Posted on 09/27/2005 12:36:32 PM PDT by Crackingham
"The Republican War on Science" lives up to its incendiary title. The book will undoubtedly raise hackles among conservatives and spawn sharp-tongued counterattacks. But the real test of its efficacy may be whether or not it persuades independents and moderate Republicans that without a new approach toward science America is headed for what the author calls "economic, ecological, and social calamity."
As a good polemicist, Chris Mooney, a journalist who specializes in writing about science and politics, knows to protect his argument by first making two concessions.
First, not all Republicans have been antiscience. Teddy Roosevelt was a great early conservationist. Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to recognize that the White House needed a science adviser. Ronald Reagan's surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, weighed scientific evidence "dispassionately" on subjects like AIDS and the health effects of abortion and declared, "I am the nation's surgeon general, not the nation's chaplain."
Even the first President Bush was largely regarded by scientists as "a friend," Mr. Mooney says. And today, a few GOP mavericks like Sen. John McCain speak the truth on issues like global warming.
Secondly, Mooney wisely - albeit briefly - acknowledges that liberals have also sometimes twisted science for their own political ends. Some of the alarm over genetically modified foods has exceeded what science shows; animal rights activists have argued that animal testing isn't necessary when most scientists disagree; and some Democratic politicians have overstated the likelihood that stemcell research will produce quick cures.
But these transgressions, Mooney says, pale in comparison with the breathtaking audacity of Mr. Bush's "New Right" in its cynical manipulation of science. In a kind of Orwellian newspeak, they label conventional science as "junk science" and seek to replace it with what they call "sound science" - in other words, questionable, fringe science that conveniently props up the interests of big industry and conservative Christians.
All sides might agree that science should inform policy, not make it. Other considerations may trump it. But what irks Mooney is when, in his eyes, science is distorted to defend a policy.
In this regard, Mooney contrasts the Clinton and Bush administrations in their approaches to needle-exchange programs for drug addicts. Numerous reputable scientific studies show that needle-exchange programs reduce the transmission of AIDS without encouraging drug abuse. The Clinton administration acknowledged these findings, but simply decided to ignore them, apparently unwilling to take an unpopular political stance.
The Bush administration also opposed needle-exchange programs but "twisted the science," Mooney says, by insisting that some scientists doubted the findings. Yet when the press followed up, the scientists cited by the White House said they had no such doubts.
A key GOP tactic, Mooney says, has been "magnifying uncertainty" - finding a few dissenting voices on the scientific fringe and calling for "more research" to forestall action - a tactic the tobacco industry used for decades, he says.
www.ChrisCMoooney.com (Mooney's blog)
The Republican War on Science (Amazon.com)
(loved reading the reviews. There isn't any middle ground here!)
A few selected reviews:
Scientific abuse: Subverting scientific knowledge for short-term gain
Fighting the Republican War on Science: A Question of Balance
Research and the Right (Washington Post) Since I can't post the full review and since it requires registration, here's the important excerpt:
"Evidence abounds of the Bush administration's ham-handed approach to making science policy. The topic is thus ripe for a quasi-scholarly, quasi-journalistic study -- perhaps one akin to Daniel S. Greenberg's 1967 classic, The Politics of Pure Science , or its excellent 2001 successor, Science, Money, and Politics . Unfortunately, Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science is not that study.
That's a shame, for he is a talented and energetic young Washington correspondent for Seed, an excellent and relatively new popular-science magazine. In writing a book about science-policy-making in America today, Mooney has bravely tackled a gigantic and complex topic. Unfortunately, the journalist in him won out over the scholar, for he ends up trying to reduce the subject's complexities to the "good guy/bad guy" categories of TV polemicists. The resulting book is ill-formulated, overwrought and surprisingly unconvincing."
'War' thesis fails the science test
Excerpt: "Mooney is relentless, but he isn't especially convincing. To be sure, some of the criticisms he levels at the Bush administration are justified, on matters such as litmus tests for appointees to science-related positions, distorted information to consumers about health and safety issues and antagonism toward embryonic stem-cell research. But Mooney's insistent denials that there have been equivalent misdemeanors by the political left are wholly unconvincing."
