval monasteries and now blossoming in Renaissance Italy, were beginning to eat away at the economic foundations of this feudal system. Now the beginnings of modern science in this same Renaissance Italy were further eroding the feudal system, undermining the faith in traditional religious as well as secular authority.  

These trends were accentuated and reinforced in northern Europe in the Protestant Reformation and still later in the European Enlightenment.  

The Protestant Reformation was centered in northern Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries when men like Martin Luther and John Calvin led religious revolts that denied the supremacy of the Pope and again with the help of the printing press and the new access to copies of the Bible, encouraged people to make their own compact with God and do away with the indulgences and what they considered other corrupt practices of the Roman Church.  

A century later in what is called the Enlightenment, secular philosophers in France, Germany, Netherlands and England and later in the newly formed United States of America went further. These Enlightenment philosophers discarded revelation altogether and instead put their faith in natural reason and human experience as the surest guides to progress.  

One of these Enlightenment philosophers, Thomas Jefferson, wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”  

Like the other founding fathers, Jefferson was a Deist. That is, he believed in God but did not believe in the literal truth of so-called divine revelations of the Bible or for that matter, any other holy book. Jefferson went so far as to rewrite the New Testament, removing the few passages that mentioned heaven and hell, but retaining the moral and compassionate parts of the gospel of Jesus.  

Most scholars think that this new faith in natural reason and human experience was a direct outgrowth of the growing faith in science that had such a notable and dramatic  beginning in the Renaissance.  

At the same time that science and technology made such dramatic progress in understanding and controlling the natural world, merchants and entrepreneurs were dismantling the feudal economic system and turning it into a economy of free labor, free trade, and free choice. Both new powers then, science and capitalism, worked side by side to make peasants, serfs and slaves unnecessary. And both worked to challenge the power of aristocratic and clerical rule.  

All of these events and thoughts were seriously undermining an agriculturally-based feudal system that had lasted over ten thousand years everywhere in the civilized world. It is no wonder such enormous changes were also accompanied by serious violence. The American Revolution, followed closely by the French Revolution, were only the latest, and not the most bloody of the conflicts that eventually led to the radical change from feudal to modern times.  

The huge change in intellectual understanding of our world begun in the Renaissance by scientists like Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton gathered force and became a tsunami about the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, just a little over two hundred years ago. It was then that the power of the scientific revolution joined forces with the power of the Industrial Revolution to give birth to the modern world.  

The Industrial Revolution began in England in the mid-18th century. Newly invented machinery to spin thread and weave cloth soon made England the center of the world’s textile industry. An engineer named James Watt perfected a new steam engine that would soon power the world’s railroads, factories and ships. At the same time in nearby Coalbrookdale, iron-makers were learning how to make iron in stronger, larger batches. Strong enough to build the first Iron Bridge in the world here over the River Severn.

Plentiful enough to provide rails and locomotives to connect the world.  

Again, consider the magnitude and scope of the changes brought on by this scientific and industrial change. Before the industrial revolution 98% of the population everywhere in the world survived, if they survived at all, as peasants, serfs or slaves. The average life span was less than 35 years. Over half the children in England in 1600 died before the age of 6. Starvation, plagues, dreadful diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, malaria and childbed fever led to disfigurement, disability or early death for millions of otherwise healthy adults. Almost everyone was illiterate. Only a very few people traveled more than a few miles from their place of birth. Wars were so common that few people escaped their horrors. As one Enlightenment philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, put it. “The life of man everywhere is nasty, brutish and short.”  

Today on the other hand the lives of men and women in the industrialized democratic world has been transformed. The average life span is over 70 years. Most people can read and write. Most people travel thousands of miles in their lifetime. Most people rarely experience violence except vicariously in movies, games or on television. Most people are healthy for most of their lives. And most children survive to become productive adults.  

Before the Industrial Revolution a small farmer needed at least 12 slaves to operate his small farm. Today everyone in the industrialized world has the equivalent of 100 slaves working for him or her in the form of energy-efficient machines.  

All of this change can be traced to humankind’s revolutionary advances in science, technology, free-market economics, humanistic religious values and democratic political ways of life..  

It was in the 19th century that these revolutionary advances in science, industry, religion, capitalism and democracy spread so rapidly throughout Europe and North America. And then in the 20th century, science, industry, religion, capitalism and democracy went global, shaking up and replacing feudal societies almost everywhere on earth with new forms of government, new ways of making a living and new ways of organizing societies.  

These new ways spawned by science and capitalism were not always democratic. Nor were they always an improvement in the lives of ordinary humans. Especially in the 19th century and the early 20th century the new ways included child labor, homeless people, unemployed people, and for those who did have work, long hours of grinding labor in unsafe factories and mines. Life also had to cope with polluted air and water in the new cities (as well as the old countryside) where the contrast between rich and poor became ever more obvious.  

In the middle of the 19th century a German-born scholar named Karl Marx claimed to have discovered the scientific key to curing the new ills of the industrial societies. A powerful way to extend the power of scientific thought into history and “political” science.  

Marx’s data and analysis, he claimed, showed that free-market capitalism was indeed the most powerful system yet found to increase wealth in a society. However his analysis also showed that free-market capitalism contained contradictions that would inevitably lead to its own destruction.  

All history, claimed Marx, was the history of class warfare. Feudal societies had nobility at the top and peasants, serfs and slaves at the bottom. When capitalistic societies replaced the feudal ones, the master class was now the businessmen, the industrialists, what he called the bourgeoisie. The peasants, serfs and slaves of feudal society were replaced now by factory workers, “wage slaves,” he called them the proletariat.  

