I think everyone should agree that science is not, nor should it be, democratic. That’s probably why science did great in the post-renaissance periods, I personally believe that the democratic methodology is one of the greatest differences between the humanities and science. While the humanities do not embrace any form of democratic methodology, an essence of how democracy works is implicit in the way the humanities are usually produced.

An intuitive example of that is rationality and the refutation of irrationality. The refutation of irrationality is a very regular activity in doing science, it’s actually what science is usually defined as (or how I mostly like to define it): discovering truth by uncovering falsehoods. In the humanities, democracy is a common thing. It’s the common belief of whatever is there (let it be rational or irrational).

I’m not going to criticize democracy here as a political system nor its effects on academic communities, [1] might give you some insights on that about the great problems in democracy like rational ignorance and rational irrationality though, I would like instead to talk about yet another great issue in democracy, that’s: responsibility.

Responsibility is also used as a critique of political democracy: no one takes responsibility for their vote because 1. The fraction of one’s vote is too small to understand its segmentation, and 2. People are usually manipulated psychologically through the voting process, some people might change their vote just because they do not like the candidate’s name or haircut, and since there is no charge of responsibility and since you do not have to legally and rationally explain why you voted for that candidate, you can do whatever you like.

The tendency to fall for such psychological inclinations rises in situations like that because no one is paying for their mistakes, no one is going to put you in jail for choosing the wrong candidate (assuming that everything is so obvious that the wrongness of one of the candidates can be clearly detected). On the other hand, if one were to be judged for their choice, they might have spent much of their time doing research to clarify their vote.

So basically, responsibility and rationality have a direct relationship: the more you are responsible for your vote, the less you are irrational about it.

Irrationality does not mean unreasonableness, that’s why we have the public choice theory that studies rational irrationality. As I mentioned, you might vote for another candidate just because of reasons that you do not like about him or things that you believe to be bad about him, but you can not be scientifically rational about those reasons even if you are certain about them. For example, let’s say you have some religious belief that makes you believe that one of that candidate’s campaign promises is unlawful and going to rot the world. It’s a religion, so you are probably certain about it ; however, if you can not explain your reasons rationally, it will cause many disputes, so it is defined here as irrationality.

Whilst the current genocide in Gaza has been taking a place, Rabea Eghbariah, Palestinian doctoral candidate at Harvard Law School, submitted a 2,000-word essay arguing that the assault on Gaza is within the legal framework of genocide.

The draft has been in an undergoing process of publication, the typical academic process: “solicited, commissioned, contracted, submitted, edited, fact checked, copy edited, and approved by the relevant editors” as reported.

It seems like a focus group call made the Harvard Law Review president urge to call for an emergency meeting of editors to decide the destiny of the essay: one of the editors who commissioned the essay, Shahriari-Parsa, “and the other top online editor, Sabrina Ochoa, told The Intercept that they had never seen a piece face this level of scrutiny at the Law Review”.

Here I’m not interested in giving an example of the constrains on academic freedom, or freedom in general, especially against Palestinians rights, if you are interested in that you can find [2] rather interesting reading (and also check my The Limits on The (allowed) Freedom of Speech), but instead I wand the reader to contemplate on the method which the harvard president called for to decide whether the article should be published or not, do note that the essay perfectly qualifies to be published, as it was reviewed already:

Ironically, the book that I just mentioned had a very similar case, not only similar in the usage of irresponsible, irrational, democracy, but it was also against a Palestinian-rights defender, Norman Finkelstein: after Alan Dershowitz continuous accusations and lobbying of DePaul’s professors, department subsequently invited John Mearsheimer and Ian Lustick, two previously uninvolved academics with expertise on the Israel–Palestinian conflict, to evaluate the academic merit of Finkelstein’s work; they came to the same conclusion [3] that Dershowitz’s accusations are based on falsehoods. However, later DePaul’s political science department voted nine to three, and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee five to zero, to give Finkelstein tenure. The three opposing faculty members subsequently filed a minority report opposing tenure, supported by the Dean of the College, Chuck Suchar. Not only democracy was wrong used in this example, it was moreover violated.

Back to Eghbariah’s story, I think it’s a great depiction and manifestation of what I was talking about earlier, how irresponsibility in democracy can lead to awful choices: the vote was anonymous, no one had to clear any of their intentions, and no one will be asked to clarify them; no one is responsible for choosing anything; even the reviewers who initially approved the article initially (rationally, as that’s their job) can disapprove it by now due to their political views or whatever, as they can now act ’irrationally’ freely.

Irrationality here has reasons (as I mentioned, it does not necessarily have implicit unreasonableness), probably the same reasons one of them would have against Palestine or why to be pro-Israeli. Reasons that shall be disputed can not be introduced as a counterargument to why the essay should not be published, but they can be introduced as arguments why one’s self thinks that it should not be published.

I will give a final example, suppose you are a Muslim or belong to some ethnic group that, for some reason, has a very high crime rate, probably due to historical reasons or poverty; and you have a peer-review work to do on a statistics project that provides shocking information on how the crime rate is very high within your group of people. As a peer-reviewer, you will do your typical job, you might be more skeptical here because you have a motivation, but this should not change anything if the paper was well written.

Now what if you could just vote anonymously to shut down the paper? No questions asked. This will be great, although it’s dishonest: you know that publishing such a paper would have a bad effect, and you start to imagine how the media will use it and link it to racist reasons, how it will be depicted. These are pretty good reasons not to do your job for but unfortunately, such reasons do not work in science, the paper should be published if it qualifies to be. Unless you can provide a clear error in the content, anything you are going to use as a counterargument will be irrationality.