Democracy as Science: truth is provisional

Absolutes are anathema to scientists, and liberals. James Madison, the great experimenter-founder of America, stitched the ephemerality, the mutability of all truth into the very fabric of our government, in what Joseph Ellis calls the "evolutionary revolution" of America's founding (American Creation, 3-19).

When I read about James Madison's political philosophy last month in Ellis' American Creation ("The Argument" p. 87-126), I realized that Madison envisioned politics as a scientist would. He founded American government on progressive renewal-- the belief that principles must be challenged continually in order to remain vital, that conflict would stabilize not weaken a democracy, that no politics of individual liberty remains free if it calcifies into conservative doctrine, but must be kept "true" by being debated, questioned, tested. As in the peer review process of science, where any theory is validated with experimental evidence and old theories are continually tested, clarified, sharpened, modernized, by new experiments, American politics should be forever a work in progress.

Obama, as an expert on constitutional law, understands this:
"Its not just absolute power that the founders sought to guard against. Implicit in the Constitution's structure, in the very idea of ordered liberty, was a rejection of absolute truth — the infallibility of any idea or ideology, or theology, or 'ism', any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course."
(From The Audacity of Hope, quoted here.)

Science's assumption about the nature of "truth" is that it doesn't exist. All facts are provisional on experimental evidence. This is why it is silly when Creationists argue that evolution is "just" a theory. That's right, it is a theory, as is all of human knowledge-- but it happens to be a theory that is supported by more empirical evidence, replicable experimental evidence, than, say, the "theory" of Intelligent Design (which isn't a theory because it poses no testable hypotheses to verify). Churchill might have said about natural selection what he did about government: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried". Yes, it's just a theory, inferior perhaps to absolute truth, but it is better than any other theory we've come up with yet-- including the theory of an absolute truth. Scientific "knowledge" is a liquid rather than a solid form of fact, adaptable rather than brittle. It is a body of temporary claims, that today's scientist realizes may be overturned, or better put, re-framed, by the discoveries of tomorrow. We work to make our picture of the world ever clearer, recognizing that the scientists of the future will see a different world than the one we see now, and will adapt our contribution to that newer, more modern reality.

Madison envisioned American politics like this, as a laboratory, "an institutionalized forum for everlasting debate" (125). He came to believe that the best resolution to the argument over central versus state sovereignty was to leave it unresolved, forever . In fact to institutionalize the conflict, to make the tension permanent. That way, competing factions would continually negotiate compromise between two opposing visions of America, allowing neither to dominate unchallenged. John Adams used the same logic in distributing powers among the Executive, Judicial, and Legislative branches of government, and in keeping the Judiciary independent of the federal government. A distributed network of competing interests insured against consolidation of power, and against political stultification. Ideas that are being constantly debated-- "peer reviewed" in the science language-- never have the chance to calcify into unquestioned facts or political cudgels.

"The genius of Madison's argument," as Ellis writes, "for a version of sovereignty that was at once shared and divided raised the wholly pragmatic and politically painful compromises reached at the Constitutional Convention to the level of a novel political discovery: to wit, the notion that government was not about providing answers, but rather about providing a framework in which the salient questions could continue to be debated" (p. 123).

The role of government: Not to provide answers, but to provide a framework in which the questions can continue to be debated. Discussed. Sounds an awful lot like the kind of world Obama sees.

Hopefully we'll all live in that world, starting tomorrow.