His analysis and theory predicted that inevitably the proletariat would be exploited more and more, get poorer and poorer, until they revolted and destroyed the capitalist system. They would then proceed to replace it by a new socialist system where the workers owned the factories. After a spell of “dictatorship of the proletariat,” the workers  would finally build a new and just socialist society that would eventually include the entire world. This pure communism would lead in effect to a new man, a new woman, and a new heaven. But a heaven on earth, not in the sky. As the early communists chanted, “There’s pie in the sky when you die. That’s a lie.”  

It was a bold and popular challenge. It was a challenge that seemed -- for one of the first times – to bring the power of scientific thinking to important social problems. Along with his English partner, Frederick Engels, he wrote the most influential pamphlet ever printed, the Communist Manifesto, in 1848..  

“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.” the Manifesto began. “They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!”  

It did sound like a good idea to many people. Especially since many educated people in western and non-western countries by now distrusted both religion and capitalism. Unfortunately the so-called “scientific” solution of Marx and Engels never worked out as they predicted.  

In the 20th century a communist revolution in Russia did lead to a communist Soviet Union and after the second world war a communist Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania. In the far east a communist China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and in the Americas, a communist Cuba. All of these communist states came to power by force, not through free elections. All were led by a very small intellectual minority who took power  in the name of the workers and the peasants, and all of them ended up unproductive, oppressive and totalitarian regimes. Instead of welfare for all, all of these 20th century experiments with communism led to stagnation, boredom, drastic declines in living standards, and horrific gulags where fifty to one hundred million people were enslaved or murdered.  

By the end of the 20th century only a very few communist states still survive to carry on the cause. Cuba and North Korea are probably the only true believers. The Soviet Union is no more. All the former communist states of eastern Europe are now free, democratic and capitalist. China, like Vietnam, is still not free or democratic, but it is strongly free-market capitalist in its economy and is rapidly recovering from decades of economic decay under communism. Whether it will gradually become more democratic, more free and more respectful of human rights remains to be seen.  

In short, this secular “scientific” solution to all human problems turned out to be if anything, worse than the traditional “religious” solutions to human problems of ancient and medieval days.  

In the 20th century still another challenge, as serious as the communist one, arose in Europe, also claiming “scientific” foundation. This was the challenge of fascism. Fascists like Benito Mussolini in Italy, Francisco Franco in Spain and above all, Adolph Hitler in Germany gained dictatorial power with an agenda of racial or ethnic superiority. Hitler, the most powerful of the fascists, claimed that capitalistic wars and depressions of the early 20th century were caused by Jews and other non-Aryan inferior people. The solution was to rid the world of Jews and other unfit people (homosexuals, retarded, crippled) and let the superior races, the Aryans, rule. Like the promise of communism, the new world of Nazi control and supremacy would lead to a utopia—for Aryans at least, if not for the inferior peoples.  

Unlike communists, fascists were not out to destroy capitalism—or religion--so long as businessmen and ministers or priests worked for the good of the people, as defined as the state. Actually in the case of religion Hitler, like communists before him, made his own fascist dogma into a secular religion that supplied answers to any and all questions and would brook no dissent..  

Like communists,  fascists were and are determined to destroy democracy. While fascists support some kinds of physical science (like ancient tyrants, they support weapon research, schemes for  genetic purity and grandiose architecture), they reject, distort and suppress much of biological and social science.  

The most destructive war in human history destroyed Nazism and crippled fascism in the middle of the 20th century. By the end of the 20th century there were still some semi-fascist states. Among these states, some would list former communist states like Russia and some of the smaller communist countries in Asia that used to be a part of the Soviet Union. China too, since it has embraced capitalism in the last few decades, some would classify as fascist today, though it still claims to be communist.  

Other semi-fascist states include Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa  where religion and ethnic loyalties are dominant and poverty and class rule are the rule, not the exception. These countries, again like feudal tyrants, prize science when it contributes to weaponry or to political power, but suppress it when it challenges religious or political power.  

In conclusion most scholars today would say that just as capitalism seems to be necessary for democracy, but not sufficient, so science seems to be necessary for democracy but not sufficient. It is surely no accident that both capitalism and science thrive on freedom. In the former case, free labor, free markets and free trade. In the latter case, free inquiry, free speech and a free press.   

Within democracies today the power and validity of science are being challenged from both the radical right and the radical left. On the right, religious fundamentalists refuse to accept findings of scientists in fields like evolution, genetics, and reproductive health—and more important, deny that science has any right to inquire in some of these fields.

  On the left, environmental fundamentalists denounce findings of science in fields like biotechnology, genetic engineering, intelligence testing, using live animals for research,  industrial growth and finally like the far right, evolution. They also sometimes oppose the rights of scientists to inquire into these forbidden fields.  

Despite these political challenges, from the right or from the left, science today is for the most part accepted, admired and encouraged throughout the civilized world. No matter what the political stance, countries around the world all aspire to leadership in science and technology. However only in democratic countries is science likely to find bedfellows that nurture the free inquiry and free press that are so necessary for the scientific quest to succeed.  

One of the wisest of our fellow citizens, the late physicist Richard Feynman, summed up one case for science, for capitalism and for democracy by noting a not-usually-noted feature of free-inquiry science, of free-market capitalism, of humanistic religion and of liberal democratic practice when he called for “a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought.”  

“I feel a responsibility,” Feynman wrote, “to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings. If you know that you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation. I want to demand this freedom for future generations.”:  

Conclusion. DEMOCRACY: THE BASICS. Combine free-market capitalism, free-inquiry science, and freedom of religion and you get democracy, thus far the best form of government the world has found.  

Democracy, however, (like science, like humanistic religion and like fee-market capitalism) as we all know only too well, tends to also be contentious, full of warts and deficiencies and agonizingly slow at times. Cynics might prefer the way another democratic leader, Winston Churchill, put it  

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest.”

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