Introduction

This chapter goes deeper into the complex relation between science and democracy. Previous chapters discussed how science and politics are separate and that one elite (scientific experts) is delegated the power to represent nature (as knowledge objects) and another elite (decision makers, not only elected politicians but broadly speaking) is delegated the power to represent the people. This double delegation (delegative democracy) is based on a distinction between what is represented and who can represent. These two forms of representation divide the world into the two domains of knowledge and politics and, in addition, create a sharp division between those who are in power (the two elites) and those who are not (the ignorant mass). However, these separate domains are also interlinked, and as we have seen earlier, the boundaries between them and their authority and legitimacy can always be questioned and change over time. The separation between science and democracy, between representatives and represented, is a joint product. One of the most important ideas within STS research is that knowledge and social order are intertwined or, as it is often expressed, co-produced (Jasanoff 2004b).

Science and democracy are not independent from each other. Democracies legitimize and back up decisions and reforms with expert knowledge, and an uneven distribution of knowledge and education in a society is seen as a democracy problem (Sismondo 2010: 80). Governing requires knowledge, and science is intermingled with power. Science and democracy may be the result of a joint process, but they are often presented as separate, which has consequences for how practices are performed and leads to what they have in common being concealed. Knowledge is understood and presented as being independent of social order and power, especially in the scientific community. Researchers have a professional interest in keeping sharp distinctions between scientific knowledge and other types of knowledge as well as sharp distinctions between scientific knowledge and political interests (Gieryn 1983). At the same time, researchers also have an interest in getting attention from outsiders and they want their results to be used outside of the research community. This duality, which we have discussed previously, implies the wish of researchers to have, simultaneously, distance and closeness to politics.

Introduction

Science and democracy have emerged as important institutions in modern Western societies. But what do we mean when we say that a society is ‘modern’? Among other things, modernity means that the world is understood in the light of scientific knowledge instead of traditional knowledge and religious beliefs. Scientific knowledge takes precedence over other forms of knowledge and becomes the yardstick from which other knowledge claims are judged. This situation becomes an important part of the characterization of modernity (Beck 1992: Chapter 7).

That science is superior to other forms of knowledge in modern society is only valid on a rather basic level. However, we are expected to accept that the earth was not created in seven days, that all living things consist of one or more cells, and that the dropped coffee cup falls to the ground due to gravity. The limit, or the boundary, of what issues can legitimately be answered from a scientific point of view can never be strictly formulated. Does climate change have human causes? Has extreme weather become more common due to a higher global average temperature? Is a global climate tax the best measure for reducing greenhouse gas emissions? Do we all need to change our individual lifestyles due to climate change? Where in the climate discussion does science end and politics start, and is climate change mitigation a scientific issue at all?

These questions illustrate that it is not obvious what questions science can answer and when science should have priority over other kinds of knowledge. The boundaries between science, values, and political assessments are not sharp in these kinds of issue complex (Hulme 2009). Many issues in relation to topics like climate change are both understood and managed by a mix of scientific knowledge and political assessment. Climate change would not be an issue at all if there was not an underlying value-based assessment that it is of interest to protect planet earth for future generations of human beings.

Modernity and its strong focus on scientific knowledge can be understood from the notion of separation. The anthropologist and STS scholar Bruno Latour (1993) characterizes modernity as a separation of nature (non-humans) from society (humans). This division is fundamental to modern societies and has led to a sharp division between science and politics. In the modern, enlightened society, both science and democracy are highly valued.

Introduction

In this chapter, we continue the presentation of ideas about science and politics as separate. While the previous chapter focused on separation as part of wider societal changes and presented thinkers who demonstrate a clear separation, some of which also support the idea of strictly separate domains, this chapter focuses on approaches that discuss how science and politics can and should relate to each other, while simultaneously acknowledging that separation exists. Many of the scholars discussed in the chapter study what happens when science and politics meet.

We first present the view that the increased importance of scientific knowledge for political decision-making has led to stronger demands for scientific consensus. For scientific experts to effectively impact on and influence political decisions, their knowledge base must be generally accepted among other scientists. We then describe the linear model, which is based on the idea that knowledge precedes action. The deficit model follows from the linear model and implies that the public is characterized by knowledge deficits, which can be remedied with education and reliable information. We then present Jürgen Habermas’ seminal pragmatic model as a way to manage the gap between science and politics, and also the technocratic tendencies in modern society based on the increasing dominance of expert knowledge.

In the two final sections of this chapter, we introduce classical STS research on what happens when scientific experts become involved in political decision-making processes. Dorothy Nelkin's studies serve as an important example. Nelkin's conclusion is that politics frames the work of experts and how expert knowledge is used, and thereby expertise is reduced to a tool in managing political conflicts. Thereafter, we present Harry Collins and Robert Evans’ characterization of the first, second, and third wave of STS research. In their approach, presented as the third wave, a clear separation between science and politics, and between experts and non-experts, is defended from the explicit aim of avoiding both technocracy (relying too much on knowledge) and populism (relying too little on knowledge).

Scientific consensus and autonomous experts

Peter Haas, a political scientist well known for the notion of epistemic communities, has for a long time studied international environmental governance and under what circumstances expert knowledge can gain political significance.

