Somebody once asked me what the greatest achievement of science was. I think I replied “moonwalk”, and that was the end of the conversation. But my thoughts did not stop there. The question had a meaning that I had missed. Moonwalk was an achievement of human beings, scientists to be exact. But what had science as an entity done to be adored as we do? After a long time the answer dawned on me and it surprised me. The greatest achievement of science was ‘democracy’.
Until the end of the sixteenth century or perhaps the beginning of the seventeenth century Europeans had no choice but to believe that what the king said was laws. Worldly laws were made only by kings. Laws of a divine nature were made by the top man in the church. Ordinary men could not make laws. But starting with Galileo’s rejection of Aristotelian ideas and the advent of modern science, things changed. There came a procession of laws made by ordinary mortals with no relation to royalty or the church. Newton’s Laws of motion and gravitation, Boyle’s law, Chales’s law, Dalton’s law, Ohm’s law etc. etc. And neither royalty nor the church could challenge or alter these laws.
Once the people of Europe realized that it was possible for them to make laws, the paradigm of politics and sovereignty changed. The people had to create a situation in which they could make the laws of the land as they suited them.
The reason why democracy eludes many nations outside Europe and North America is that people there still believe that lawmaking is the purview of the privileged and not common people. Once they acquire the taste for making laws they will achieve democracy.
