Science Quote by Mary Catherine Bateson

Democracy doesn’t run on faith; it runs on a tense, productive double vision. Mary Catherine Bateson’s line argues that the citizen’s core skill isn’t loud conviction or cool detachment, but the ability to hold both at once: to commit to shared rules and collective projects while staying alert to how those projects can curdle into dogma, corruption, or self-congratulation.

The phrasing matters. “Capacity” frames this as a learnable civic competence, not a personality trait you either have or don’t. That’s a scientist’s move: treat political maturity as something cultivated through habits, feedback, and practice. “Combine” rejects the common binary where skepticism is coded as cynicism and commitment as naive loyalty. Bateson is after a third stance: engaged participation that keeps its own claims under review. It’s the democratic version of peer review: you show up, you invest, you argue, and you still concede the possibility you’re wrong.

The subtext is a warning about two equal and opposite failures. Commitment without skepticism becomes fanaticism, the kind that treats opponents as enemies and institutions as idols. Skepticism without commitment becomes nihilism, the posture that mistakes disillusionment for sophistication and leaves power to the most organized minority. In the late-20th-century American context Bateson inhabited - post-Vietnam distrust, post-Watergate suspicion, the rise of media cynicism - her point lands as a corrective: democracy can’t survive either blind allegiance or permanent side-eye. It needs citizens who can doubt responsibly and act anyway.