I’m feeling good from my hat to my shoe
Know where I am going and I know what to do
I’ve tidied up my point of view
I’ve got a new attitude.—Patti LaBelle
In the first installment of The Open Society and its Frenemies, I sought to frame the Trumpist assault on the ideal of the Open Society in a very particular way. My intent was to take Karl Popper’s original work on the Open Society published in 1945, and situate it firmly in the contemporary world, the world that we know since the collapse of communism. Over the course of this series of posts, the overarching purpose is to try to think about what it means to defend the ideal of the open society today, when the enemies of the open society come from within rather than from without, when the enemy turns out to be us, rather than some external rival on the world stage. Before looking into the question of these Frenemies, it is useful to take a moment to recount what Popper had to say about open and closed societies in more detail.
Popper’s writings are wide-ranging and sometimes annoyingly irreducible. In general, though, it is possible to isolate three major moments of his thought. There is the work in the philosophy of science and his broader restatement of the growth of knowledge in general, in relation to what he calls critical rationalism; there is his relentless critique of historicism in philosophy and politics; and there is his historical sociology, his study of past societies in order to explain things about the structure of contemporary society.
Before resuming the main thread of this post, the question of what it means for the open society to be threatened from within, by frenemies rather than external enemies, I will first take a quick tour here through Popper’s writing in reverse, starting with Conjectures and Refutations, where he talks about his concern to relate his findings in the philosophy of science with questions belonging to the domain of social science.
In the installment falling this one, I will turn to the Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol. 1, the final chapter on ancient Greece. The post will look at what’s going on where Popper says he is revisiting the birth of Western civilization because the shock of the transition from the tribal or closed society to the open society in the 5th century BCE is still with us, and how he says it plays a role in the rise of contemporary reactionary movements which “…have tried, and still try, to overthrow civilization and to return to tribalism.”
Popper’s Critical Rationalism, Science, and Democracy
At a surface level, it is not immediately obvious why a philosopher like Karl Popper, concerned primarily with the rationality of science, with such things as ‘the problem of induction’ and ‘the problem of demarcation’ would feel the need to insert himself into social science, by turns writing elaborate works of historical sociology, and asking odd questions like, “what is the function of tradition in social life?” Certainly, it is easy to see that as a man living in dark times, Popper felt an urgent need to do his part to confront totalitarianism, especially since he felt that the social scientific community had failed to make adequate sense of it. If one also understands what it was that Popper had to say about the methods of the empirical sciences, however, the reasons for his interest and attention really come into focus.
The scientific attitude, Popper writes, “is not the desire to understand the natural world; rather it is the critical attitude, of discussing, criticizing, testing.”
As Popper wrote in the introduction to “The Logic of Scientific Discovery,” in the 1930s, contrary to those who were generally focused on the problem of meaning, with analyzing the formulation of our common-sense knowledge in ordinary language and with the verification of the truth of scientific basic statements, Popper was interested in the problem of the growth of knowledge, with the method of the empirical sciences, understood as a logic of scientific discovery. Where the logical positivists and their immediate successors framed the problem of the knowledge of natural laws as the question of how inductive inferences about the world could be justified, Popper insisted that we needn’t worry about this because empirical science doesn’t actually go about verifying the truth of statements about the world–it proceeds deductively, through the testing of hypotheses, falsifying theories, corroborating findings, but never, it turns out, verifying them in the strict sense.
For Popper, the rationality and objectivity of science is found in its insistence on the inter-subjective (reproducible) testability of empirical hypotheses, its method understood as a logic of discovery through testing and falsification. As he writes years later in Conjectures and Refutations, “growth in the theories of science should not be considered as the result of the collection or accumulation of observations; on the contrary, the observations and their accumulation should be considered as the result of the growth of scientific theories.” The scientific attitude, Popper writes, “is not the desire to understand the natural world; rather it is the critical attitude, of discussing, criticizing, testing.”
