The myth of the scientific method as a series of neat and tidy steps from hypothesis and prediction to experiment and conclusion is busted once you go into a lab and observe the more haphazard and messy realities of how researchers feel their way toward discovery. So it is with liberal democracies, which almost never work out as planned but somehow progress ever closer to finding the right balance between individual liberty and social order. The constitutions of nations are grounded in the constitution of humanity, which science is best equipped to understand.
This article was originally published with the title Democracy's Laboratory.
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31 Comments
Add CommentShermer's article reconnects us with the deliberative, observation based process that many of our nation's founders felt was essential to democracy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDemocracy depends on the democratized community to be able to share common understandings of: What is Real. The Likely Effects of Policy Alternatives. What just happened. and many more aspects of what we seek to govern together.
Only a global scientific culture can hope to provide the framework for such common understandings. The memes of science play a critical role in the epidemiology of thought which underlies all democratic processes. We can see in the ongoing controversies about evolution and in the perennially contentious process of determining the cumulative impact of human actions on the living earth as US based dialectics in that very cultural diffusion process.
We have, over centuries, built up ever larger bodies of widely accepted scientific knowledge - water boils under certain conditions, the germ theory of disease, etc. At the same time, it is remarkable how cultures as diverse as traditional Islam and American Creationists have found ways to use the benefits of scientific culture without integrating the scientific method or the deeper metaphorical implications of scientific discoveries.
It's a patient process, this science stuff. Sometimes we wonder if there is time for the memes it gives rise to can diffuse effectively before ignorance and anachronistic habits cause some very scientifically knowable catastrophies.
One of the best articles ever written on the founding of this country and the intentions of the Founders! Mythbusting.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisArticulate!
Then there was the experiment that took place in Venezuela.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn the early nineteenth century, Simon Bolivar left Venezuela to help drive the Spanish viceroys out of Peru. He put Jose Antonio Paez in charge of getting the fledgling democracy up and running. Paez failed and Venezuela was run by a series of military dictators. In 1958, Marcos Perez Jimenez was overthrown, a second time, and in his place a coalition democracy was formed.
In 1974, I was in Venezuela, and I was told that what had happened in 1958 was an experiment and if democracy failed, they would return to dictatorship. I saw, first hand, how oil money came in and flowed down from the national party bosses to the local party bosses to the local party members, with some of it going for the general welfare. As time went on less and less money went to the general welfare, less and less money went downstream. People became poorer, while the political elite became richer.
By 1998, it became obvious that parliamentary democracy was a failure and Hugo Chavez came to power.
It is not the form of government but the moral leadership that best fits the needs of the people. A benevolent dictatorship is better than a corrupt democracy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut the democratic experiment has proven it's worth in encouraging moral leadership. But institutionalized corruption silences the voices of moral reason.
That is what is happening in the USA today.
I feel uncomfortable saying the democratic process is the scientific method. If it technically is, then I'd be inclined to think it was an atypical variant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn horse racing, you could run the same horses against each other on the same track on different days and get a different result. Well, I suppose the same could be said of quantum physics. Of course, in horse racing, perhaps it's possible in theory to collect all the necessary data to predict the winner. And the "winner" is determined by the horses, not the bettors.
In elections, one might say the "winner" is determined by the bettors rather than the horses. So the results of the election "experiment" is somewhat self-referential. The election doesn't even really tell us what the residents of the jurisdiction want. It's something more like: Of those residents who are legally eligible to vote and are registered to vote and who choose to go to the polls and who are not prevented from voting by election irregularities, those people choose what they feel is the least bad of the available alternatives to the best of their understanding (which is often limited). As was discussed in a Scientific American article a few years ago, many voters act emotionally rather than intellectually in voting. So we can't even say that those who vote choose the person with whom they believe they agree with on the most issues. Rather some people vote by party loyalty, some by issues, some by gut feeling, etc.
