Roger Pielke Jr.’s recent essay, “The New Republic of Science,” does something we desperately need more public thinkers to do: it treats science not as a magic word or a tribal banner, but as a real set of institutions, norms, and power relations that can be examined, critiqued, and, if we’re honest, re‑imagined.
Drawing on Michael Polanyi’s famous 1962 essay, “The Republic of Science,” Pielke describes how the post‑war scientific community came to see itself—and in many ways to operate—as a kind of self‑governing polity. There were rules, internal politics, and a tacit social contract with the broader society that funded it. It was never as utopian as Polanyi suggested, but there was at least a shared story: scientists, trusted and underwritten by democratic states, pursued knowledge; benefits eventually flowed to everyone.
Pielke’s argument is that this “republic” is now under strain—internally, externally, and morally. And that the Trump years, far from being the origin of the problem, simply weaponized and exposed tensions that had been building for decades.
As SOOPMedia finalizes plans to host a “What Is Truth?” summit this summer—a gathering that will touch on, among other related topics, how we can rebuild shared trust in our institutions of knowledge and governance—I find Pielke’s diagnosis both bracing and deeply affirming. He is mapping fault lines that many of us feel every day, in different arenas.
In this piece, I’d like to put his “new republic of science” into conversation with another conceptual framework: the Twin Institutions of the Rulers and the Learned, as articulated in the Bahá’í writings. I won’t present this as “the blueprint” everyone must accept, but as a philosophical lens—a way of thinking about how power and knowledge might relate more healthily in a civilization that’s outgrowing its tribal adolescence.
My hope is that this will contribute to the same project Pielke is engaged in: helping us figure out, together, how a mature society might organize truth-seeking and decision-making in a way that serves everyone.
The republic of science as an incomplete architecture
Pielke identifies six tensions at work in what he calls the new republic of science. A few stand out.
- Internal governance has become procedural. Ethics review often verifies forms and signatures rather than wrestling with consequences. Open science becomes an extractive commons for large AI operators rather than a reciprocal community.
- External political conditions have shifted. The Cold War made science “politically unassailable” in the United States; those days are over. Science is now an arena of geopolitical strategy, culture war, and partisan branding.
- Science has become a partisan constituency. In the U.S., the Trump administration treated scientific institutions as enemies; the Biden administration, Pielke argues, treated them as an allied tribe—“weaponizing scientific authority to foreclose debate” and encouraging the scientific community to align with one party.
- Trust is eroding and polarizing. Confidence in science has dropped, and—crucially—has become sharply partisan. Trust is now much higher on the political left than the right, and has also declined among Black and Hispanic Americans in recent years.¹
Pielke’s long-standing concern is that when science becomes just another player in partisan politics—one more tribe among many—its claim to serve the public as a whole collapses. When that happens, the social contract that underwrote Polanyi’s “republic of science” is broken, even if the funding lines remain in place.
From another angle, what Pielke is describing looks like an incomplete architecture.
We have a powerful, loosely self-governing body of the Learned—scientists, universities, journals, expert commissions—functioning as a sort of quasi‑sovereign republic. Around them we have the Rulers—elected officials, agencies, courts, parties—who fund and regulate that republic, often without clear principles or shared expectations. Both sets of institutions are being pulled into the gravitational field of tribal politics.
The result is what we see now: an expert community tempted to serve—and be seen as serving—one side, and political institutions tempted either to capture, ignore, or attack that expertise, depending on partisan convenience.
A brief detour: the Twin Institutions of Rulers and Learned
In the Bahá’í writings, there’s a conceptual pairing called the Twin Institutions of the Rulers and the Learned. I offer it here not as a dogma to be imposed, but as a design pattern that might illuminate what’s missing in our current arrangements.
In this schema:
- The Rulers are those who hold the responsibility of governance:
- They legislate, administer, and adjudicate.
- They are meant to be chosen through processes that reflect and serve the whole population.
- Their obligation is to justice, consultation, and the welfare of everyone—not a party or tribe.
