In the religious world you will sometimes read articles or hear
sermons trying to understand the mindset of unbelievers and
lamenting the lure of apostasy. The funny thing is, in entirely
secular venues you will also find people worrying about the power
of heresy to seduce the unwary from the true path. In the secular
world, that path is called “science.”
About such scientific heresy, the level of anxiety seems
higher now than any time in recent memory. Republican presidential
candidates continuously being probed on their scientific beliefs,
ranked by media liberals on the basis of their adherence to
scientifically orthodox ideas about evolution, global warming, and
stem-cell research, has been the most obvious way this came out
recently.
What’s wrong with Republicans, anyway? Scientists and
journalists offer a variety of diagnoses. Some say a backwoods
element in the population has abandoned the Enlightenment, a result
of poor education or religious fundamentalism or both.
Other experts find no convincing sociological explanation
and opt for a more scientific (or scientific-seeming) approach,
pointing to faulty brain chemistry. A forthcoming book title by
journalist Chris Mooney says it all: The Republican Brain: The
Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality.
I’m not aware, though, that anyone trying to explain these
things has considered exactly what kind of scientific issues evoke
a skeptical response from Republicans.
Doubts about natural selection may seem to be of a piece
with wariness about (therapeutically questionable)
embryonic-stem-cell research. Sounds like a religious thing. But
where is the religious significance of believing in human-induced
catastrophic global warming?
What about other scientific questions on which
conservatives register their distrust? Rush Limbaugh delights
listeners by mocking pronouncements that “science says” we must eat
this or not eat that. Where’s the “fundamentalist” stake in
tweaking liberals for using legislation to discourage unhealthy
eating and smoking?
Something all these hot-button scientific topics have in
common is that each has been politicized. Not by Republicans,
however. The scientific issues that incite the Right all involve
attempts by government to coerce behavior and spend billions in tax
dollars through divisive policies on education, the environment,
public health, and medical experiments.
It doesn’t reassure conservatives, either, when we happen
to know something about the subject and aren’t just operating from
a “gut feeling” as one social scientists tried to prove recently,
in a study in the Journal of Research in Science Teaching
that got some media play.
In coverage of the evolution debate, for example, Darwin
defenders have convinced many journalists that only two sides
exist: Darwinists themselves versus advocates of a naïve Scriptural
view that insists the world is just thousands of years
old.
But most Americans understand that a more credible view
exists, one that accepts a history of life going back more than 3
billion years but that doubts blind Darwinian forces can account
for life’s development, seeing, instead, evidence of purpose and
design.
There is a persistent sense that we are being manipulated
by fellow citizens who use the prestige of the word “science,”
coupled with the technique of the excluded middle, to intimidate us
in service to a political agenda. Not just any political agenda,
but one that violates our own experience of who, as human beings,
we really are.
At stake is an anthropological view that, on “scientific”
grounds, equates humans with animals who climbed too high in their
own estimation and need an attitude adjustment. In this picture,
government plays the role of zookeeper. We need our modes of
transportation and industrial production tightly constrained, our
diets controlled, our claim of possessing marks of divine intention
or favor firmly denied, our offspring available immediately from
conception to be consumed for medical research.
Republican resistance to radicalized science is nothing
new. It goes back to the founding of modern
conservatism.
The book that launched the contemporary conservative
movement, Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences (1948),
traced man’s devolving self-image, with special attention to
Darwin. A University of Chicago philosopher, Weaver outlined the
cultural costs of a Darwin-directed “world picture,” and he
suggested the outlines of a scientific critique of evolutionary
theory. With “Darwinism… lurking in the background,” he wrote,
“Politics, arts, everything, came under the rule; man was primarily
a food- and shelter-finding animal.”
From this erring self-image, as he taught and many
conservatives still believe, men have derived almost all the
disastrous political and cultural ideas of modern times. It’s not
“science” that we deny but this effort to redefine man in the name
of science that we resist.