So as a scientific experiment, elections seem to mostly tell us that the person who receives the most votes is the person for whom the most votes were cast. Maybe that's "science", but "it's not rocket science".
I neglected to say in my previous comment:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are some voters who are well-informed and make thought-out decisions based on reasonable estimates of what policies candidates would implement if elected. These voters may use trial and error based on how they perceive past politicians and policies. For those individuals their trial and error approach between elections does share elements with science.
democracy is a dead issue in the US. We may believe there is a democratic process but recent events disprove that notion. The country is run by the bureaucrats, politicians and oligarchs who operate in their best interest or the interests of their patrons. That, sad to say, does not include the vast majority of the people. So, science and politics interrelated? A rhetorical question as is the Pope Catholic?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEver hear of Political Science???????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEver hear of Political Science???????
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo rather than being a Nation founded on christianity, as some like to believe, we're a Nation founded, at the core, on science? Nice!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid-hardsf... I'd have to disagree with your assessment... I think the voters aren't intended to be compared with the bettors, I think they are instead the horses in this experiment. In a government of the people, the voters are part of the system, and so part of the experiment, rather than the outside observers.
The experiment isn't just about how the voters decide for each candidate, but about how the system works as a whole, all together. The voters, the inevitable bureaucrats, the politicians, the military, the whole group together. It is about how to organize those different parts so they interact all together in an evolving yet stable way that maximizes the original goals (life, liberty, etc).
Quite a complex experiment, but pretty important.
That doesn't make sense, because Venezuela is a democracy now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSure Chavez came in because of the corruption you sight, but that wasn't the end of democracy in the country, the "experiment", to use the articles description, continues.
@David-hardsf.org:
In your analogy though, as I see it, it is the bettors that are being experimented on using the horse race as a tool, Not the other way round. Democracy is the tool to study humans so it is better that the bett0rs influence or determine the result so the results can be analysed.
I'm mixing it but I hope this makes a different kind of sense.
This is a prime example of circular reasoning:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Both incorporate feedback loops through which actions (e.g., laws) can be evaluated to see whether they continue to meet with GENERAL APPROVAL."
You're evaluating the worth of democracy by taking a democratic vote.
Since the issue under discussion is the value/accuracy of science and liberal democracy (equal weight to votes, no qualifications essentially for quality of vote or candidate/legislation), you haven't really asked a legitimate question, since you haven't even POSTULATED a theory about how to judge quality of decision, either scientific or otherwise. Stated baldly, you can't prove scientific law by unqualified votes, which is the difference between democracy and science. You don't need a peer review to vote for Rand Paul or Sharron Angle, and they have no requirement on them to peer review their ideas, except by unqualified voters.
Try this at your next Academy convention: invite in the general public to vote as peers in the peer review process.
The difference between science and liberal democracy will become clear. Liberal democracy assumes the quality of mind of the voter, in my mind a serious mistake, since the corporate media and illiterate voters were not included in the formula of the Founders.
We've ignored the formula, and we are a failing empire as a result.
Maybe Europe or Asia will have some requirements of civic literacy for voters some day. After all, we require licenses to drive, doctor, fly and teach. Isn't government AT LEAST that important?
On my desk is a book "The Genius of America" ( by Lane/Oreskes) which theorizes that between the fervent Declaration of Independence and the practical Constitution was eleven years of watching the idealism of war turn to the infighting of commercial greed and dumping of collective responsibility for war debts and the commons of the new nation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThus the negative tone of the Constitution and Amendments, which basically closed loopholes caused by the polymorphously perverse humans that were to be governed.
The human genome is stable, we are not blank slates, and corporations have no soul. Hence, rules of governance that treat humans as flawed IN THIS NICHE.
I'm surprised at you, Michael!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"liberal democracies, which almost never work out as planned but somehow progress ever closer to finding the right balance between individual liberty and social order."
Why do you think were closer? What's your metric? Is it scientific?