Popper calls this view of the inter-relationship between the method of the empirical sciences and the practice of liberal democracy ‘critical rationalism.’
It is not necessary to delve any further into the history of the philosophy of science to see why Popper became so concerned about the social and political conditions for the advancement of knowledge given his views on the logic of discovery through the adoption of a critical attitude, and through testing and falsification. Popper is well on the way to jettisoning the strict empiricist or logical positivist notion of ‘truth as correspondence’ in favor of a more fallibilistic, ‘consensus theory of truth,’ where scientists with their unique community of practice play a special role in identifying, at any given time, what can be taken to be true.
If knowledge advances in this fashion, through conjecture, testing and falsification, and criticism and/or refutation, then a certain mutuality between science and democracy becomes evident. For science to function, it requires a socio-political context that supports these practices, namely the open society. Likewise, democracy presumes the universality of reason among all humanity; and the exercise of this rationality in making decisions likewise requires, along with the benefits that come from free debate and diverse perspectives, the products of science. Popper calls this view of the inter-relationship between the method of the empirical sciences and the practice of liberal democracy ‘critical rationalism.’
The Open Society and the March for Science
While lots of people decry what is happening in America under Trump–the attempt to close borders, the threatening of minorities, the fear of foreigners, the assaults on the constitution and the rule of law, and attacks on the institutions of science–not many voices have been heard to invoke the ideal of the Open Society. Watching the Science March speeches, I was struck by the shared presumption of the various speakers that there was some sort of an integral relationship between science and democracy. Even more striking was the extent to which this claim almost never seemed to be directly addressed. On April 19th, 2017, just before the Marches for Science were held across the country on the 22nd, Novelist and Science Advocate Shawn Otto wrote a short piece in the Huffington Post entitled, “The March for Science is a March for Democracy.” The piece was intended to explain the apparently paradoxical purpose of the science marchers, specifically the grassroots political demand for a de-politicization of science.
“The upcoming March for Science is in many ways a March for Democracy,” Otto wrote, “because science is the foundation of democracy.” In this short piece, Otto gives two reasons, both of which echo Popper’s points on what I call the mutuality between the practice of science and the institutions of liberal democracy. For freedom to survive, he says, “it has to be based on the idea that there is such a thing as objective reality that we can all turn to in order to settle arguments of fact…without it we are left with arguments being won by the person with the biggest stick, the fattest wallet, the most violent mob, or the most religious followers.”
Further echoing Popper, Otto also asserts that Jefferson, while writing the Declaration of Independence, and having read Bacon, Newton, and Locke, clearly understood that, “if anyone could discover the truth of something for him or herself using the tools of reason and science, then all men are created equal, and no king, no pope, and no wealthy lord had any more right to govern than the people themselves.”
Watching the Science March speeches last month, I was struck by the shared presumption of the various speakers that there was an integral relationship between science and democracy.
In the end, Otto acknowledges that because science produces knowledge, and knowledge is power, science is in fact political–it is political because the knowledge it produces either confirms or challenges somebody’s vested interests. What he denies, and what he thinks should be protested, is the notion that scientists should come to be regarded as just another partisan special interest group. My intention in quoting Shawn Otto is not to enter into the tactical controversies surrounding the March for Science. My point here is simply to suggest that there is a value in defending the ideal of the open society as such, as something more than just the sum of the individual parts (rule of law, human rights, free speech, critical rationalism, etc.).
In the next installment of this Open Society series, Frenemies3, I turn to Popper’s sojourn with the golden age of Pericles, and his account of the conditions and attitudes that are conducive to the establishment of the Open Society as well as the reactions to it that emerge under conditions of strain. The purpose of this description will be to try to understand the sense in which Popper believes that revisiting the scene of Athenian democracy, beset by its critics, somehow “sketches some of the difficulties faced by our civilization—a civilization which might be described…as aiming at humaneness and reasonableness, at equality and freedom” and “…tries thereby to contribute to our understanding of totalitarianism and of the significance of the perennial fight against it.”
