This falls into the category of Stop the epistemic power-plays! It comes from a recent article in Scientific American written by Shawn Lawrence Otto:
The Founding Fathers were science enthusiasts. Thomas Jefferson, a lawyer and scientist, built the primary justification for the nation’s independence on the thinking of Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon and John Locke—the creators of physics, inductive reasoning and empiricism. He called them his “trinity of three greatest men.” If anyone can discover the truth by using reason and science, Jefferson reasoned, then no one is naturally closer to the truth than anyone else. Consequently, those in positions of authority do not have the right to impose their beliefs on other people. The people themselves retain this inalienable right. Based on this foundation of science—of knowledge gained by systematic study and testing instead of by the assertions of ideology—the argument for a new, democratic form of government was self-evident.
This definitely puts an interesting spin on what Thomas Jefferson might have had in mind when he wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Read epistemically, Jefferson is arguing that all people have equal access to the tools of logic and empiricism, and because of this they are competent to rationally decide the course of their own affairs and those of their nations. There is no secret gnosis that belongs to just a few. The truth has no favorites. But to reach that truth, the rights of individuals to think and act freely must not be interfered with. Hence the Bill of Rights.
But, of course, there is a problem here. Jefferson’s world is not our world. In our world, science is specialized, experts really do have access to gnosis that the rest of us are poorly equipped to access, and the very science that unleashed human freedom in the 18th century now tells us, in the 21st, that freedom is actually a delusion. We are beings utterly determined by physics and chemistry.
So the irony here is that the above quote appeared in Scientific American, a magazine whose editors actually take for granted expertise, specialization, and material determinism. And the contemporary reality is different from this public spin: the average citizen, truth be told, is not especially trusted by intellectual or monied elites to make good decisions about much of anything at all.
In the West, we no longer have state sponsored religious priesthoods hoarding gnosis and making claims to special authority, but it doesn’t matter because modern civilization has become so complex that gnosis and authority (in the form of expertise) naturally draws away from the average person anyway. If priests abhor the vacuum of equality, and would replace it with religious hierarchy, Nature also abhors equality and would replace it with its own hierarchy (and does).
Charles Darwin was a scientist, obviously, but he came after Jefferson. And it was Darwin the scientist, not Jefferson the scientist, who gave us the real and lasting lowdown: Nature’s hierarchy is determined by competition for mates and resources. Scientists are the priests of that Nature. They read out, for the rest of us, the Book of Nature.
And the reading out of the Book of Nature by scientists is now being combined with the reading out of the Book of Human Nature. Psychology and social psychology are fast merging with neuroscience and evolutionary biology. As a result, mass manipulation is becoming increasingly refined and effective. So much so that, through things like advertising, monied elites can simply purchase the services of intellectual elites to make a mockery of Jeffersonian democratic deliberation and processes. The recent U.S. presidential “election” is exhibit A.
I love Jefferson, but the world has long since run past Jefferson. It is now one based in determinism, Nature’s hierarchy of mate and resource competition, elitism, specialization, expertise, and the scientific manipulation of the broad mass of human beings. This manipulation takes on the veneer of democracy and is called, by Noam Chomsky, “the manufacture of consent.” The revelation from the social sciences is that, by focusing on propaganda tools and the way systems and policies are structured, elites can pretty effectively direct the masses without formally shredding things like the Bill of Rights.
The long march of science–from Newton, Bacon, and Locke to Darwin, Dawkins, and Craig Venter–has thus brought us from innocence to experience; from a Jeffersonian world to a Darwinian, Machiavellian, and Nietzschean one. Shawn Lawrence Otto is right to note that Jefferson was both a lawyer and a scientist, but these are very different professions from what they were 200 years ago.
Jefferson, by the way, would have liked the below song, but the science that Jefferson so revered now tells us that this poor girl is quite simply deluded, and there’s the rub.