"The general public has long been divided into two parts those who think science can do anything, and those who are afraid it will"
About this Quote
A good political line doesn’t just split the difference; it names the split and dares you to notice it. Dixie Lee Ray frames the “general public” as a nation stuck in a binary tantrum: techno-utopians who treat science like a wish machine, and techno-panickers who treat it like a monster movie. The wit is in the symmetry. “Can do anything” and “afraid it will” are grammatically parallel but psychologically opposed, exposing how the same awe powers both boosterism and dread.
Ray’s intent is less to mock science than to mock our relationship to it. She’s pointing at a civic failure: we outsource judgment to vibes. One camp grants science limitless competence; the other grants it limitless agency. Both positions conveniently dodge the hard work of democratic governance: defining goals, setting limits, distributing risk, and asking who benefits. The subtext is that the public debate isn’t “pro-” or “anti-science” so much as pro- and anti-control. We crave miracles, then fear the bill.
Context matters because Ray was a politician with deep ties to scientific institutions (and, historically, a sharp critic of certain strands of environmental alarmism). In the late 20th century, “science” wasn’t an abstract noun; it was nuclear power, pesticides, medical breakthroughs, and an accelerating Cold War tech pipeline. Her line works because it compresses that era’s mood swing into a single diagnosis: a culture that treats science as destiny rather than as a tool that still needs human steering.
Ray’s intent is less to mock science than to mock our relationship to it. She’s pointing at a civic failure: we outsource judgment to vibes. One camp grants science limitless competence; the other grants it limitless agency. Both positions conveniently dodge the hard work of democratic governance: defining goals, setting limits, distributing risk, and asking who benefits. The subtext is that the public debate isn’t “pro-” or “anti-science” so much as pro- and anti-control. We crave miracles, then fear the bill.
Context matters because Ray was a politician with deep ties to scientific institutions (and, historically, a sharp critic of certain strands of environmental alarmism). In the late 20th century, “science” wasn’t an abstract noun; it was nuclear power, pesticides, medical breakthroughs, and an accelerating Cold War tech pipeline. Her line works because it compresses that era’s mood swing into a single diagnosis: a culture that treats science as destiny rather than as a tool that still needs human steering.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
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