The Enlightenment’s Dark Fallacy: On the Dangers of Undemocratic Scientific Progress
After the Scientific Revolution, some Enlightenment thinkers equated scientific progress with moral or political progress. Unfortunately, revolution often becomes devolution.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men. Martin Luther King, Jr.
At core, politics requires power. Ideas move hearts; power moves history.
Although legislators operate through majoritarian coalitions, since an energized plurality of any population habitually opposes even benign change, democratic populism alone is no sure safeguard against a tyranny of the minority.
For most of history, the path to political power ran through nepotism, exploitative economic policies like mercantilism, offensive wars justified as defensive ones, and other exercises of “might makes right.”
Today, authority is less naked; neither generals nor politicians monopolize power. Instead, the keys to power — and, thus, the future — are held by scientists, including corporate scientists. And what is science but a mechanism for humans to attain power over nature (and, as nature includes humans, over one another)?
Like power’s more traditional tools (e.g., soldiers, police, judges), science can yield good or ill. But, in today’s Second Gilded Age, science too often aims at (1) fattening corporate pockets and (2) increasing the destructive capacities of nation-states. The public good is neglected, and the highest motive of applied research is no longer truth, nor fame, nor even military hegemony. The highest motive is profit. Money.
But there are higher motives than the profit motive.
This reality would have depressed Enlightenment thinkers, taken as they were with science’s liberalizing potential. They saw logic and mathematics as keys to emancipation —sworn enemies of monarchs who insisted that tradition (and nothing but tradition) gave them the right to rule.
Unfortunately, insofar as they assumed a 1:1 correlation between scientific and ethical or political progress, Enlightenment thinkers were wrong. Since that view — science as an unmitigated good — remains widely popular, their assumptions are worth examining. Indeed, the unpredictable effects of social media algorithms and micro-targeting on liberal democracy, as well as the push to merge AI with humans, make such questions all the more pressing.
For if we wish to have any control whatsoever over our future, we must make these questions democratic, not corporate, and ensure that technology does not control us but that we control technology.
Marquis de Condorcet: Science as the Great Emancipator
An eighteenth-century polymath’s writings exemplify the emancipatory view of science.
In Marquis de Condorcet’s Outlines of an Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind, Condorcet claimed that “[t]he human race . . . will be [a]meliorated by new discoveries in the sciences and the arts, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the means of individual and general prosperity.”
That phrase — that science will improve our lot as “an unavoidable consequence” — is, we now know, absurd. The tree of science produces both poisonous and wholesome fruits.
Recent years have made the emancipatory view’s naivety frighteningly clear. Enlightenment thinkers thought science a panacea. Yet its potential incompatibility with other fruits of the Enlightenment — including tolerance for minority rights and liberal democracy— has never been clearer.
Most people will disagree. Popular books like Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now include statistics about just how great things have become over the past few years because of scientific progress and capitalism. And Pinker is largely correct. But as Karl Popper knew, there are more ways to understand reality than the scientific method.
More importantly, in the same way that “intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings,” scientific knowledge without philosophy — ethics — tells us nothing about where we should go. Something far more valuable than knowledge — wisdom — is required for that task, something that thinkers as varied as Plato, Nietzsche, and Jung knew well. (Especially Jung, who saw science destroy Europe in violent orgies of blood that exterminated two generations of young men and several generations of innocent civilians.)
Increasinglytargeted online advertisements created by consulting firms like Cambridge Analytica threaten to undermine not only the nature but even the possibility of democracy. Worse, social-media algorithms on platforms like Facebook and YouTube aimed at maximizing user engagement often do so by funneling users into extremist rabbit holes — cesspools that use outrage-invoking conspiracy theories to hijack attention, thereby increasing the quantity of online user engagement while reducing the quality of in-person civic engagement. (For example, if you search for a science video on the shape of the planet, the profit-oriented Youtube algorithm means you’ll soon wind up watching a video promoting flat-earth theory — whether you started off looking for that video or not.)
Instead of science saving politics, it seems that politics must save science, that political institutions must regulate science in order to ensure its fruits heighten rather than diminish human consciousness.
Justifications for Regulating Science
So the Enlightenment’s emancipatory view is wrong — utterly wrong. Instead of improving the human condition “as an unavoidable consequence,” science may well degrade it.
Fortunately, the answer is simple. Whenever we invent something dangerous — e.g., nuclear missiles — we tend to regulate the technology, to restrict access to it and to create rules around its use. Since capitalism alone is incapable of ensuring that scientific progress is ethical progress,citizens —through their governments — must ultimately regulate science. In doing so, we can preserve our human agency even as scientific progress continues.
In the same way that lawyers lack a monopoly over legal institutions, corporate scientists should lack a monopoly over scientific ones. The reason is simple: Emerging technologies like exponentially sophisticated AI or bio-engineering implicate all of society. Therefore, scientists — a subset of society — should not be sole decision-makers. As we see from climate change, when guided by profit-oriented goals instead of the public good, science can pose a threat to not only our democratic future, but any future.
- Military Considerations
In Condorcet’s century, as explosives grew deadlier and armies faster, as the guillotine anesthetized death but accelerated its dispensation, it was all-too clear that — rather than utopia — science could produce dystopia. Today, it remains uncertain whether we can exercise enough collective prudence to thwart nuclear holocaust. Yet Enlightenment thinkers like Condorcet ignored the risks of instrumental reason divorced from teleology when writing paeans like “the progress of the sciences … must be ranked in the number of the most prolific and powerful causes of the improvement of the human race.” (This sentiment is, unfortunately, just as strong today as in Condorcet’s time.) Science is reckless, at best, without the guiding hand of morality; guided by the power and profit-motives alone, it is affirmatively dangerous.
