Whatta Ya Know ?

                As we stumble on through the public impeachment hearings, a central problem in our democracy becomes more and more evident: there is no way to create a consensus around what is and is not true.  I’m not talking about the kind of Truth that comes with flaming bushes and stone tablets, just the ordinary grounds for agreeing how we sort out what we think is important.  A democracy cannot function without some mechanism for defining political reality.  I am also not proposing that we return to any of the male dominated truth machines of the church and state that propped up political reality since the Enlightenment.  But we have to find some way that we can talk to each other without retreating to separate universes and lobbing bricks at the other side.  How did this get to be so hard?

                Science was supposed to solve this problem.  Rational and scientific thought was supposed to be free of the ideological contamination that infected the religious definitions of reality it replaced.  It should be pretty simple.  We have visual evidence from space that the earth is round (ok, elliptical if you must), but more people than ever believe the earth is flat.  Exhaustive studies on the effects of vaccines have concluded that they do not produce autism, but the anti-vaxer movement still grows.  Over 99% of climate scientists believe that climate change is real, but people still deny it exists.  How could there be such a disconnect between science and popular belief?  Democracy is impossible if people just deny what they don’t want to believe.  It depends on a robust conflict of ideas that can be worked out through dialog and compromise to create a political truth.  That truth may, and probably will, be found to be wrong or insufficient down the road, but that’s part of the plan.  When Dewey tried to define democracy as inquiry, that constant interrogation of truth is exactly what he had in mind.  We can’t engage in inquiry because we can’t agree how to agree on what is real.

                The expectation, ever since Bacon, was that science wouldn’t fall into the same sectarian disagreements that sent Christians out to kill other Christians over petty doctrinal issues.  To be fair, the chemists and physicists aren’t cutting each other’s throats, but a large part of the population has simply tuned out.  As science advanced, it became more specialized and credentialed.  Early proponents of the ‘New Science’ didn’t have to go through peer review to get tenure or research positions.  That specialization helped the sciences, making their work more focused and more productive.  Unfortunately, it also cut out most of the people.  The way we teach science doesn’t really help the problem, concentrating on rote memorization instead of experimentation and direct experience.  But the bigger problem is that for a lot of people who don’t really understand what science is or how it works it isn’t any more valid than Uncle Ted’s version of how the world works.  Scientists don’t think they should have to have a narrative interface, but without one their work is just being ignored by people who don’t get it.

                The temptation is just to say that those people are dumb, and they might be, but they vote.  They elected a president who tweets out half-baked conspiracy theories daily.  Science will not survive as a stand-alone enterprise if the political will to fund it and follow it isn’t there.  People want to believe they understand the world; that it makes sense.  If they can’t make sense of science, they’ll find another story to tell about how the world works.  I think that’s the easiest way to understand why our political system is in trouble.  Elites thought they could control the narrative by talking only to other elites.  In a democracy, that’s not enough.  The point is that in a democracy science needs more than labs and equipment; it needs a story, one that is both inclusive and captivating.  I think that story exists, but scientists don’t seem to want to tell it.  We have to change the way we educate people about how we make knowledge.  We have to stop acting like a random selection of facts or information means anything at all.  We also have to stop assuming that we only need to speak to the people who are as refined and educated as we are.  Democracy as inquiry needs more than a plan for STEM programs; it needs a narrative about those programs that makes them accessible and understandable to all of us.