- The Learned are those who carry the responsibility of knowledge and guidance:
- They investigate reality, preserve and develop knowledge, and advise.
- They are supposed to exhibit humility, integrity, and independence from partisan agendas.
- Their obligation is to truthfulness and service—not to the maintenance of their own prestige or the advancement of a faction.
Crucially, these are functions, not castes. In any healthy society, people and institutions will play both roles in different ways and at different levels.
Taking a step back, the overall Bahá’í claim (stated briefly and, I hope, non‑threateningly) is that humanity is being helped—what believers would call assisted by Divine Providence—to discover how to build institutions in which these two functions are distinct yet cooperative. The Rulers must be guided by and hold accountable the Learned; the Learned must advise and, in a sense, hold morally accountable the Rulers, without becoming their partisans or their priests.
You don’t have to accept the spiritual backstory to see the usefulness of the model. It simply says: a mature civilization needs both wise governance and honest expertise, and it needs them to be structurally interdependent yet non‑tribal. It’s not within the scope of this article to outline how the twin accountabilities of these twin institutions are checked and balanced. What I will say here is that it has to do with how they attain their positions, and to whom they are beholden.
Viewed through this lens, Pielke’s “republic of science” looks like a powerful instantiation of the Learned that has never been fully integrated into a correspondingly mature system of Rulers.
Pielke’s design principles and a new social contract
Near the end of his essay, Pielke suggests three principles that should anchor a new conversation about the future of science:
- Science serves everyone regardless of who they vote for.
If scientific institutions become a partisan constituency, they forfeit their claim to speak for the whole. - Science answers to the public democratically.
Scientists draw on public funds and trust; democratic accountability is not a threat but a legitimate grounding. - Science and technology produce both benefits and risks.
Honest conversation must acknowledge both; suppressing risk to win arguments, or denying benefits to score points, corrodes trust.
These are, in effect, the scaffolding of a new social contract between the republic of science and the rest of society. They also resonate strongly with the Twin Institutions pattern.
- Pielke’s first principle reflects the vocation of the Learned:
to serve all humanity, not a faction. The moment journals, universities, or scientific societies endorse candidates or brand themselves as allies of one party against another, they cease to be credible as the Learned of the whole community. Pielke has shared data showing that a flagship journal’s presidential endorsement measurably harmed trust in science among half the country,² and the journal did it anyway. - His second principle requires healthy Rulers:
structures of governance that can demand transparency and accountability from experts without turning everything into a scorched‑earth culture war. Where those structures are absent or degraded, “democratic accountability” quickly collapses into punitive spectacle or total capture. - His third principle demands a rare collaboration between the two:
experts must be honest about uncertainty, limitations, and risk; rulers must be willing to weigh those uncertainties alongside values, tradeoffs, and competing needs. When either side pretends that complex value‑laden questions can be settled by slogans like “follow the science,” democratic deliberation is short‑circuited.
From a Bahá’í perspective, what Pielke is reaching for here is very close—structurally, if not terminologically—to the project of building Twin Institutions that can hold truth and power together without collapsing into technocracy on one hand or demagoguery on the other.
The trust crisis as spiritual adolescence
The empirical picture Pielke paints is sobering.
- Trust in scientists has declined and has become much more ideologically skewed. Those on the political left have substantially higher trust than those to their right, in the U.S. and in other countries.³
- The highly educated have, across multiple Western democracies, shifted increasingly to the political left over the last decades.⁴
- University faculty and many scientific communities overwhelmingly self‑identify as left‑leaning.⁵
On their own, none of these facts are “proof” of bias or corruption. But in a partisan environment, they become tinder. If the people who command the language of “evidence” and “expertise” are visibly clustered on one side of the political spectrum, it becomes almost inevitable that the other side will start to suspect—fairly or unfairly—that the game is rigged.
From where I sit, this is not merely an institutional failure. It’s a spiritual one.
