Historians date the beginning of modern times to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the period of the late Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution. The outcome of these tectonic shifts in the Western mind is the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the liberal democracies that grew from it in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
This broad-brush picture is a familiar one, and it is, equally broadly, right; but interesting questions remain about the relationship between the strands of development involved. One argument is that the growth of science and the growth of liberal democracy were not merely contemporaneous, but causally connected; and that the causal link runs from science to democracy. A proponent of this view is Timothy Ferris (The Science of Liberty, 2010). He adds the further claim that science continues to underwrite the political freedoms enjoyed by developed societies today.
There is a lot to be said for this thesis. Science could neither have arisen nor flourished in circumstances of oppression of thought, and indeed the churches made strenuous efforts – including persecuting and even executing people – in the early phases of the scientific revolution in an effort to quell it; and those efforts had to be defeated to allow science to grow. As this shows, the science–freedom link is an intimate one. But an adjustment to this thesis is required: rather than taking the rise of science to be the literal cause of the growth of political liberty, both science and political liberty would be better regarded as the joint outcome of an antecedent cause. This antecedent cause is the freeing of the human mind from the trammels of doctrinal orthodoxy. I argue this in Towards the Light (2008): aspirations to liberty of religious conscience in the sixteenth century rapidly evolved into demands for liberty of thought and enquiry in all fields, including science; and once people had asserted the right to think for themselves without conforming to a dogma on pain of death, they were able to ask questions both about nature and about socio-political arrangements. On this view, science and democracy grew together from a fundamental impulse towards liberty, and are its joint fruits.
But it may not be wholly right to say that once an advanced degree of scientific understanding of nature is achieved, and applications of that understanding via technology begin to transform human experience, democratic structures are thereby enabled. Alas, there are social and political arrangements in the world that take the fullest benefit from scientific progress without accompanying commitment to democracy. Perhaps the cruellest paradox is seen in the use made of technologies – in the form of aeroplanes and computers and explosive devices – by people whose zeal is for a worldview that arose many centuries ago, and who seem to wish to return the world to that period’s condition by making as much use of today’s science and technology as possible.
Still, there is a hopeful sign for the world lodged in the fact that increased scientific understanding does have a tendency to make people think more, and more clearly, about their other assumptions and beliefs. Action to diffuse not just scientific knowledge but scientific styles of thought therefore recommends itself – not just as a way forward for humankind, but its best hope for a peaceful way forward. The dismaying consideration is that it might be the best hope because it is the only one.