Science and Democracy
Science doesn’t seem democratic to a lot of people, but that’s only because those people are confusing democracy with humanocentricism. In order to learn about science, you—and anyone else—have to be willing to remain open minded to the possibility that everything you believe you know about the world that wasn’t discovered objectively, could be wrong.
If you insist that something must be true just because you feel it to be true, that isn’t science. It isn’t democracy either. You can recognize that people don’t always agree with each other, and that much of what you’re doing is democratic. But by refusing to believe that what someone else is saying could be true because you feel that it isn’t true, without objective information to back up your side of the disagreement, isn’t democracy, because in practice you are preventing debate by the simple act of your refusing to engage in the debate. If you aren’t willing to change your mind about something, you and a person talking about differing points of view isn’t a debate, it’s just two people preaching at each other. Anarchists do this to me all the time.
The problem is that if you believe in something that is incorrect, the actions you take based on your beliefs won’t produce the results you thought they would, because you will be using incorrect information in your decision making. By refusing to remain open minded to the possibility that there might still be important things you need to learn about how the world works, you are choosing to make avoidable mistakes. If you choose to make avoidable mistakes, other people and other species are pretty well guaranteed to be affected by your avoidable mistakes. Then you’re calling your right to maintain your humanocentric point of view, refuse to change your mind, and make avoidable mistakes that affect other people and other species, democracy. I shouldn’t need to point out that democracy for you and nobody else isn’t democracy.
Traditional science isn’t very compatible with traditional Anarchism for a couple of big reasons, which makes science seem to be incompatible with democracy. First, traditional Anarchists have been making a lot of humanocentric mistakes, which I talk about a lot in this book and even more in Planteary Biology, Neo-Anarchism, and the Political Future of the World.
Second, traditional scientists have been making a lot of mistakes too. Planteary biology is the most controversial field of science ever conceived because it depends on a lot of non-traditional approaches to science in order to study a lot of big, important things that traditional approaches to science just aren’t adequate for studying. I take the most controversial approach ever to the most controversial field of science ever.
I refer to what I do as folk-science. Objectivity depends on observability, universality, self-consistency, reproducibility, and debatability. My approach to discovering objective information was to learn how science works first, and how to recognize objective discoveries, and then learning other systems of thought and recognizing discoveries other people had made that produced observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable results. This is not to say that those people discovered what they believed they had discovered, but it is to say that the people did discover something objectively.
For one example, here in America, Pagans have faced the challenge of figuring out how to practice a non-organized religion—some would say a disorganized religion—and still be able to work together for their mutual goals. So Pagans have discovered an observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable pattern of cause and effect that explain how metaphysics work. In any religion, when a person wants to make something metaphysical happen, the person has an idea for what they want, then one way or another they focus a lot of spiritual energy on it, and then the thing either happens or doesn’t happen. It might happen the way you expected it to, or it might happen in a way you didn’t expect. If it doesn’t happen, for some reason or another it wasn’t supposed to happen.
What Pagans discovered isn’t science, or even folk science, because they presupposed that it was possible for people to make metaphysical things happen. Their discovery is observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, and debatable if metaphysical forces exist. That isn’t science because the existence of metaphysical forces hasn’t been proved scientifically, and the people who discovered this hadn’t considered the possibility that metaphysical forces don’t exist. (I should point out that there’s a difference between believing that metaphysical or supernatural forces must exist indepantly of physics, and believing that there are forces in the universe that we perceive to be supernatural because they follow laws of physics that we have not yet discovered.) But what Pagans did discover was an observable, universal, self-consistent, reproducible, debatable pattern of why and how people feel that they should be able to make metaphysical things happen. Regardless of whether or not metaphysical forces exist, a discovery of how people believe metaphysics work that’s universal and self-consistent to every religion, is an important discovery.