Johnson and Plato make very similar arguments — it seems to me that Johnson’s could even be an extension of the democratic flaws that Plato points out. Plato argues that the freedom of democracies means that leaders are unable to shape (or as later social scientists might suggest, socialize) the opinions of the people or control their actions.(1) He points out that this creates a society incoherent in both action and opinion, with the people refusing to hold any value as superior to any others.(2) Johnson echoes these negative ramifications, lamenting that we “live in a culture in which bad faith tolerance-for-others is ubiquitous and rewarded, while productive intellectual sparring is shunned.”(3) Thus, the two authors agree that the pluralism of democracies stifles discourse and the emergence of true consensus on values. Tocqueville, however, argues that the equality of democracies leads to each person putting immense faith in their own reason and abilities (since none of his countrymen are his superior) and in public opinion.(4) As a result, the opinions of the people will converge (not diverge as Plato suggests and Johnson seems to assume), yet the people themselves will be reluctant to engage in discourse since they are all equals.(5)
I think they are right to the extent that people in democracies do not often take up the normative questions of to what ends we should devote ourselves. This is restrictive of debate, but I think that our society does accept moral truths, even if people do not defend them as such and instead revert to “lazy relativism.” For example, the equality and liberty of liberal societies like America (even if some think that they ultimately stifle debate) are held as moral truths themselves — indeed, Western countries have seized many opportunities to export these values abroad. That said, ending the embargo on normative claims might have some benefits — it could strengthen the sets of values that we currently hold (or, if we cannot defend our values, as Johnson says, “we ought to let them go”).(6)
Tocqueville, though, articulates the best argument in favor of the status quo: if every person took up philosophical speculation, we would never get anything done. Even if we had no walls between the social sciences and more philosophical practices, I would venture to say that social scientists might find it troublesome to always question the ends of their work — in other words, there are limits to the practicality of interdisciplinary interaction. There are some interesting examples of fields that straddle the divide (such as behavioral economics bridging the hard science-social science chasm with economics and psychology), revealing that our categorization is somewhat arbitrary. Nevertheless, the divides have their utility (in dividing labor) — they are arbitrary in their locations, not in their existence.
(1) Plato. Republic: 557a-558c, 560e-562a.
(2) Ibid.
(3) Leigh Johnson. “Lazy Relativism.” ReadMoreWriteMoreThinkMoreBeMore, November 7, 2009. http://www.readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore.com/2009/11/lazy-relativism.html.
(4) Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. Vol. 2. 2000: 409.
(5) Ibid: 409, 410.
(6) Johnson. “Lazy Relativism.”