Not worth a ping.
I agree with you crackhead is a lefty, he never has any remarks and he always posts the flotsum of the most screwed up media organizations.
He thinks he has developed a stealth strategy and will influence some conservatives by his brilliant planning. He fails in the same way all the liberal propaganda organizations fail, they fail to understand that everyday we are bombarded non-stop by TV and newspapers with the same slanted propaganda.
The thing they just don't understand is that we have heard their lies and misleading information all our lives, some such as myself even believed their pitch for periods of time. I'm not a conservative because I haven't been exposed to the lies of the MSM and I'm not on FreeRepublic because I don't know where else to get my news.
I used to read a large newspaper everyday for decades now I would never give my money to one, I don't read crackheads posts because of the information they contain I read them to see what kind of swill he's discovered while spending his quality time at the DU........
When W says I.D. should be taught along with evolution, it adds fuel (a big tank of gas) to the fire, and gives this guy credibility.
Karl Marx made a big deal out of politicizing science, and the greenies have perfected it.
I'm not going to say that the Bush administration hasn't made major mistakes regarding science policy, because it has, but Mooney's book is representative of the left's most lethal assault against conservatism yet. We see it whenever the left refers to itself as the "reality-based community" when it is anything but; when Frank Wilczek, on his news conference after it is announced he has won the Nobel prize, slaps on a Kerry-Edwards button and grandstands that the physics award stands against everything the current administration is for; and when Paul Krugman says the reason that there are so few conservatives in academia is not because of discrimination or hostility towards people or ideas, but because conservatives prefer "revelation" over reason. In short, the left, after years of denying the existence of objectivity, is now declaring itself the sole arbitrater of truth and reason, and is trying to position conservatives in general and the Republican party in specific.
What's worse is that there are so many self-declared conservatives who are falling into the left's trap, and allowing themselves to be played for pasties. Going by a "anything my enemy is for, I'm against" philosophy, they will reflexively defend silliness such as creationism, even co-opting the left's language regarding "diversity" and "dissent" in their defense of irrationality. As a result, the left can hold them up as proof that everyone on the right is a fool thorougly detached from reality, and the media gobbles up and perpetuates this meme.
I came across FR when I was worried about whether or not I could still call myself a conservative, giving the seeming identification, if not equivocation, of the word with "creationist" in the MSM, but fortunately, it helped to restore in my hope in the movement. But since the voice of the Rationalist Right has been mute in the mainstream discourse-either due to deliberate exclusion by those controlling the dialog, or by the unwillingess of conservative scientists and rationalists to take political discussions beyond closed doors, conservatism faces a crisis of identity similar to what liberalism faced in the forties and fifties, when the support of communism by some within the movement threatened to delegitimatize it. The anti-communist liberals briefly won out, but the ideological fellow travellers resurged with a veangence in the sixties, and utterly decimated the type of liberalism identified with Harry Truman, John F Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. Similarly, the irrationalists within our movement will marginalize conservatism, if not completely wreck it, if the rationalist conservatives don't start speaking out more.
A couple of worthy links related to my rant:
First, an article from The Scientist which should have recieved greater circulation, but was ignored by the major press syndicates, and didn't even get posted on FR. It digs deeps and exposes as fradulent the image that the scientific community was overwhelmingly anti-Bush, and includes interviews from three conservative scientists, all very prominent in their fields: physicists William Happer and David Casper, and biomedical researcher Charles Arntzen. Not mentioned in the article was that Happer was a victim of genuine political abuse of science, dismissed from his DOE position in 1993 after he criticized some of Al Gore's statements regarding ozone depletion before a House Appropriations committee.
Lubos Motl, the Rush Limbaugh of string theory, takes on Krugman's aforementioned moronic statements in a long but very informed and astute post on his blog.
Finally, if you can stand me posting another John Derbyshire article, here's The Derb's ode to the wonders of science, and the understanding it brings to us. He also very wisely cautions against confusing scientific authority with political authority, something which both the left and right do too often.
