Democracy is tedious.

Lately, I’ve found myself at the peak of a periodic cycle of frustration with blogging and online discussion. I think it’s partly because I get told periodically by friends and readers that I expect too much of it, that I just need to filter out all the noise and hubbub, all the people engaged in culture war, all the dialogic illiteracy. What’s the point if you have to filter all that? Because I really do think that there is both practical and abstract peril in that kind of “skills gap”, in some ways far more so than with simple weakness in mathematics or competency in writing. In a way, what I think Americans might need most from their educational system is to better learn the arts and science of public reason, about how to form arguments and opinions and respect evidence. That’s not just about the health of the body politic or about how we sustain community. It’s also an economically valuable skill set, both for its social and its intellectual strengths. If I could assign homework to the people who care about homework, it would be to rethink how they approach the art and science of debating with others. Strong opinions require strong evidence, not just passionate intensity. Scientific literacy requires scientific thought, not just rote knowledge, which means an ability to engage in exploratory learning and a healthy dose of general skepticism. Good analytic writing requires the ability to see an issue from several sides at once, to think through the consequences and roots of an argument.

This was the concluding graf of a post dealing with homework assignments for k-12 children and the way that parents debate the issue.

. . . what has ultimately interested me more about reading various discussions of homework is how intense the feelings are swirling around the topic, and how much that intensity strikes me as a problem in and of itself. Not just as a symptom of a kind of civic illness, an inability to collectively and democratically work through complex issues, but also in some cases as evidence of an educational failure in its own right. . .

What strikes me about some of the most passionate responses is how much they are statements about the moral, political and emotional worlds different individuals inhabit rather than considered empirical statements about education, economic growth, or the general welfare of the nation.

Or, Civic Epistemology, as Sheila Jasanoff terms it.

. . . the shift is toward a fracturing of the authority of nation-states, with consequent pressures to rethink the forms of democratic governance. State sovereignty is eroding under the onslaught of environmental change, financial and labor mobility, increased communication, the global transfer of technical skills and scientific knowledge, and the rise of transnational organizations, multinational corporations, and social movements.6 Supranational concerns, such as the demand for free trade or globally sustainable development, are gaining political salience,7 but they are at the same time encountering resistance from tendencies toward greater local autonomy based on particularities of culture and place.8 As a result, the "old" politics of modernity--with its core values of rationality, objectivity, universalism, centralization, and efficiency--is confronting, and possibly yielding to, a "new" politics of pluralism, localism, irreducible ambiguity, and aestheticism in matters of lifestyle and taste.

My emphasis. Sheila Jasanoff is specifically concerned with science education and policy, but the concept generalizes and has been applied to k-12 science education.

. . . thinking that you can change what citizens believe by changing what teachers teach is too big a conceptual leap. While there is certainly a relationship between teaching, learning, and belief, it is by no means simple or linear. By separating those processes out we can better understand them. The study of what citizens believe is a huge social question. Scholars have compiled huge amounts of polling data on what citizens believe, though interpreting that data comes with problems, such as assuming that belief is measured by response to questions instead of processes that get citizens to reflect and deliberate on questions. But in any case we know more about what people believe that why they believe it. While formal high school education may have some influence, so will family background, religious affiliation, occupation, race, income, and a host of unquantifiable cultural beliefs and ways of sorting true from false claims, what Sheila Jasanoff has called civic epistemology (Jasanoff 2005).

The earlier post Hysteria Tradition argued that there was more to science policy than science, that ethics was an important and necessary part. Moreover, even if you disagree and think that the scientific view in some way trumps other concerns, you are faced with the fact that society disagrees.

It may be that the secular squick of European ersatz green sensibilities is no more defensible from a scientific perspective than the spiritual squick of various religious thinkers, but together they comprise a very, very large number of people who rightly insist that we remember that science policy is about ethics as well as technology. To demonize policy makers for including ethical considerations as well as scientific perspective is a blunder. The ethics can be debated, and should be, and policies that reflect that debate as well as science can be accepted with good grace if not applauded even when they are contrary to our personal views.

To Timothy's idea that "Scientific literacy requires scientific thought" I'd add that it also requires some grasp of civic epistemology. This won't make the endless debates less tedious, but it can reduce some of the frustration. When you understand how people are working through conflicts resulting from science, and that the "old" politics of modernity--with its core values of rationality, objectivity, universalism, centralization, and efficiency--is confronting, and possibly yielding to, a "new" politics of pluralism, localism, irreducible ambiguity, and aestheticism in matters of lifestyle and taste, the seemingly senseless conflicts can be seen in a different light. Useful and effective arguments in this context will be different than those that assume the old authority, the old politics.

Still, it can be a bloody bore. It's perfectly understandable if some blogger loses interest and retires from the fray for a time, maybe a long time.