Democratic plurality or enlightened despotism?

In a globally connected and technologically complex world the process of democratic decision making becomes increasingly difficult.  Never have so many known so little about so much.  In this light, how should a democratic society process and handle technical decisions when outside the core of decision making are people who are cut off, don’t understand, and wouldn’t understand even if they got in to find out? 

 

Since the beginning of the Enlightenment era science and scientific ideologies have been entangled with politics and used by the state to regulate society.  Chapter 4 of “of “Historical Perspectives on Science and the State…” provides a pertinent historiography on the interaction of the sciences with the political world and the state.  The author, Dominique Pestre, discusses ways the sciences can be “sites of power” by contributing to the management of the state and society and how they are an integral part of larger techno-political systems.  As such, scientific experts and specialists have long since been affecting decision making on scientific matters, therefore and to some degree replacing democracy with technocracy. 

 

Pestre points out that this reliance on experts requires a “conviction that expertise does exist”, “…the certainty that social and natural facts can be assessed authoritatively by science.”  He continues, …science has thus become an authority to legitimate public action, to ‘technicalize’ public action, to ‘de-politicize’ it, to render it impersonal, thus bypassing the democratic rules of accountability.  He suggests this leads to an “instrumentalization of politics through use of specialists”, which gives to political decisions the force of necessity, therefore a substitutions of, “…competence and technical knowledge for the affirmation of will and of values deliberately chosen.”  At the extreme, “…‘scientific politics’ converges with political practice reduced to certitudes of a well managed leviathan state”, thus a technocratic management of society. 

 

The notion of the few making decisions for the many is obviously problematic, but when decision making becomes so complex it requires esoteric knowledge the democratic process breaks down.  The question then is, does the use of experts merely constitute a form of enlightened despotism?  Or is there a better -- more democratic way -- to achieve a genuine plurality and to effectively combine a confluence interests and opinions which can competently address complex scientific decisions?  A difficult dilemma indeed!