John Gould’s father was a gardener. A very, very good one – good enough to be head of the Royal Gardens at Windsor. John apprenticed, too, becoming a gardener in his own right at Ripley Castle, Yorkshire, in 1825. As good as he was at flowers and trees, birds became young John Gould’s true passion early in life. Like John Edmonstone, John Gould (1804–1881) adopted Charles Waterton’s preservation techniques that kept taxidermied bird feathers crisp and vibrant for decades (some still exist in museums today), and he began to employ the technique to make extra cash. He sold preserved birds and their eggs to fancy Eton schoolboys near his father’s work. His collecting side-hustle soon landed him a professional post: curator and preserver of the new Zoological Society of London. They paid him £100 a year, a respectable sum for an uneducated son of a gardener, though not enough to make him Charles Darwin’s social equal (Darwin initially received a £400 annual allowance from his father plus £10,000 as a wedding present).

Darwin claimed that On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was only an “abstract” of that much longer book he had begun to write in 1856, after his irreverent meeting with J. D. Hooker, T. H. Huxley, and T. V. Wollaston, and Lyell’s exasperated encouragement in May. But he never completed that larger book. Instead, he worked on plants and pigeons and collected information through surveys from other naturalists and professional specimen hunters like Alfred Russel Wallace for the better part of a decade.

For all their scientific prowess and public renown, there is no comparable Lyell-ism, Faraday-ism, Einstein-ism, Curie-ism, Hawking-ism, or deGrasse-Tyson-ism. So, there must be something even more powerful than scientific ideas alone caught in the net of this ism attached to Darwin. And whatever the term meant, it’s fair to say that Darwinism frightened Bryan.

Historian Everett Mendelsohn was intrigued. In the middle of writing a review of an annual survey of academic publications in the History of Science, he marveled that an article in that volume contained almost 40 pages’ worth of references to works on Darwin published in just the years between 1959 and 1963. Almost 200 works published in a handful of years – no single figure in the history of science commanded such an impressive academic following. Yet Mendelsohn noted that, paradoxically, no one had written a proper biography of Darwin by 1965. Oh sure, there was commentary. Lots of commentary. But so many of the authors were retired biologists who had a tendency toward hagiography or, the opposite, with axes to grind.

Meeting the “White Raja of Sarawak” in Singapore in 1853 had been a stroke of luck. Honestly, it could have been a major turning point in what had been an unlucky career so far for 30-year-old collector Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) (Figure 4.1). But the steep, rocky, sweaty climb up Borneo’s Mt. Serembu (also known as Bung Moan or Bukit Peninjau) in the last week of December 1855 wasn’t exactly what Wallace expected. His eyeglasses fogged in the humidity. Bamboo taller than buildings crowded the narrow path. Near the top, the rainforest finally parted. But it revealed neither a temple nor some sort of massive colonial complex with all the trappings of empire worthy of a “raja.” Instead, there leaned a modest, very un-colonial-ruler-like white cabin. When he saw it, Wallace literally called it “rude.”

Charles Darwin spent nearly the whole of his writing career attempting to convince his colleagues, the general public, and, by extension, you and me, that change occurs gradually. Tiny slivers of difference accumulate over time like grains of sand in a vast hourglass. Change happens, in other words. It’s painfully slow, but it’s inevitable. By implication, two organisms that look different enough to us to be classified as separate species share, many tens of thousands or even millions of generations back, the same ancestors. (Inbreeding means we don’t even need to go back quite that many generations to demonstrate overlap, but you get the point.) But change that gradual means, as Darwin himself well recognized, that looking for “missing links” would be a pretty silly errand. Differences between one generation and the next look to our eyes just like common variation. It’s one grain falling from the top of the hourglass to the bottom. You can’t perceive the change. You would have to go back in time to find the very first individuals who possessed a particular trait – bat-like wings, say, or human-ish hands – and then, turning to their parents, you would see something almost identical.

Transmutation. “Evolutio,” if you wanted to be fancy and Italian about it. Whatever you want to call it, the grand unrolling of one type into another, connecting all living things into a single tree of life was all the rage among the society gentlemen. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, an influential Scottish judge in the 1700s, had said shocking things about it. Monboddo’s metaphysics separated humans from brutes by only the thinnest slice of cognition. And imagine how he scandalized the chattering classes when, according to rumor anyway, he suggested perhaps tails even lingered, dangling from the spinal cords of the underdeveloped. They called him an “eccentric,” a fusty, argumentative judge and a voracious reader. Perhaps too learned – genius and madness, you know.

The Good News finally snagged him. In late September 1881, he was near the end, bedridden, languishing in a soft purple robe, still able to read, though he always preferred to be read to. Lady Hope entered the drawing room at the top of the stairs quietly, respectfully, as the golden hour gently illuminated corn fields and English oak forests through his picturesque bay window. The faintest crown of white hair encircled his head in the late afternoon light; the rest was wizardly beard (Figure 6.1). Lady Hope, the well-known evangelist, was visiting the Darwins, and she approached the old scientist cautiously. But she needn’t have. In his wrinkled hands he held the Bible, open to the New Testament Epistle of Hebrews. “The Royal Book,” Darwin called it, serenely, mentioning a few favored passages.