Peter Watson argues that science, unlike art, philosophy, politics, culture or other forms of human endeavor was never reflective; it never looked backed on its past and wondered why, or whether it was a good idea. Science moves irrevocably forward, constantly refining and leaving in its trail technological gadgets that make life easier and easier.

Whereas a politician might wonder if Marxism wasn't an expressly bad idea, or an artist might not wonder if 'ready-made' is pushing art too far, science does not wonder much. A few might, such as with something like the nuclear bomb, but for the most part the follow on of those discoveries and theories in technology - in health for instance - make the point moot for the general population.

This does mean that art, philosophy, politics and culture are constantly playing catch up to science. Their response is reactive simply because the scientific method and technology dumps it on society to be consumed in a meaningful manner. Stem cells are a recent example of politics and culture being left to navigate the wake of science.

The other aspect of science is its 'self-sufficiency'. The large discoveries of the twentieth century we made in isolation and then presented to peers. Quite unusual when compared to art, philosophy or politics. Science also became specialised beyond the realm of the educated class. The average person does not know how a cell phone works despite paying $80 every month to speak, text and browse with it. Watson writes:

For non-specialists, the inaccessibility of science didn't matter, or it didn't matter very much, for the technology that was the product of difficult science worked, conferring authority on physics, medicine, and even mathematics.

The flip-side of that coin is that science has fashion too and prior controversies are taught as truth - for instance the duality of light is common to all Year 10 students in Australia, but in the 19thC the though that light might be photons as well as a wave was unfathomable.

Science's dominance and authority leaves the question to be answered that does the knowledge of science constitute a special kind of knowledge, higher than all others.

I am currently reading The Closing of the Western Mind which charts how the reason and rationality of the Greek world was replaced with the dogma of faith in the Medieval world. The interfaces of rationality are fascinating; I recently read through A World Lit Only By Fire which looked at the Medieval mind and how it changed with the reformation and renaissance. I also finished Peter Watson's The Modern Mind which looks a the rationality of the twentieth century and how science came to dominate modern intellectualism. The rationality of humankind is an amazing thing.

Peter Watson argues the great intellectual forces of the 20thC were science, free-market economics and mass media. He writes:

That is not say; of course, that science or free-market economics, or the mass media were entirely twentieth century phenomena; they were not. But there were important aspects of the twentieth century which meant that each of these forces took on a new potency, which only emerged for all to see in the 1920s.

With science the different disciplines started to come together and combine into new descriptions which cumulatively left new technologies in its wake; physics joined with chemistry as the electron was explored and physics met chemistry and biology as the DNA molecule was theorized. Mathematics, geology, cosmology, biology, genetics, linguistics, anthropology, economics and sociology all bled into each other adding new authority to science as it provided increasingly accurate and resilient descriptions of the world, past, present and evolutionary.

Social organization counts in progress; and currently the scientific method, liberal democracy and free markets are the most efficient forms of organization for progress and democratization of wealth and knowledge. The advantages this gives has left much of the non-western world rushing to catch up to the inherent advantages these forms of organization give. Watson writes:

Finally in considering this evolution of knowledge forms, think back to the link between science, free-markets and liberal democracy ... The relevance and importance of that link is brought home in this book by the dearth of non-Western thinkers.

This will change as more and more nations adopt the very successful forms of knowledge, political and market organization that the West has been using. The issue of course is that the three major forms of organization the West has been using are eminently modifiable at their core. It may be like Zeno's paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise. Everytime Achilles reached where the Tortoise had been when he set out, the tortoise had moved again.

Peter Watson writes that the disruption of the Second World War was less devastating to Frankic intellectualism than the pursuit of Freud and Marx; both of which turned out to be dead-ends intellectually and left Francophone intellectualism trailing Anglo intellectual and scientific progress.

Many continental thinkers, especially French and from the German speaking lands, were devoted to the marriage of Freud and Marx, one of the main intellectual pre-occupations of the century, and maybe the biggest dead end, or folly, which had the effect, in France most of all, of blinding thinkers to the advances of the harder sciences. This has created a cultural divide in intellectual terms between francophone and anglophone thought.

Freud's theories did not survive the scrutiny of empiricism as more and more science uncovered the workings of the brain. The larger Marxist experiments all collapsed into political and economic failure; the most dramatic when the USSR could not feed itself and balkanized into numerous smaller political entities of differing market-economy views.