Taylor Dotson at The New Atlantis (contra some scientist dingbat with an iconic/ironic voice for storytelling):
Like Popper’s philosophy of science, this vision of democracy emphasizes the tentativeness of political truths and the inherent cognitive limitations of any given citizen, even an expert. If political outcomes ever approximate what seems “objectively” most desirable, it is through a healthy process of negotiation in which “subjective” individuals challenge each other, rather than through assent to the superior understanding of an expert class.
But The Open Society was a product of its time. Because Popper did not anticipate threats to open societies outside of grand historical narratives, he did not imagine that the source of fanatical certitude would one day be individuals, who would fashion it out of a veritable flood of discordant facts and suspicions. Americans have increasingly come to see themselves as capable of sifting through all the available evidence to discover unerring truths that their political opponents are too biased, ignorant, or corrupt to see. Although some citizens still coalesce around shared visions of the ultimate makeup of society (such as that of white nationalists), the more significant drivers of polarized, intransigent politics are the twin afflictions of scientism and conspiracism. […]
Conspiracism and scientism are jointly preoccupied with certainty. They enjoy a fantasy in which experts are uniquely able to escape the messiness of politics, discern the facts plain and simple, and from their godlike viewpoint turn back to politics and dispense with it. Both seduce members of open, uncertain societies with the promise of a more simply ordered world. […]
Let’s call this fact-ist politics. Under its influence, citizens no longer debate or deliberate but dedicate themselves to aligning the evidence to shore up cherished beliefs and interests. And they end up even more intransigent as a result, because they can tell themselves that their own ideas are unassailably rational and objective. […]
This diagnostic political style is both unfair and condescending. It eventually renders all disagreement into a cognitive disease — one to which the diagnostician just so happens to be immune. The diagnostic style reinforces the idea that the only legitimate grounds for participating in politics is having “evidence-based” opinions. Evidence matters greatly, but it isn’t the whole game. When we believe that it is, we shove aside our underlying value disagreements, thereby undermining our capacity to deliberate as our disagreements become ever more devoid of moral and practical complexity. […]
Democratic theorists have long recognized the dangers of rationalistic politics. As historian Sofia Rosenfeld writes, describing the thought of Hannah Arendt: “What individuals require is the return to a kind of public life that forces them to constantly weigh and consider things from the perspective of other people.” Political theorist Benjamin Barber has defined “strong democratic talk” as incorporating “listening as well as speaking, feeling as well as thinking, and acting as well as reflecting.” And theorists such as Robert Dahl and Charles Lindblom — associated with a political theory called “pluralism” — have emphasized the need for democracies to foster mutual learning and accept the inescapability of disagreement. […]
We must learn how to see agreement as the end of politics more than the beginning — and, even then, as partial, tentative, and contingent. By abandoning the idea that consensus on the facts must precede politics, we can promote a style of governance that aspires to gradually earn trust by publicly testing new policies.