6 - The Scientist as Modern Benefactor

Summary

New Atlantis, Francis Bacon's 1626 incomplete and posthumous novel, depicts the ideal country of Bensalem administered by Salomon's House, the ‘eye of the kingdom’, a college of wise and philanthropic sages who will employ Bacon's new instruments and experiments to relieve man's estate.1 New Atlantis anticipates how Bacon's discoveries would lay the foundations for a new society administered by scientists that would presage a life of health, wealth and peace. Though Bacon's unfinished novel seemed fanciful and far-fetched, in due course the claim that scientists should take a much more active role in politics assumed increasing prominence and support. Science was disinterested and its hard-won objective knowledge implicitly endorsed a notion of the common good. Politics, on the other hand, was subjective, partial and incoherent, leading to wasteful, inefficient and dangerous public policy. It therefore made a great deal of sense to have scientists take a greater role in politics, though the nature of this involvement and its implications for both science and politics remained less clear. For some, science could play a valuable advisory role, providing important insights for making better policy. For others who were more ambitious, there was the hope that scientific insights and methods would not only supplement but in due course supplant politics and politicians, leading to a new world of scientific rule. Here then we had a new manifestation of the paradox of the philosopher king and the ambition to resolve it on modern terms, where the philosopher is the scientist and rule is justified not on the basis of individual character and judgement, but on incontrovertible and demonstrated scientific truths. Does the rule by the modern scientist conclusively solve the paradox of the philosopher king? We begin to explore this question by examining the difference between the philosopher and the modern scientist and the increasing authority of science and scientists and their political role as advisors and rulers. We then evaluate the powerful contemporary headwinds against scientist advisors and kings, and in our concluding comments question whether ethical, democratic and philosophical challenges to science and scientists reassert in new terms the paradox of the philosopher king.