And oh yes, for all you bloggers-that "reality based community" link is a Google-bomb suggestion. Go off and run with it :-)
"Our study, while exhaustive in its complexity [Translation: We wrote a whole bunch of stuff that we know you will never be able to make heads nor tails of because all we have to say is that it is scientific jargon that can't be understood by silly lay persons], is inconclusive at this time and needs continuing research [Translation: We couldn't gin up enough evidence to prove our supposition one way or another and we want to keep doing the same thing until we can achieve our agenda]. It is our hope that we can get increased funding [Translation: We blew the money on parties and lived high off the hog on the government's dime, and we fervently hope we can schmooze our way into another big bucks grant] to continue this much needed research in our continuing efforts to explore the unknown [Translation: This research grant is needed by us so we can continue living in the lifestyle we have become accustomed to under our previous research grant]. This research could provide exciting new benefits for all of humanity [Translation: If we do find anything, we will damn sure patent it and secure the benefits for our own wealth even though the research is being done on public funds]."
Science a hundred years ago was the search for truth. Science today is the search for the largest government grant.
Science, "Bah, Humbug!"
For whatever it's worth, conservatism is the only viable home for people with libertarian views.
Libbaugh makes fun of the dems for being a hodgepodge of conflicting interest groups, but so is the Republican Party.
Hope you don't mind me pinging you guys to my post #27.
Good post.
Great post. If anything could raise my flagging spirits recently about the prospects for science in the GOP, this is it. I'm pinging curiosity, since he and I had a conversation about this recently.
I forgot to mention another pet peeve of mine, which reflects the way in which the media tries to perpetuate the conservative=anti-science/liberal=pro-science meme. Whenever liberal Democratic Congressman Rush Holt is mentioned in the press, almost always, they mention that he is a physicist, as if it granted him some sort of authority, sometimes even qualifying that by calling him a former plasma physicist at Princeton, even though his duties there were strictly admininstrative. When he was first elected, in fact, it was a cause celebre in the press that a scientist was coming to congress, "Mr.Science goes to Washington", as NPR trumpeted. What they didn't mention was that the Republicans had already sent two scientists to congress, Vernon Ehlers and Roscoe Bartlett, and that Ehlers, in fact, had a far more distinguished career as a physicist than Holt. But not only did they not mention that, they hardly ever mention that these two very conservative members of Congress are scientists with excellent scientific records who have done much to help continue scientific funding in tight times.
I didn't know this. I'll look them up.
His web site: After three years of studying at Calvin College, Ehlers received his undergraduate degree in physics and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1960. After six years teaching and research at Berkeley, he moved to Calvin College in 1966 where he taught physics for 16 years and later served as chairman of the Physics Department
Why don't you email him and ask him? He replied to my email after a couple days. You can get his email off his webpage.
To fair to him, he does highlight a few abuses of science by the left in his book, or at least so he told me. He did not do so in the talk of his I attended, though, and I took him to task in the Q&A.
While he makes a lot of good points, it's clear he has a political axe to grind, and that unfortuately detracts a great deal from the quality of his work. It's a shame because he had an opportunity to write a solid, balanced book about how politicians distort science. Instead, he wrote a partisan polemic, which makes it much less valuable.
Great post!
Thanks!
The interesting thing is that that's *not* actually what W. said (although it's being spun that way), and it's not a topic that W. himself brought up -- a reporter brought it up and tried to pin W. into the corner, W. tried to give a noncommittal answer to the question, then the reporter tried again to pin W. to the mat, and W. still sidestepped the trap by just saying that students should be "exposed" to various ideas. That's a far cry from actually saying that "I.D. should be taught along with evolution".
I haven't read articles or seen this. But let me guess: If there is a political subject that needs the slightest bit of scientific backing, his name is brought up.
If so, this is another common fallacy, called " argument by authority ".
Aside from the 'other' threads, this thread is IMHO a very salient topic to begin discussing. All one has to point to is the push in the mid to late 90s with respect to ratifying the Kyoto Treaty to see the dangers of politics mixing with 'science'.
Then again, I'm one of those troublesome epistemologists.
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