Science, Religion & Politics
Religion and politics are often proscribed topics wherever accord is valued. A result is that we don’t grapple well with the deep challenges of either, remaining comfortable with superficiality. A solid conversation on either is fraught by deficiencies of skill and knowledge and warped by unhealthy attitudes. Science has become like politics and religion in some quarters, in that skill and knowledge are replaced or ravaged by attitudes. The Science is too often articulated alongside The Bible or The Constitution as though a final word has been spoken from somewhere on high above our humanity.
All three are blessed and cursed with dogma and authority. Democracy holds potential for leveling and enlightening all three, but at the same time democracy is corrupted. Communication opens potential for development of skills, knowledge and attitudes whenever language is unencumbered by repeated, ritualized mumbo jumbo (jargon, words, phrases) that is uncritically accepted by recipients or purveyors.
Magisterial was invoked by Stephen Jay Gould to conciliate the controversy of science and religion when he declared each to be “non-overlapping magisteria”. But Nicholas Spencer, in a recent book titled Magisteria, argues that the term withholds from both metaphysics, and physics potential for resolution and clarification. In my view, Gould’s admonition dangerously slams shut all portals for enlightenment, skepticism, freethinking and humanism. Adding politics to either religion or science threatens not only democracy but humanity writ large. These three topics are rich and wothy—pathways to Evolutionary Developmental Conversations. A new mindset is needed to open those portals.
Science, Politics, and Religion are ideally practiced at a personal level. However, this personal practice is never realistic but can or could obviate certain corruptions through bypassing the constraints and restrictions of language. It may well be that poetry, music and painting hold promise for enabling individuals to escape language, if at least or only momentarily. Adding lyrical performance and interpretation may guide emotion (affect) dangerously but is socially productive by enabling ritual to guide cognition and behavior. Performances may occur in a multitude of forms including writing, speaking and dance. All are embodied cognitive, affective and spiritual displays demanding high levels of coordination of and through sensorimotor pathways. Skill enables the artist to influence attitudes but knowledge is at best fuzzy. How would anyone justify “belief” in a crescendo or pizzicato?
Science and Religion demand scholarship with often intense peer review, but that is not quite so true for politics as it is practiced in democracies. Freedom of speech is invoked to run off the mouth, pen or keyboard with nearly any absurd assertion. Scholarship, we must hope, touches politics with statutory or constitutional law. The terminal degree for politics would be a law degree, but this degree is not required of a politician—although, it must also be acknowledged that in theology and science a terminal degree is also not an absolute requirement, as it is now for the practice of medicine (or law). Research scientists are, by and large, required to hold the PhD. Science & Religion both make some claim for truth, but that is not precisely true for politics in that most lawyers or attorneys are trained and first committed to advocacy on behalf of a client, commercial firm or a political ideology. Sometimes lawyers act as advocates for a particular theology inside or outside of a theocracy. Guilt or innocence in the form of some version of truth is not at issue when a client’s freedom and property are at risk. Or, for that matter when broad acceptance of an ideology is politically or theologically necessary. In politics, truth is relegated or confined to governance, which may be manifest in the form of duly legislated laws or the declarative pronouncements of a monarch—by (or through a) divine right. The divine right of kings was partially abrogated by the Magna Carta in 1215 ostensibly establishing that the king and government were not above the law. Yet the motivations to become king-like and above the law remains with us today. In corporate governance, divinity is the Board of Directors.
Lest we forget, politics, particularly in a democracy, is dominated by journalists and journalism. Journalism is itself an ideology requiring nothing more than performance, mostly in the form of writing. The idealism of journalists extends in the direction of truth in the form of accuracy, and objectivity. Journalists are expected to maintain a degree of detachment from groups or countries with which they are associated in order to minimize political biases in their reporting and writing.
Truth and accuracy should be a priority, which it, quite reliably is, in science. In politics and religion persuasion rises about anything resembling truth. Emotion scoops truth; frequently in politics and religion; but way too often nowadays, also with science. Even with science we have to remember that we are profoundly ignorant people just trying to find, sometimes, reliable truth.