Episode 12: Scientific Rebellion — A New Enlightenment

What does it actually mean to rebel scientifically? I’ve been circling that question for eleven episodes. This one answers it directly — at three levels: the individual, the community, and democratic governance.

For one person, Scientific Rebellion is the discipline of holding your beliefs only as tightly as the evidence supports them, and not one bit tighter. That sounds obvious. It is profoundly out of step with a culture that rewards confidence and treats “I don’t know yet” as weakness. I describe the engineer’s version of the commitment, and Karl Popper’s falsifiability test — ask what evidence would change your mind, and if the answer is nothing, you’re no longer dealing with a knowledge claim. At the community level it’s coalition work and the defense of libraries, local newspapers, and independent teachers. At the level of governance it’s accountability: the demand that those who make policy show their work.

Then I give the concrete program — what to do in education, in government, in public discourse, in coalition, and, above all, in voting. I place it inside a larger frame: the Enlightenment is not a period that ended in the eighteenth century. It’s an ongoing, always-contested project. Kant’s answer still holds — sapere aude, dare to know, have the courage to use your own reason. What we’re facing now is not a new attack on that project. It’s the latest in a three-century series. What’s new is the scale.

History does not guarantee progress. But manufactured certainty eventually fails, because it is built on a lie, and lies require increasing energy to maintain. I close with the people I’ve watched do this work without fanfare — the doctors, teachers, parents, researchers, and congregations who chose honest uncertainty over false certainty. They are the bravest people I know.

Transcript

Episode 12: Scientific Rebellion — A New Enlightenment

What does it actually mean to rebel scientifically?

This is the question I have been circling for eleven episodes, and now I want to answer it directly. The answer is different depending on whether you are asking about individual practice, community organizing, or democratic governance. So I want to take it at all three levels.

Start with what Scientific Rebellion looks like for one person. It is the discipline of holding your beliefs only as tightly as the evidence supports them — and not one bit tighter. That sounds obvious when I say it out loud. It is profoundly out of step with the way our culture actually behaves. Confidence is rewarded — socially, professionally, electorally. Saying “I don’t know yet” is treated as weakness, even when it is the most honest thing in the room. The rebellion, at the individual level, is the willingness to stay honest anyway.

The engineer’s version of this commitment is the one I find most useful, and I want to describe it carefully. An engineer who is uncertain about a structural calculation does not resolve the uncertainty by confidence. They do more analysis. They consult the literature. They run the numbers again. They call a colleague and ask for a second opinion. They build in a safety factor to account for the residual uncertainty. And when the result comes back wrong — when the bridge behaves differently from the model — they do not defend the model. They update it.

That practice is not just an attitude. It is a set of habits of mind that runs counter to the default patterns of human cognition. The tendency to seek information that confirms what we already believe. The tendency to weight a vivid anecdote more heavily than systematic evidence. The tendency to evaluate the quality of an argument by the social status of the person making it. These tendencies are not character flaws. They are features of the cognitive system that has served our species well in other environments. But they are not adequate for the epistemic demands of democratic self-governance in a complex, diverse society. The rebellion, at the individual level, is the discipline to work against them.

Karl Popper’s falsifiability test — the one I introduced back in Episode Four — is worth pressing into wider service. It is a test worth running on any claim anyone offers you. Ask — what evidence would change your mind on this? If the answer is nothing, you are no longer dealing with a knowledge claim. You are dealing with a faith claim dressed in the language of knowledge. Faith claims are legitimate in their own domain. As the basis for governance of a pluralistic society, they are not.

At the community level, Scientific Rebellion looks like the coalition work I described in the last episode. It looks like building alliances around shared commitment to evidence rather than shared ideology. It looks like creating spaces — congregations, PTAs, civic organizations, neighborhood networks — in which honest engagement with inconvenient facts is possible. It looks like defending the institutional infrastructure that makes evidence-based reasoning possible at the scale of a community. The public library. The local newspaper. The independent teacher. The union. The local judiciary.

At the democratic governance level, Scientific Rebellion looks like accountability. It looks like the demand — made in school board meetings, in legislative hearings, in electoral campaigns — that those who make policy on behalf of a community be required to show their work. To demonstrate that the policies they are proposing are supported by evidence. To engage honestly with evidence that challenges their proposals. To accept the verdict of the evidence even when it is politically inconvenient.

This is not a radical demand. It is the demand the Founders made of themselves — and, as I argued back in Episode Four, largely met. They grounded the design of the government in the historical evidence of what had failed before — not in the preferences of a faction, not in the authority of a creed. Madison did the homework. He studied the republics that fell down and built the new design against those failure modes. They rejected government by divine mandate not because they overlooked it but because they had already tested it and had the results in hand.

