Is this our era's crucial democratic crisis and paradox: The scientification of society where people lack trust in knowledge institutions? Society is more scientified than ever; we live in a permanent technological revolution. In the years to come, artificial intelligence will dramatically transform everyone's daily lives. Eco-catastrophe and climate crisis loom, but once again, the answer lies in more science and new technology.

Therefore, it's paradoxical that trust in science seems to be plummeting across broad segments of the population. Where once health research and industrial agriculture represented liberation from disease and deprivation, many now see research almost as a site of conspiracy. Vaccine hesitancy and climate denial flourish in a conspiratorial landscape that has become a significant political force in many Western countries.

In this lecture, Kjetil Jakobsen will shed light on the problem from a historical and intellectual perspective. The principles of the permanent techno-scientific revolution were formulated by the English philosopher Francis Bacon in "The New Atlantis," published shortly after Bacon's death in 1626. The utopian fable is now available for the first time in Norwegian translation. Bacon described how through experimental natural science, humans could take control of nature and make a better world possible.

The fundamental question raised and sought to be answered by Francis Bacon's work is how to base a society on knowledge when the knowledge produced by research is difficult for politicians and the general public to understand and is also always changing and evolving. Unlike the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries, Bacon had no pedagogical utopia; he is clear that research, despite the progress of enlightenment, will always be largely a closed book both to the rulers and the general public.

However, society cannot be based solely on the power of argument. Bacon did not provide a simple solution to the problem of the authority and legitimacy of research but suggested several different answers, all of which have had a rich history of impact right up to our present day. In the lecture, Jakobsen will examine Bacon's four-hundred-year-old proposals for how to create trust in science and discuss how they have functioned and where they - and we - stand today.

Lecture by Kjetil Ansgar Jakobsen, Professor of Intellectual History at Nord University, Bodø, Henrik Steffens Professor at Humboldt University in Berlin (2011-14), Associate Professor in Intellectual History at the University of Oslo (2010-11), and Postdoctoral Fellow at UiB (2006-09), leading the research project "Words and Violence. Literary Intellectuals Between Democracy and Dictatorship 1933-52", translated and wrote the introductory essay for Francis Bacon's "The New Atlantis" (Cappelen Damm/Thorleif Dahls Cultural Library, 2023).

Commentators -

Alan Finlayson, Professor of Political & Social Theory at the University of East Anglia, with particular expertise in the theoretical and practical study of political rhetoric. He oversees the website British Political Speech.

Rupert Sheldrake, biologist, philosopher, and author of over a hundred academic articles and nine books, including "The Science Delusion." Formerly Director of Studies in Cell Biology and research fellow at the Royal Society, from 2005 to 2010 he was director of the Perrott-Warrick Project, for studies of unexplained abilities in animals and humans, funded by Trinity College, Cambridge. Host TBA

Host: Brita Strand Rangnes, associate professor of english-speaking culture and literature at the University of Stavanger