Today, the world’s nations find themselves locked in a race to perfect ways to kill ever more people in ever less time. No wonder Einstein, who helped develop the nuclear bomb, was wary of a science unmoored from morality. Condorcet was correct that, due to science’s capacity to manipulate the natural world, “nature has fixed no limits to our hopes.” But it has also placed no limits to our fears.
Condorcet was also correct that “instruments [and] machines … add every day to the capabilities and skill of man.” Yet this truth applies to both our constructive and our destructive capabilities. One wonders how Condorcet, confronted with the terrible power of the atom, might have qualified his views.
2. Economic Considerations
Like Marx and Engels, Condorcet predicted that (because of science) the workday would dramatically decline such that free time would soon develop to add “every day to the [creative] capabilities and skill of man.” Yet Condorcet failed to take greed into sufficient account. Many humans are never satisfied; their gluttony forces all of society to work far harder than would be otherwise necessary to merely create the goods necessary for sustenance. Poverty exists not because society produces too little, but because the rich demand too much.
While Enlightenment thinkers were correct that science could shorten workdays, they failed to recognize that science alone was insufficient. The workday — if subjected to regulations preventing the owners of the means of production from demanding ever more labor despite ever more efficiency — could be shortened. But because of our fetishization of economic over societal gain, of the power of money over the power of institutions, the opposite happened.
Yes, science made it possible for one farmer to produce in one day what ten farmers used to produce in twenty. But human greed is insatiable. A farm owner, noticing his increased potential profit, has proven as likely to maintain or increase the workday as to decrease it. This dynamic — increased production leading to increased consumption, and therefore to even more production — means that increased productive capacity via science is unlikely to shorten the average workday absent progressive reforms.
Condorcet’s Error
Reason and science light the path; but the harder task of deciding where to go, of determining which paths to take and which ends are worthy, depends on \deeper wells of wisdom than those science offers. Moral wisdom is developed not through science, but through hard-won life experiences and the humanities — art, philosophy, history, theology.
Of course, as thinkers like Pinker point out, science has indeed improved collective human life. The mistake of Condorcet and his modern Pinker-like heirs, however, is the belief that moral progress inevitably increases with scientific progress. It is the naïve view that science, simply by increasing human power over nature, will necessarily increase political emancipation. Power has, quite often, been used not to uplift but to oppress.
Science’s benefits are undeniable. Its dangers are, too. Like any tool, science has both destructive and constructive potentiality. From gunpowder to cannons to biological warfare to targeted and misleading campaign ads, science has proven it possesses as much negative potential as it does positive. Although Condorcet and his Enlightenment heirs praised science’s emancipatory potential, they ignored its potential to enslave. They failed to acknowledge that since science yields power, and since power can be misused, science can be misused.By failing to acknowledge past misuses of science as indicative of future ones, Condorcet ignored an important piece of evidence: “experience of the past.”
The first proper scientist, Aristotle, called politics “the master science.” This is because he knew — unlike contemporary scientists guilty of scientism — that leadership is key in ensuring that scientific knowledge is effectively employed.
COVID-19 has shown us that an excellent army with negligent generals goes nowhere. This is why the United States, armed with humanity’s best scientists, nonetheless featured the highest rates of coronavirus infections. Its generals — its political leaders — lacked the necessary wisdom to put their soldiers (scientists) to productive use. The best technology is useless in the hands of a fool.
Conclusion
Condorcet was wrong — dangerously so. Scientific and political progress do not go hand in hand. Politics remains the “master science” because, unlike the empirical sciences, it concerns itself not only with means but also with moral ends. Fetishizing empiricism risks ignoring that, though science can tell us what is, it cannot tell us what ought to be. Without a regulatory framework to keep corporate scientists — and their money-hungry patrons — from ignoring negative externalities, the Scientific Revolution , unlike the Agricultural , may prove the last: A revolution yielding devolution.
Nothing above implies that science has nothing to say about the proper ends of human life. Science continues to increase what Condorcet called the “knowledge necessary for the direction of every [hu]man in the common occurrences of life.” With an increased understanding of how to uncover truths, the scientific method has enabled us to create goods with positive consequences for everyday life — things like vaccines. In addition, few would dispute Condorcet’s assertion that, with the faster spread of knowledge through innovations like the printing press and Internet, people seem to be learning how to better conduct “themselves in the common affairs of life by their own reason,” especially in comparison to the past. Tyrants can still pull the wool over our collective heads, but enterprising web-surfers will never be silenced.
Still, because science cannot tell us what we ought to do — only what is — we must remain eternally cognizant of the danger of pursuing scientific progress absent moral progress. Advances in artificial intelligence, cloning, gene editing, and nuclear proliferation have yielded morally puzzling questions that may not be easily — or peacefully — resolved. Because we all have a stake in these issues, they cannot be left to private organizations, but to democratic institutions: We the People.
Thus, the notion that science renders philosophy and ethics superfluous is not just naive, but absurd. Science, like anything increasing human power, has made philosophy, ethics, political theory, and ethics more essential than ever. Condorcet was partly right: Nature has fixed no limits to our hopes. It has also fixed no limits to our fears. Let us proceed, then, wisely, consciously, and — most importantly — prudently.
Michael Elias Shammas is a lawyer and writer. Feel free to follow him on Twitter or to read his in-progress scholarship for free.