I personally think political science is like physics before calculus. Hari Seldon is clearer on the problems.
"
I see a couple of problems with the thesis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst, we are not a Democracy. They US is a representational republic. That means that the decisions get made by a relatively small number of people, and they are approved or turned out every few years.
Second is the continual restatement of the term "Liberal". This term has been co-opted over the last 50 or so years by one political party. The result of this has been to give the term a bad association.
A similar thing is now happening to the terms "gay" and "conservative".
For the essay, the term should be defined, so that we know what is intended. Originally, Liberal was used to imply the association with freedom and respect for each individual. Now, it implies a penchant for increased socialism and consolidation of central power.
Gay originally meant lighthearted and carefree. No sexual connotation was implied.
Conservative originally meant resistant to change. Now, conservatives in politics want to change everything.
With so many dishonest people redefining terms, we need to explain what the words we use mean.
I am not sure what the Author meant by Liberal. The way Thomas Jefferson used it, I would agree. The way Barack Obama uses it, I might disagree.
Nice description of democracy (or republic as the case may be) as a feedback system. But it does not go far enough. These are not the only possible feedback systems. The only requirement is that, since the system is for the benefit of the people, the feedback most come from the people in some way.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnother way to look at it is to recognize that liberal democracy, like any philosophy, is really just a scientific hypothesis which has not been checked with the scientific method. Once one does so, it is possible to further revise the process is maximize the welfare of the people.
I would like seeing more science applied to government, especially here at S.A. Government seems to be last last bastion of non-scientific thought controlling our lives.
Well, but ... this:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"The only requirement is that, since the system is for the benefit of the people, the feedback most come from the people in some way."
This presumes that the welfare and benefits to the people are correctly perceived by the people. Like the author, you don't define your terms, perhaps expecting automatic head-nodding agreement.
My impression, seven decades in, is that people don't have much understanding of long-term benefits.
I'd like YOU to define what you mean by welfare. Please don't define it as the greatest good for the greatest number. I already know social science has no applicable calculus.
It's not difficult to verify that democracy fosters the positive evolution of societies. We have only to make a broad comparison between, say, life in the middle of the 19th century and life at the present day. It's not hard to see improvement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat doesn't mean that every individual aspect will be positive, but it's the overall picture that counts.
I don't see that the problems of voter competence can be used to deny the relationship between science and politics. To varying degrees, voters will be informed and will make their choices with correspondingly varying degrees of "choice quality". Let's remember that often in science, choices have to be made with limited and sometimes apparently contradictory data.
On the matter of civilizational evolution, we mustn't forget that, just as science isn't a victory march towards knowledge, so is the case with politics. There will be setbacks, failures, need for tinkering with the methods, changes in response to evolving outside circumstances. None of these disproves either the parallels with science or the usefulness of the process.
hereticoftruth wrote:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"It is not the form of government but the moral leadership that best fits the needs of the people. A benevolent dictatorship is better than a corrupt democracy.
But the democratic experiment has proven it's worth in encouraging moral leadership. But institutionalized corruption silences the voices of moral reason.
That is what is happening in the USA today."
In a given situation, your assertion that a benevolent dictatorship is better than a corrupt democracy may be true. The problem is that it doesn't stay true for long.
Asking a single person (the dictator) to satisfy everyone in a society is impossible; dictators die just as any of us; who replaces them? Absolute power corrupts those who wield it, because inevitably a clique forms around them.
We need political solutions that are as effective as possible, but that are also robust, adaptable, and kept in check by the majority of the people. Dictatorships are inherently fragile (the transmission of power is often bungled), rigid by definition, and quickly divorced from the needs of the ruled to concentrate only on the interests of the rulers.
About the USA, if the "voices of moral reason" are those of the majority of the people, let the people use the multiple tools at its disposal to steer the political boat: the vote, direct contact with its representatives, public pressure (demonstrations), civil disobedience, and so on.
