New Crises: Science, Morality, and Democracy in the 21st Century

Apstrakt

This paper examines the restructuring of political conflict in Western societies in the 21st century, as well as its effects on morality, science, and democracy. I argue that the traditional socio-economic dimension of conflict has been intersected by a new dimension of cultural conflict between the cosmopolitan and the communitarian camps. In this paper, I identify three new crises which are responsible for this two-dimensional conflict structure: the refugee and migrant crisis, the climate debate, and the COVID-19 pandemic. I argue that these crises are not based in “objective” facts alone, but that they are also shaped by their subjective perceptions or “crisis narratives”. The paper shows that these narratives are characterized by three distinct properties: scientification, moralization, and polarization. Scientification entails the simplified perception of both science and democratic decision-making. By reducing the role of science to a singular procedure which produces non-refutable “truths”, scientification has led to a change in the perception of democracy from a pluralistic and a posteriori decision-making to the means of implementing a priori scientific truth. The second characteristic of crisis narratives is moralization; that is, the stylization of one’s own moral position as superior in order to disparage another moral position which introduces binarism and friend-foe relations in the political discourse of democracy. Finally, I demonstrate how these properties undermine democratic pluralism by leading it into a two-dimensional (or, in the case of the United States, one-dimensional), non-negotiable and “all or nothing” polarization.