07-02-2025
The double helix of science and democracy
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Put those dynamics together and one of America's greatest legacies — our ability to produce knowledge that leads to material progress — feels shakier than ever.
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So Globe Ideas and the president of the Museum of Science, Tim Ritchie, asked Danielle Allen, director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation at the Harvard Kennedy School, and David Kaiser, an MIT professor of physics and the history of science,
Edited excerpts of the discussion follow here.
Tim Ritchie
: I think we all believe that if humanity is going to rise up to the big challenges we face, we have to have thriving science. But if we're going to have science bend itself toward goodness, we have to have good societies built by democracy, by people who know what is best for themselves and their communities.
David Kaiser
: I don't find it very helpful to consider science and democracy as separated spheres — 'Keep your politics out of my science' or vice versa. I don't know what that means. If science must necessarily be done by groups of people, then of course we're social and political beings and that should be a source of strength, not a source to run from. One of the roles for politics, among many, is resource allocation. How do members of a society come to agree on how to distribute resources among worthy causes? Science, which needs a lot of resources,
has
to be political. We have to make the case in a persuasive way about why this kind of activity is worthy of support and hopefully not subject to the turmoil of election cycles. Making a persuasive case — not as if support is our birthright or should happen just because we said so — is one of our most important responsibilities among many. This requires sustained political engagement.
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MIT's David Kaiser at the Science and Democracy event on Jan. 9, cosponsored by the Museum of Science and Globe Ideas.
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Danielle Allen
: Oftentimes we think that politics is all about material goods, resource allocation and the like. I want to say it's actually about something more fundamental. It's about human dignity, and human dignity resides in the capacity of people to be the authors of their lives.
My school of democracy was my family's dinner table. I had extended family who were super civically engaged, across the political spectrum. There was this one incredible year in my youth, 1992, when both my aunt and my dad were running for office in California. She was running for Congress from the far left. My dad was running for US Senate as a Reagan Republican. So we had amazing dinner table conversations. My dad would argue for market liberties and for civic virtues, and my aunt would argue for public sector investment in every segment of society and experiments in living. And as I watched them, I finally realized that there were two things that they were sharing. One was just this clarity of purpose: They were both seeking empowerment for themselves, for their families, for their communities. Then they were having this massive argument about how to unlock human potential, how to convert empowerment into well-being. But while they had that argument, they never ever broke the bonds of love, however vehement they were in their positions.
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I think this relates to science in that you can have debates that are really intensely felt, but you have to bring with that a willingness to use these shared decision-making mechanisms — the votes, the elections, the institutions — to yield a result that you're going to live by even if you don't perfectly love it, but you're going to come back to the conversation again the next time. In science, too, people will win debates at certain points in time, but that doesn't actually end the conversation. We think of science as this accumulation of discoveries, but actually even Einstein is having his theory of relativity be modified by contemporary work of all kinds.
I think democracy has a special relationship to science because both are forms of human social organization that respect human potential. That's the point of the synergy. And because of that core shared commitment, there is a way in which democracy and science can flourish better together.
Harvard's Danielle Allen at the Science and Democracy event on Jan. 9, cosponsored by the Museum of Science and Globe Ideas.
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Ritchie
: Where are we telling the stories of awesome and wonderful things in science? Whether it's on YouTube or TikTok — or Twitch or Rumble for that matter — people are getting their science and their view of politics online. Should Danielle Allen and David Kaiser be mixing it up with Joe Rogan? Should your smart colleagues be going to where people are on social media and be more robust and more brave out there?
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Allen
: Yes, for sure. We should be taking stories to where people are and sharing the wonder. I think there is so much good to share in the work of universities and the work of science. And I think the hard question is really how to support people in doing that. It's not necessarily the muscle that one develops after years in the lab or years in the archive and the like. There was the 19th-century habit of
Ritchie
: Let's go on the road and make science great again?
Allen
: Yes, yes. I will say yes to that.
Ritchie
: An audience member online is asking about the COVID vaccine, a fascinating example of democracy and science. A lot of funding there, lots of information, and lots of mistakes. What have you learned from the race to find a COVID vaccine and this relationship between democracy and funding and science?
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Kaiser
: I'll give one: How do we live under uncertainty? Not just live under it as individual thinking people, but how do we communicate it? How do we try to formulate public policies that will affect lots and lots of people without knowing everything we'd want to know up front? That's the world we live in, that's our condition. And how do we communicate a kind of intellectual modesty in the face of grand challenges? 'We don't know everything. We have compelling reasons why we're going to try this now.' That's different from 'Back off. The scientists are in town.'
Allen
: Politics is fundamentally about value judgments and about choosing a direction collectively. Science can't answer those questions. And so in that regard, I do think it matters that science and scientists enter into those decision-making moments precisely with that spirit of humility. 'No, we don't necessarily have the answer. What we do have is a lot of information about the choices, the trade-offs, the stakes of the different choices, and so forth.' I don't think we got that balance right in the time of COVID.
Audience member
: My question is about corporations. They provide lots of the funds, trained personnel, and time to do science. Are there ways that you think we should change how corporations are regulated or operated to be better for science and democracy?
Allen
: I think the COVID moment gave us a beautiful example of how in principle the public sector, the commercial private sector, and civil society can work together.
We couldn't have had those vaccines if there hadn't been decades of public sector democracy investment in bench science, the discovery of mRNA. But bench science alone can't get you to unlock the full human good of a discovery. You need the capital that a Moderna or Pfizer has to scale up something like a vaccine. But those vaccines weren't getting into people's arms unless people trusted the vaccine. And here in Massachusetts that was a civil society effort — the Black Boston COVID collaborative, the Western Mass. COVID coalition. The point being you need public sector investment in science, you need corporations, and then you need civil society.
And the hard question is: How can you have a regulatory or governance structure that keeps corporations serving the public, not converting everything that's public into something that's just extracted for private good? We are without any question living through a moment of real challenge around the question of what a corporation is, how it operates and the like, and whether or not democracies are masters of corporations or vice versa. That is the political question of the next decade, and I think the stakes are very high.
Audience member
: In a world where anyone can self-publish and information is shared through a multitude of modalities, is there a role for either a democratic institution or a private institution or otherwise to really ensure that anything that's labeled as science or fact is actually true?
Kaiser
: There's a fundamental First Amendment right in our country to be able to say what one wants within, obviously, some limits. If someone has a contrarian view about quantum entanglement — and many do, my inbox confirms that every day — I don't think there's any reason to block them from being able to share those ideas. One thing we can try to do is just do more of it ourselves. Flood the market. Let's go all in.
If we know there are remarkably well-organized, often well-funded disinformation campaigns, I think saying, 'How dare you?' is an appropriate first reaction. The second reaction is, 'Well, that's a political campaign. We're living in a political world. What's our political campaign going to be?' I think it should be: Let's do more work getting things that we trust out there and explain why we trust it, as opposed to 'How dare you! Take it down. Censor that.' We don't need more martyr complexes out there.
Brian Bergstein is the editor of the Globe Ideas section. He can be reached at
