Science & Tech Quote by Mary McCarthy

There’s a sly jab hiding inside McCarthy’s tidy compliment to science: “democratic equality” is both an ideal and a provocation. She’s praising the scientific habit of treating evidence as evidence, not as a reflection of status, taste, or narrative appeal. A trivial datum can dethrone a beautiful theory; a banal measurement can matter more than a charismatic expert. In that sense, science is the most unforgiving meritocracy: the lab doesn’t care who you are, only what holds up.

But McCarthy’s word choice tilts the line into cultural criticism. “Democratic” is not neutral in mid-century American letters; it’s a loaded civic aspiration, constantly contradicted by social hierarchies, gatekeeping, and the kind of literary prestige McCarthy knew intimately. The subtext: in politics and culture, “facts” do not enjoy equality. They’re sorted, promoted, ignored, or punished depending on who benefits. Calling scientific facts “trivial or banal” also needles the romantic hunger for significance. Science advances by accumulating the unglamorous, the repetitive, the apparently pointless. It’s a rebuke to the essayist’s temptation to curate only the meaningful detail.

Contextually, McCarthy is writing as an intellectual novelist-critic in an era when “scientific” authority was rising and anxieties about propaganda, ideology, and mass persuasion were acute. The line flatters science while refusing to sentimentalize it: democracy here isn’t warm fellowship; it’s procedural fairness, indifferent and bracing. Facts get a vote, not a halo.