Portrait statue of Plato along the balustrade of main reading room. Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C. Wikicommons/ Carol M. Highsmith archive. Some rights reserved.This online exchange put together by Rosemary Bechler and myself has mobilised a great number of engaged and passionate articles (see here). The trigger for that endeavour here and also in the related ‘live’ roundtable discussion in the Council of Europe’s World Forum for Democracy 2017 in Strasbourg, 8-10 November, has been the frustrating observation that currently facts do not matter as much as they should, either in public discourse addressing burning problems, or in the design of policies.
Behind that diagnosis, lies, however, a much older clash: the clash between different ways of accessing trustworthy knowledge, particularly when it comes to issues of great moment and consequence for our everyday lives as citizens, such as those concerning social policy, education and employment, security, or collective identity. To be sure, this clash is scarcely visible most of the time: many of us are continuing to maintain the same beliefs and opinions, while regularly ignoring how and why others have diverging beliefs and opinions. Yet, this results in us living in different, and not shared realities.
Theocracy, democracy, technocracy
If we look at the venerable forms of knowledge we rely upon to identify the true ‘facts’, then we can roughly distinguish at least three types of knowledge: religious knowledge, political knowledge, and scientific knowledge. The paths leading there are distinct – although they often intersect – and I would describe them as belief-driven, power- and interest-driven, and methodology-driven, respectively. The first one is also the oldest in the history of humankind, drawing its legitimacy from an externalised, metaphysical entity; the second, political knowledge, started to differentiate itself from the first via deliberations about collective decision-making within a given community around 2,500-3,000 years ago; last, ‘scientific’, methodology-based knowledge about patterns and mechanisms in physical and social phenomena also began to develop at that time. But it really took off, in terms of influence, some 300 years ago in the western world.
