The intelligences of science and democracy and what they offer each other
Science and democracy have cultivated complementary capacities, intelligences, that we now need to inform one another; and we need spaces where those intelligences gather and interconnect.
Regions where real novelty occurs, where really new things happen, things we have not seen before, are always regions on the edge of chaos.
Intelligence is a difficult thing to define. As such, as many definitions exist as people who have thought about it. However, certain notes in the thinking and definitions across time are sounded often enough, included frequently enough, to warrant near-accepted status. Intelligence is something like the ability to acquire rules or representations that facilitate successful (and efficient) problem solving (David Krakauer is owed a great deal for this particular synthesis). To this I would add that intelligence must have a vitality, like living things it must be always moving, shifting, changing. Intelligence is going to the limits and figuring there. This is the ‘intelligence’ of philosophy, not of IQ scores. In this more capacious discussion of intelligence many things often considered unintelligent by some group are welcomed into the realm of intelligence.
Indeed that is the very point of beginning with the notion of intelligence: to awaken an openness to what an intelligence can be.
This is not a piece to explicate the lived and living history of the debate about what intelligence is, but rather to suggest that intelligence is a property not only of the individual human, but of the non-human world, of groups and societies, and of domains of thought and disciplines.
We tend to give predominance to the intelligence that we possess, the collection of abilities, literacies, and capacities that solve problems in the contexts we move around in and think about, a predominance that blinds us to other intelligences around us. It is a bit the same point as David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.” In my own hurry, I fail to notice the intelligence of the mail-person making her route, fail to pause among the intelligence of the goldfinch landing atop the sunflower, fail to awe at the intelligence of the trees silently communicating and sharing nutrients in under and overstory invisible networks.
A moment of realization of the presence of another intelligence is a gift. Here I want to draw out a particular pair of intelligences whose mutual reverence and connection is being called forward by the state of our world.
In the sciences, we often miss the intelligences of disciplines outside one's own. An aerospace engineer seldom learns from a volcanologist, a geoscientist rarely talks meaningfully with a cosmologist. Some of the most profound breakthroughs in science have come from bridging chasms across science, and indeed we are learning interdisciplinary collaboration is intrinsically as well as extrinsically rewarding.
There is an even greater chasm that I want to draw out as a provocation to us all to find ways to overcome the divide: between the intelligences of science and democracy.
Indeed the question, "What is the interrelation between science and democracy?" shapes a generative narrative of our time. Science and democracy as intelligences is an illustrative lens and I’d like to begin to draw out their distinctions as a way into understanding what they offer one another and how community(ies) might be nurtured in the liminal space between and among them.
The intelligence of science
Science is my area, my familiarity. Science is the process of generating new knowledge. As such, it has long considered the process of knowledge-making. The core question that the philosophy of science asks concerns the collective process of knowledge discovery and construction. Science has a long history of examining itself, wondering, “How is it we create knowledge?” That engagement, and rich understanding from the history and anthropology of science bolstered by the very tools of analysis that science knows so well, means that perhaps no section of society is better equipped to answer questions related to this question of collective knowledge creation and no section more engaged in evolving its conception of that question.
Science is about knowledge-making, so its history is a trajectory in understanding how we do that. Science itself is a laboratory for understanding sensemaking. This is its intelligence and what it offers democracy from a philosophical and procedural perspective (it, of course, offers manifold influence in the artifacts of applying its sensemaking processes). Democracy needs that. Democracy needs science's intelligence of epistemology (theory of knowledge and how it grows).
The intelligence of democracy
A telescope is an instrument for bringing close something far away. Looking through the lens of the telescope the other direction, from democracy toward science, democracy offers science its own arena of knowing, its own intelligence. Democracy is quite simple: it is the empowerment of a population through the protection of individual rights (both personal and participatory; the rights of the ancients and the rights of the moderns in the lexicon of political philosophy) for the sake of flourishing, meaning health, well-being, and creative vital expression. When we understand flourishing in this way, and democracy as a mechanism for flourishing, much becomes clear.
Note that flourishing is decidedly and importantly not about unlimited, unbounded 'progress.' These are not features of flourishing made clear to us in nature--unbounded growth does not exist there. Nature understands and demonstrates that progress somewhere has effects everywhere. Your ‘progress’ (the things you change about a system) changes the system. This is something Buddhists have discussed as interdependence and scholars like Francisco Varela have expanded upon in the concept of enaction [Varela et al., 1992]. We as humans have attempted to banish these 'side effects' of our progress under the Enlightenment era banner that the world is endlessly understandable, controllable, and exploitable to our needs. To me, it is a cold lifeless world that this philosophy imagines.
The definition of democracy invokes learning health from nature. It asks for a prerequisite understanding of enaction--defined in much too simple a way that your actions in the world change the world. It is the great lesson from the quantum revolution in physics.
This component of flourishing that is creative vital expression is beautiful and revelatory. Expression happens both at the individual and group levels, but we are often less aware of the group component. There participation is about involvement in the shape and function of your society. The other aspect of this component of flourishing is the word 'vital,' revealing that a base element of flourishing is making things alive. Vitality is an amino acid of flourishing.
Democracy's structures and intelligences are of serving this ideal of empowerment and flourishing; of how to realize them (see Justice by Means of Democracy by Danielle Allen). This is what it offers science: how to organize such that the ideas and the populace of science flourish as defined by vitality.
What do they offer each other?
So, I return to this question of science and democracy. What do each offer one another? What community exists in the liminal space between and among them and how do we nurture it? It does not always take all of society to create waves, nor, perhaps, even a 'critical mass,' but rather as one of our greatest living architects of social transformation, John Paul Lederach, says: a 'critical yeast.' Here and in the Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy salons we are taking up the calling Lederach lays out when he asks, "How do you find that meaningful “we” that is expansive?" These communities are meeting places for the intelligences of science and democracy, a new “we” among them. Participation in the making of science and of science governance (civics) but also in bringing science's intelligence to the improvement, renovation, and innovation of democracy.
Collective Intelligence as a guide
Going back to John Polkinghorne's quote above, all new things happen in chaos, or what seems like chaos. Maybe places where chaos is a part of the vernacular have things to teach us about this new expansive “we.” Simultaneous to the June Knowledge Commons and the Future of Democracy salon was a first-of-its-kind conference hosted by the Santa Fe Institute (famed complex systems institute) on collective intelligence--roughly, the production of adaptive, wise, or clever structures and behaviors by groups [Flack et al., 2022].
As I listened to and interacted with this uncategorizable cross-section of physicists, sociologists, engineers, entomologists, artificial intelligence researchers, artists, futurists, it was irresistible to pose this calling to associate the intelligences of science and democracy as a collective intelligence problem. Perhaps the nascent field of collective intelligence offers guidance to how we create connections and harmony between them?
Let's take seriously the collective intelligence that could exist among science and democracy, there is much to be learned there, and new friendships besides.