‘God is Dead and the War’s Begun:’ Contesting Science and Democracy from Progressivism to Postmodernism Joseph Vitti I. Introduction: From Faith to Irony American Progressivists believed in a natural alliance between science and democracy.1 The former, construed as an abstract methodology for generating objective knowledge, was viewed as a necessary mechanism for establishing consensus in the evaluation of truth-claims – and such consensus, in turn, was viewed as necessary for any kind of self-government. By the Postmodern Era, such optimism had disappeared. Science – now construed as a situated social and historical process for generating authoritative knowledge – was viewed, at best, as orthogonal to goals of social progress,2 and at worst as a mechanism for maintaining an unjust status quo. This essay aims to understand the rupture that separates these two historical moments. In what follows, I only briefly gesture to major world events contributing to the popular decline of faith in science as the harbinger of social progress (most notably, the advent of modern warfare on a global scale). I instead focus my analysis on shifting attitudes towards science among intellectuals, and in particular on the relevance of the “linguistic turn” in the academy.3 I argue that this movement undergirds Thomas Kuhn’s reasoning in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and that this work represents a reimagining of the relationship between language, science and progress.4 Kuhn opened up new possibilities for thinking about how to effect democracy; the notion that science was ‘just another language game’ that may or may not align 1 By democracy, I refer to systems of power that are in some way committed to ensuring that power is distributed rather than concentrated. 2 By social progress or democratic progress, I refer to historical trajectories in which groups bolster their commitment to the distribution rather than the concentration of power. I take this idea of progress to mesh easily with Judith Shklar’s definition of a liberal (‘the people who think that cruelty is the worst thing we could do’) as invoked by Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1989), xv. By scientific progress, I refer to historical trajectories in which groups achieve what is perceived to be a more advanced state of scientific knowledge. By progress, I refer to either or both of these. 3 Richard Rorty, ed., The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967). 4 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, third edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962). 1 with liberal ideologies allowed intellectuals to narrow their focus to language itself, and to its significance as a potential catalyst or obstacle of democratic progress. In the first section, I trace the rise and fall of Progressivist faith in science, focusing in particular on the ‘death of God’ and ensuing dialogue among public intellectuals such as Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. I then discuss the advent of the linguistic turn by contrasting the early and late ideas of the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, connecting these ideas with their application to science in Kuhn’s work. I then connect Kuhn’s arguments to those of the contemporaneous ‘New Left’ political movement, and suggest that subsequent Postmodernist thought, as epitomized by Richard Rorty, represents the logical extreme of Wittgenstein and Kuhn’s reimagining of the relationship between language, science and progress. Rorty’s “liberal ironist” strives to accomplish what earlier thinkers proclaimed impossible: she commits herself to egalitarian solidarity in the acknowledged absence of objectivity, in a world where even the most authoritative modes of knowledge production are subject to pervasive contingencies.5 I argue that thus, Postmodernism articulates the possibility of a liberal polity in a ‘post-scientific’ epistemic regime – a possibility that was unimaginable at the beginning of the 20th century. I close by considering how this historical trajectory might inform current conceptions of science and its social commitments. II. If There Is No God, All Are Divided: Science, Consensus & Progress in the Early 1900s Friedrich Nietszche famously authored the provocative claim that “God is dead,” amounting to a recognition of the decline in theistic belief among intellectuals and as a major cultural force for Western civilization writ large.6 As Nietzsche’s Madman proceeded to lament, 5 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, xv. Following Rorty, I take contingent to refer to something that is not absolutely necessary or that could be otherwise. Thus, the notion that scientific knowledge is subject to contingencies in its production means that there is no single perfect Truth (with a capital T) that science aims to uncover; the world is not split up “on its own initiative, into sentence-shaped chunks called ‘facts’” (5). 6 Friedrich Nietzsche,The Gay Science,1882, trans. Thomas Common, (Mineola: Dover, 2006), 90. 2 this realization gives rise to a spiritual crisis.7 One supposes that if there is no God, all is permitted8 – a notion that threatens social anarchy. After the death of God has destabilized traditional moral and value systems, how can society continue to cohere? What happens to God’s congregation post mortem? The American Progressivist Walter Lippmann proposed a solution in his 1914 Drift and Mastery: namely, to let science serve as our “modern communion.”9 Lippmann put forth the idea that America, which was reeling from pervasive political corruption and other capitalist growing pains, had entered a state of “drift” – a state of widespread social discontent resulting from an unreflective laissez-faire attitude. Lippmann cited Nietzsche’s ideas directly in his diagnosis of the situation, commenting that “a stern commander is just what this age lacks.”10 That is, Lippmann identified the loss of an absolute social authority, as exemplified by the death of God, as the source of the unrest he witnessed. The antidote to drift, according to Lippmann, was “mastery” – proceeding deliberately and reflectively as a society by articulating and committing to shared social goals. Lippmann hailed science as the demonstration that such mastery was possible. In order to “domesticate the brute” we only needed to undertake the basic tasks of science: “draw the hidden into the light of consciousness, record it, compare phases of it, note its history, experiment, reflect on error.”11 With this belief in mind, Lippmann went so far as to describe science and democracy as two sides of the same coin. His attitude towards the scientific method and its democratic potential could be described as a sort of faith, if his rhetorical flourish serves as any indication: “There is 7 “How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murders? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife – who will wipe the blood from us?” (Ibid., 91). 8 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 1880, trans. Constance Garrett, (New York: Macmillan, 1922), 674. 9 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, 1914, (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1985) 152. 10 Ibid., 116. 11 Ibid., 148. 3 nothing accidental then in the fact that democracy in politics is the twin-brother of scientific thinking. They had to come together. As absolutism falls, science arises. It is self-government.”12 One nuance of Lippmann’s argument bears particular recognition: for him, science functions democratically because it gives its adherents what we might call a ‘shared language.’ In Lippmann’s own words, “the discipline of science is the only one which gives any assurance that from the same set of facts men will come approximately to the same conclusion.”13 Following World War I, however, Lippmann came to lose some of this optimism in science’s potential for establishing consensus and ensuring social progress. As he wrote in 1922, democracy had not yet been made to confront “the problem which arises because the pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”14 That is, science’s potential to establish consensus among its publics is marred by the threat of what Lippmann termed “stereotypes” – culturally inscribed conceptions or categories that lend themselves to prejudice.15 But while Lippmann’s faith in the alliance of science and democracy was weakening, other Progressivists continued to carry the banner. John Dewey, for example, maintained that the problem was not that Progressivism had invested too much faith in the public’s commitment to scientific consensus, it was rather an issue of implementation: the essential “problem of the public” was the need of “improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion.”16 For Dewey, consensus was still within reach, if only Pragmatist conceptions of knowledge generation could be universally maintained. 12 Ibid., 151. 13 Ibid., 155. The idea that science is unique inasmuch as it offers a decision procedure for truth harkens back to the earlier Pragmatists, e.g. Charles Saunders Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief” in Popular Science Monthly (vol. 12, Nov 1877), 1-15. 14 Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922, (New York: Free Press, 1965), 19. 15 Ibid., 53. 16 John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: Holt, 1927), 187. 4 As the interwar years progressed, however, Deweyan optimism came to represent