That is an engineer’s method. It is the demand that every engineer makes of every structure they design. It is the demand that every physician makes of every treatment they recommend. It is the demand that every honest person should make of themselves, and of every institution that claims authority over their lives.

Let me give you the concrete program, because I don’t want this to stay at the altitude of abstraction.

In education, teach critical thinking explicitly, at every grade level. Not just the scientific method as a procedure, but the habits of mind it requires. Distinguishing evidence from assertion. Recognizing logical fallacies. Asking what would count as evidence against a claim. Being willing to change your mind when the evidence demands it. Teach the history of science, including the history of how scientific consensus has been manufactured and resisted, so students recognize the playbook when they see it deployed again. Teach religion honestly and comparatively, including the role of religious institutions in both atrocities and liberation, so students understand what the separation of church and state is actually protecting.

Teach gender identity and sexual orientation honestly and age-appropriately at every level of public education. This is not indoctrination. It is the opposite of indoctrination. It presents students with the actual diversity of human experience and trusts them to engage with it. Schools in Michigan have been doing this in various forms for more than a decade. The children are fine. Better than fine. The research consistently shows that LGBTQ-inclusive curricula benefit not only LGBTQ students but the entire school community, reducing bullying and improving overall school climate.

In government, insist consistently and loudly that public policy be justified by public evidence. This requires more than voting. It requires active engagement in the venues where manufactured certainty does most of its work. School board meetings. State legislative hearings. Local zoning decisions about where churches can operate schools with public funding. The organizations doing the most damage to democratic pluralism are highly organized at the local level. The response has to be equally organized.

Support the full separation of church and state in its practical applications. The tax-exempt status of religious organizations should not extend to political activity. Public funds should not flow to religious schools that discriminate. Government facilities and officials should not be used to advance specific theological positions. And legislation that has no justification other than religious doctrine should not survive constitutional scrutiny.

In public discourse, name manufactured certainty when you see it. Call out the specific mechanism — this is not a genuine scientific dispute, this is a political strategy that uses the language of doubt to protect an interest. Call out the false binary — the choice is not between Christian values and chaos, the choice is between evidence-based governance and theocracy. And keep naming the connection between different forms of false certainty. The anti-trans campaign. The book-ban campaign. The climate-denial campaign. They are not separate political issues. They are three applications of the same epistemological weapon.

In coalition, build the broadest possible alliance of people who share the commitment to evidence-based governance, regardless of theological convictions. This means explicitly including progressive religious communities, not treating them as embarrassing exceptions to a secular rule. It means centering the voices of communities most directly harmed — Black Americans, LGBTQ Americans, women, Indigenous people, immigrants — not as constituencies to be served but as leaders whose experience of manufactured certainty has been the sharpest and most instructive.

It means, above all, voting. I am not being cute about this. The Supreme Court that eliminated the federal right to abortion, that has repeatedly ruled in favor of Christian nationalist arguments, that has opened the door to unlimited dark money in politics, was placed there by elected officials who were elected by people who voted.

The manufactured certainty of the current movement has an Achilles heel. It does not represent the views of most Americans. On abortion. On gender-affirming care. On book bans. On climate science. On the separation of church and state. Polling is consistent that the movement’s positions are the minority positions. The minority position has power because it mobilizes effectively. The majority can mobilize too. It just has to decide to.

I want to place this program in its historical frame, because I think it helps. The Enlightenment is not a period of history that ended in the eighteenth century. It is an ongoing project. And it has always been contested.

The Enlightenment project — in its broadest sense, the project of grounding human knowledge in reason and evidence rather than in authority and revelation — has been contested from its inception by people who understood, correctly, that it threatened the structures of authority that organized their world. The Church’s condemnation of Galileo was a contestation of the Enlightenment project. The political philosophies that sought to derive the legitimacy of monarchy from divine right were a contestation of it. The pseudoscientific theories of racial hierarchy that developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were, in part, an attempt to use the language of science to defend a social order that the Enlightenment’s own principles of universal human dignity would have required dismantling.

When Immanuel Kant wrote his famous answer to the question “what is Enlightenment?” in 1784, he described it as a human being’s emergence from self-imposed immaturity — the refusal to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. Sapere aude, he declared. Dare to know. Have the courage to use your own reason. That was a revolutionary claim in a world organized around the authority of kings and churches. It was a challenge to every power structure whose legitimacy rested on the claim to exclusive access to truth.

What Kant also called the public use of reason — the free exercise of reason in the public sphere, subject to no authority other than the evidence — is both the means and the end of Scientific Rebellion. It is the practice through which manufactured certainty is exposed. And it is the goal toward which the movement aims. A public sphere in which claims to authority are required to meet the same standard as claims to knowledge.