The people is as much a part of the process as any other political player, and can only blame itself if it doesn't intervene when it has to. The machine can only work well if all its parts do their job.
If anyone has ever worked for Federal Government prime contractors like Northrop Grumman or Lockheed then you will have no doubts that science and politics are interrelated. Science is responsible for the atom bomb the patriot missile defense system, etc. "Weapons of Mass Destruction" are nothing more than Federally funded science projects. Besides it's all a part of the bigger "Industrial Military Complex" are they not?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThen there is Political science.
Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior.
If anyone has ever worked for Federal Government prime contractors like Northrop Grumman or Lockheed then you will have no doubts that science and politics are interrelated. Science is responsible for the atom bomb the patriot missile defense system, etc. "Weapons of Mass Destruction" are nothing more than Federally funded science projects. Besides it's all a part of the bigger "Industrial Military Complex" are they not?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThen there is Political science.
Political science is a social science concerned with the theory and practice of politics and the description and analysis of political systems and political behavior.
@oldvic (from old ormond) I fail to see why the people, as supposedly absolute rulers, cannot greedily, and shortsightedly, act as the demagogued mob, as they're doing now, subject to the passions stirred up by the corrupt and soulless vested interests that control the media for the real rulers, the oligarchy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEverything you say about single rulers can be applied to any size group that realizes it can vote itself privileges unsupportable by reality, like a USA standard of living for 9 billion people.
I don't think you make your case, vague and reassuring and reactionary as it might be. I'm not a head-nodder. Show me the facts. I stand on history, recent and millenial. The greed of the polis was noted by Cicero. The Roman Empire had periods of democracy, as did Ancient Greece. Both were succeeded by dictatorships and anarchy.
@oldvic ...to continue: As has happened before, when science contradicts or weakens the hold of those in power, a reaction against science can easily be triggered by the media. As we're doing now. We can't make the needed progress against global warming, overpopulation, crazed religious wars, poverty from maldistribution. Any serious analyst of the plight of humanity, as it struggles with problems easily solved technically, but cast in stone socially and sociologically, would not give good odds of science being enabled to do its problem-solving function.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've been a technoid all my life. I remember the Technocracy signs on fenceposts. That didn't happen, but nuclear bombs replaced nuclear power. Except in France. Hmmmm?
Well in order to control the masses there needs to be a system or systems to keep the revolutionary rhetoric to a minimum. What is being described seems to me to be the beginnings of a Pre-Industrial Military Complex. The science of politics is more like a pseudo science to me. As in most endeavors you need to do a fair amount of analytic s to achieve a level of control.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know that there has been a claim that liberal democracy is science, but that liberal democracy is a method or system. Take for example evolution itself or genetic algorithms. Variants of the current system pop up by chance (or thought up by enlightened individuals - though I would say that "enlightened individuals" pop up and meaningfully contribute in a largely random process), but within the bounds of possibility given our current circumstances. A fitness function is applied during every election cycle. Variants acceptable to the voting population become incorporated, while those that are unacceptable get voted down. As time progresses, the system will change according to the dynamic fitness function. Conditions today affect the values of the people, which in turn affect our system of governance, which affect conditions tomorrow, etc.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that liberal democracy is a method, though not Science. It is more akin to complex adaptive systems.
I found the article thought provoking.
