Dennis Overbye has a superb commentary in the NYT Elevating Science, Elevating Democracy that reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, “the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals.”
Overbye writes:
[Science], which has transformed the world in the last few centuries, does indeed teach values. Those values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view. These are the unabashedly pragmatic working principles that guide the buzzing, testing, poking, probing, argumentative, gossiping, gadgety, joking, dreaming and tendentious cloud of activity — the writer and biologist Lewis Thomas once likened it to an anthill — that is slowly and thoroughly penetrating every nook and cranny of the world.
Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.
He goes further into this fact of scientific progress marching hand in hand with democratic empowerment. He also talks about science and democracy and how they relate to America’s strongest ideological opponent in the modern world, China, and how empowering scientists is antithetical to totalitarian power. It’s a very inspiring read.