One of our leading experts on the ethics and public policy of scientific innovation, Yuval Levin has written a searching and philosophically deep book on the complicated relationship between science and politics in America. He addresses the divergent ways in which the right and the left typically approach the political stewardship of tecchnological advancement, the threat certain kinds of science might pose to human feedom, equality, and dignity, and the extent to which our own democratic institutions are prepared to shoulder the problems with us and just over the horizon. One of the highlights of the volume is Yuval’s discussion of the problem generated by considering modern science genuinely comprehensive in the Cartesian sense, a mathesis universalis , that either dertermines the nature of moral discourse under the banner of its own methodology or crowds it out altogether as insufficiently scientific. There is a tendency on the American left to dismissively consider all moral challenges to scientific experimentation as luddite or benighted and a tendency on the right to rely too heavily in their critiques on the language of revelation independent of rational support. Science itself, however, though often described as morally neutral, merely a set of methods and tools that can be used well or ill, might have within its foundational theoretical premises a moral perspective all its own regarding the nature of the individual and his relation to nature and God. Part of the problem, then, might be created by the political/moral view contained within the scientism, or the view that science has a monopoly on the market of reason and comprehensively describes human affairs , that underwrites the modern conception of science itself.