The benevolent dictator scenario is often related as the best system of governance. I agree with your thoughts about the eventuality of a not-so benevolent dictator assuming power; however, I think that there is another, perhaps even more important issue. Let us say that there was an immortal dictator of perfect benevolence, but lacked omniscience, who always had the same perspective. It would lock us into a Shangri-La of stagnation! This system of government may please its subjects, but still embrace social institutions that we (thankfully) no longer find acceptable (slavery being the most obvious example). Liberal democracy allows the competition of diverse ideas. It means that humanity can potentially change in ways that any one individual could ever have imagined - even the benevolent dictator.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think that the underlying question here is who gets to decide what human governance should look like. But this begs the question: "what should human governance look like?" The two are indeed related. I think that Rousseau's argument ad absurdum as he relates the a story about a possible "original condition" makes it clear that human beings are what they are today because of existing social institutions. Our long history, for better or worse, is part of who we are today. You cannot take away social institutions/government and have all of the characteristics that we usually associate now with being a member of Homo sapiens. As for what ideal governance should look like, I don't think any of us knows and perhaps it isn't the same for all time. Democracy lets us realize who we want to become, one step at a time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is obvious that in the preceding comment that the writer is not content with things as they are. I don't think that the writer is alone. Each of us as individuals may see a clear course to fulfilling our wants and needs. As a society however, I think that the use of a fitness function of majority rules is the best strategy, in the long run, to developing a system that satisfies the majority. In the obviously dynamical system of human governance and changing majority preferences, we would expect that the peculiarities of such systems may arise: periodicity, unpredictability, etc. Hopefully, we will learn to implement bounds to check these behaviors in our systems, but complex systems will always surprise us. We see this happen with capitalism. It is a marvelous mechanism that has afforded us a diversity of products and services and has spawned technological advances. But it is prone to the proclivities of unchecked complex systems as suggested by the 80:20 rule. 80% of the resources are owned by 20% of the people. Over time, hopefully, we'll learn how to harness capitalism in a more equitable way. As for democracy, I continue to hope that the healthy competition of ideas will eventually bring change that suits us all. I would venture that the previous commenter and I would share common ground in saying that the trend of using confirmation bias as the fitness function we use to estimate the worth of ideas is a disturbing one.
It is incorrect to believe that atheists are not religious. The Arians believed the story of Jesus, but did not believe he was the son of God. When, as barbarians they attacked Rome, Rome was still pagan. There is a subtle difference between atheists and people that believe in nothing at all or possess a half-baked knowledge of religion. Most true Atheists are people with a deep spiritual view of creation, which includes a great many scientists.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDemocratic elections are uncontrolled self-experiments. Is like taking a medicine to see its effects. The results are chaotic and various negative feed back loops can protect the homoeostasis of the system – not always of course. Only dictators can do controlled social experiments. Lenin has dome his "New Democracy" by allowing capitalism to take place for a short time. It was a great success since it saved Russians from famine. Chinese are doing the same, but in a really larger scale. They are always ready to intervene if things go wrong (see Tiananmen “intervention”).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI find convincing that liberal democracy might have roots in the scientific methodology but I would underline some differences that make science and politics two distinctive areas. Scientific advancement relies on validation and replication possibilities making the outcomes from experiments a basis on which new knowledge might be further developed. You might start from these outcomes to test a wide range of theories but the results have to be scientifically validated to be taken into account.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn the other hand, democratic processes are sometimes affected by non-scientific, deceptive and subjective opinions. Thus, feedback provided though elections have no possibility to be validated as right or wrong and there’s no way to verify that they produce any progress in the long term either.
In my opinion, asymmetric information between elected and electors, majority distortions, politicians’ misbehaviors, exogenous factors, and cultural imbalances, limit the comparison to a mere attempt (so far the most effective) by liberal democratic processes to simulate the effectiveness of the scientific method.
"Democracy has developed over time. Just as it has gone through many different stages in the past, it will continue to evolve and improve in the future. Along the way, it will be shaped into a more humane and just system, one based on righteousness and reality. If human beings are considered as a whole, without disregarding the spiritual dimension of their existence and their spiritual needs, and without forgetting that human life is not limited to this mortal life and that all people have a great craving for eternity, democracy could reach the peak of perfection and bring even more happiness to humanity." (Fethullah Gulen)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.fethullah-gulen.org/
http://www.fethullah-gulen.net/
http://www.rumiforum.org/about/fethullah-gulen.html