When any group—political, scientific, religious—absolutizes a partial perspective, we drift into new forms of priestcraft and idolatry. Party, ideology, or even “Science” itself becomes the untouchable authority that just happens to ratify the interests and values of our in‑group. Those who question it are not simply wrong; they are heretical.
The Bahá’í reading of this moment is that humanity is passing through a turbulent adolescence. We have unprecedented technical ability, but our emotional and institutional maturity lag behind. We’re still trying to run 21st‑century societies on 19th‑century models of partisanship and power.
If you grant, for the sake of argument, the premise that there is such a thing as Divine Guidance at work in history, then this turbulence looks less like random chaos and more like a prolonged education: the “school of hard knocks” forcing us to confront the limits of our current patterns.
In my own trilogy of books, I’ve tried to explore this theme on three levels—personal, societal, and institutional: how we grow up, often painfully, when reality refuses to conform to our favorite stories. The crisis of the “republic of science” is, in that sense, one more classroom in which we are being invited to learn new habits of humility, consultation, and shared responsibility.
A “What Is Truth?” summit as a laboratory
All of this raises a practical question: where do we work this out?
We can’t wait for a technocratic committee to hand down a perfect constitution for the new republic of science. Nor can we resolve these questions through another electoral cycle of outrage and counter‑outrage. As Pielke notes, the last serious bipartisan attempt in the U.S. to renegotiate the science policy social contract was in the late 1990s. We have drifted since then, and the cost is now showing up in frayed trust and weaponized expertise.
One modest initiative I’m involved in is a forthcoming “What Is Truth?” summit.
The idea is simple but, I think, urgently needed: bring together people who, in different ways, inhabit the roles of Rulers and Learned—scientists, policymakers, philosophers, theologians, and citizens—and create a space where we can:
- Acknowledge the harms and benefits of our current arrangements,
- Examine how truth claims are made, contested, and enforced,
- Experiment with forms of dialogue that are not captured by partisan scripts.
We won’t be writing a constitution. But we hope to model, in miniature, what it might look like for the Rulers and the Learned to meet as trustees of a shared reality, rather than as representatives of warring tribes.
Roger, if you ever happen to read this: your work maps these tensions with rigor and without hysteria. You bring data, memory, and a genuine concern for institutional health. We’d be honored to have voices like yours in conversations of this kind—whether at our summit or in any forum where people are honestly asking, “what would a healthier social contract between science and society actually look like?”
An invitation, not a blueprint
None of us has this figured out.
The Bahá’í community, for its part, understands its global project as a kind of apprenticeship in building new forms of community life and institutional order. The claim is not that we possess a finished template for the world, but that there are patterns—like the Twin Institutions of the Rulers and the Learned—that can help us think more clearly about what a mature civilization might require.
Pielke’s “new republic of science” essay is, to my eyes, an important contribution to that same quest. It asks the right uncomfortable questions: Who does science serve? Who does it answer to? How do we rebuild a social contract that is not just functional, but just?
If there is any “Divine Providence” at work in this, I suspect it doesn’t appear as a voice on a mountaintop dictating institutional charts. It appears in the slow, halting work of many people, from many traditions and none, refusing to accept cynicism as the final word, and striving instead to bring truth, power, and compassion into some kind of constructive alignment.
The “What Is Truth?” summit is one small attempt to create a room where that work can proceed, visibly and together.
Wherever we each stand—inside universities or legislatures, in labs or neighborhoods—we share responsibility for the republics we inhabit. Whether we use Bahá’í terminology or Pielke’s policy language or neither, the question is the same:
Can we grow into a people—and build institutions—for whom truth is not a weapon of the tribe, but a trust we hold on behalf of one another?
¹ See Pielke’s summary of Pew data, “How Science Must Change,” and related analyses in “The New Republic of Science.”
² Discussed in Pielke’s “The Price of Partisan Advocacy by Scientific Journals.”
³ Pielke presents cross‑national survey data showing ideological gradients in trust in science, with the left more trusting than the right.
⁴ From Gethin et al., “Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022).
⁵ See Pielke’s cited surveys of European university faculty political self‑identification.