The Enlightenment project has never been completed. It has faced continuous opposition from those whose power depends on the deference of others to claimed authority. What we are experiencing now is not a new attack on the Enlightenment. It is the latest in a three-century series of attacks.

What is new is the scale. The organization. The digital reach. And the specific weak points this attack has learned to exploit in our politics.

A Senate that systematically underrepresents urban America. An Electoral College that can elect a president who lost the vote. A gerrymandering machine that lets legislators ignore the majority of the people they supposedly represent. None of these vulnerabilities are accidents. The current attack is using them on purpose.

A New Enlightenment, then, is not something entirely new. It is the reassertion and the deepening of the ongoing Enlightenment project under the specific conditions of our moment. It involves new technology — the same technology that has been weaponized to spread manufactured certainty can be used to spread honest inquiry, if people are equipped with the tools to tell the difference. It involves new communities — grounded in honest uncertainty rather than weaponized certainty. And it involves new political commitments — the willingness to protect and strengthen the institutions that make honest inquiry possible. A free press. Public education. Independent scientific institutions. An impartial judiciary.

None of this is guaranteed. History does not guarantee progress. The Enlightenment project has been reversed before — in the rise of fascism in the twentieth century, in the many periods of reaction that followed genuine advances in human freedom. What history does guarantee is that manufactured certainty eventually fails, because it is built on a lie, and lies require increasing amounts of energy to maintain. The energy required to maintain the lie that some human beings are less than fully human eventually exceeds the willingness of a sufficient number of people to pay it.

We may be approaching that moment. I believe we are. Not because I am optimistic by temperament — I am not, and I have spent ten years watching things get worse in many specific ways — but because I have watched the evidence accumulate. The evidence of what gender-affirming care actually produces. The evidence of what book bans actually do to children. The evidence of what happens to communities when the knowledge their children need is suppressed. The evidence of what happens to women when their reproductive autonomy is controlled by people who believe they speak for God.

This evidence does not assemble itself into a political movement. People have to do that. But the evidence is there, and more people are seeing it every year. Every parent who watches their child thrive with gender-affirming care, and then hears a politician say that care is abuse, is a person whose experience has given them knowledge that no engineered certainty can erase. Every student who is denied a book about their own history and finds it elsewhere — in a library, online, in a conversation with a teacher who knows the cost of silence — is a person whose knowledge has been deepened, not suppressed, by the attempt to suppress it.

The arc bends. It bends because people bend it. Because engineers who were comfortable became advocates. Because teachers kept teaching. Because doctors kept practicing medicine. Because parents chose their children over their comfort. Because every person who chose honest uncertainty over false certainty made the truth a little harder to bury.

Let me describe what that looks like in practice, because I have seen it, in pieces, in the people I have been fortunate enough to encounter in the years of this fight.

It looks like Dr. Norman Spack, the pediatric endocrinologist at Boston Children’s Hospital who spent decades developing and refining the protocols for gender-affirming care, and who continued practicing medicine in the face of death threats and bomb threats from people who had been told that his work was abuse. And the nurses and social workers who stood with him — who showed up to work in a building that had received bomb threats because they understood that the children in their care needed them more than they needed to be safe from the weaponized certainty of people who had never met those children.

It looks like the teachers in Michigan who kept their doors open to LGBTQ students after the legislative assault began — who understood that their classrooms were safe spaces for children whose homes might not be, and who maintained that understanding in defiance of legal threats and administrative pressure.

It looks like the parent in a conservative rural community who attended a school board meeting for the first time in their life after learning that the local library was removing books about families like their neighbor’s — who stood up, in a room full of people who disagreed with them, and said that their community’s children deserved to know the actual diversity of human experience.

It looks like the congregation that voted to become a welcoming church for LGBTQ people — that endured the loss of members who could not accept the decision, and continued anyway, because they understood their faith to require the extension of welcome, not its withholding.

And it looks like the researcher who published findings on the efficacy of gender-affirming care knowing those findings would be used by legislators to argue for banning the care — and who published them anyway, because the evidence is the evidence, and suppressing it would harm the patients she had spent her career serving.

These are not famous people. Most of them are not public figures. Most of them are doing the work without anyone writing books about them or giving speeches at rallies in their honor. They are doing it because it is the right thing to do — because the evidence of what is needed is in front of them, and they have chosen to respond to it honestly.

This is the New Enlightenment. Not the proclamation of a new age of reason. Not the defeat of manufactured certainty in a single decisive argument or election. But the steady, person-by-person, community-by-community insistence that the evidence matters — that the lives of people who do not fit the manufactured categories matter — that a democracy committed to the dignity of every citizen is worth fighting for, one school board meeting at a time.

I believe in this. I have seen enough of it to believe it is real. And I believe that the people who are doing this work — without fanfare, without certainty of success — are the bravest people I know.