Vitally Important Article: "Who Turned Out the Enlightenment?"

The current online edition of The National Journal contains a profoundly important (and for many, potentially unsettling) article on the politicization of science in modern America. Written by Paul Starobin, the article assaults both the political left and the political right for deliberately trying to bend scientific research to their own ends. Many of us in the political center-left will be uncomfortable with certain of Starobin's contentions. Many on the political right (if they bother to read the article at all) will be even more outraged. Starobin thinks the same way I do about these issues: it doesn't matter what anyone wants to be true; all that matters is what is true, or at least empirically verifiable. Increasingly, science has become a political football in this country, with ideologues and religious fanatics fighting against the reality of science's findings if that reality upsets their comfortable pre-conceived notions. Key excerpts:

The partisans are of two basic types. For shorthand, they can be called The Ideologues and The Big-Money Crowd

The Ideologues traverse the political spectrum, from the Religious Right to the New Left. The former push for the teaching of a pseudo-science, intelligent design, in biology class; the latter refuse to countenance the idea, taken seriously by biologists, that males and females may have different aptitudes for such subjects as math and language. Each is vulnerable to the courtroom dressing-down that the Jack Nicholson character, Marine Col. Jessep, delivered in "A Few Good Men." "You want answers?" the grizzled Nicholson asked a young Tom Cruise, playing a military lawyer.

"I want the truth!"

"You can't handle the truth!"

As for The Big-Money Crowd, the striking example is the fossil fuel industry's willful reluctance to acknowledge "an inconvenient truth" -- global warming -- as science evangelist Al Gore asserts in his new movie by that name. Probably these cool cucumbers, unlike The Ideologues, can handle the truth -- it is their bottom-line businesses that seem invested in fable and distortion. The real loser, of course, could be planet Earth.

As far as the differences in male and female capacities, I have my doubts about that. I've been a teacher for 32 years, and I fail to see these differences. But being a history teacher, I cannot safely judge the aptitude of females for math and science. I'm not afraid of research in this area, and I would never dream of trying to block it on ideological grounds. Let's settle the question instead of arguing about it. In regard to the global warming "controversy" (I put the term controversy in quotes because the so-called controversy is wholly manufactured), we know what's at stake. Despite the overwhelming evidence that human activity is exacerbating the natural cycles of the earth's warming and cooling, a massive political apparatus has sprung up to fight this evidence. This fight is solely based on economic self-interest, regardless of potential consequences.

The Left has sometimes violently objected to research that upsets its worldview. What happened to Edward O. Wilson is instructive:

In 1978, at a meeting in Washington of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a protester poured a jug of water over the head of Edward O. Wilson, a world-renowned Harvard entomologist whose specialty was the study of ants. The miscreant's compatriots verbally denounced Wilson for giving sustenance to sexism, racism, and genocide through his research.

Wilson's sin was his founding of "sociobiology," which he defined as the extension of "neo-Darwinism into the study of social behavior and animal societies." Humans were part of this analysis -- their activities treated not as outside of biological principles but as obedient to them. The result was a politically incorrect litany of examples that were presented in a nuanced fashion but infuriated the Left nevertheless. In the chapter on "Sex" in his book "On Human Nature," Wilson wrote, concerning humans and "most" animal species, that "it pays males to be aggressive, hasty, fickle, and undiscriminating," while "in theory it is more profitable for females to be coy, to hold back until they can identify males with the best genes."

On the question of whether human beings are "innately aggressive," and for this reason prone to warfare, "the answer," he wrote, "is yes." In The New York Review of Books, Wilson was attacked for reviving theories that were the basis for "the eugenics policies which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany."

I think this reaction can safely be characterized as hysterical. Wilson's bottom line is this: humans are animals with a long evolutionary past that has shaped their development. To contend, as some have, that cultural influences are the only factors that shape human behavior is to be dangerously misguided about why humans act as they do. Sociobiology is a legitimate scientific endeavor, now known chiefly as evolutionary psychology. Let the facts behind human behavior be explored, and if these facts destroy cherished prejudices, so be it.

By far the most egregious offenders against science, in Starobin's view, have been right wing Big Money people and ideologues. The litany of their sins is depressingly familiar:

[In promoting creationism after attempts at banning evolution failed] religious ideologues took a different tack, seeking to have public schools teach intelligent design in science classes as an alternative to evolution. The problem is that "ID is not science," as a George W. Bush-appointed federal judge, John E. Jones III, ruled decisively [PDF] in Harrisburg, Pa., last December. "ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation," Jones wrote in his explanation of why the Dover Area School Board was guilty of "breathtaking inanity" in its requirement that students be told about intelligent design in ninth-grade biology class.

Jones tossed out the Dover school board's requirement on the grounds that intelligent design, as "creationism relabeled," breached the constitutional wall separating church from state because it was the product of a religious viewpoint. He might have ruled narrowly; instead he provided a tutorial on the origins of the modern scientific method in the time of Newton. His ruling made clear that advocates of ID were not simply displaying hostility toward evolution -- they were, in effect, rejecting the workings of science and the evidence compiled by scientists since Darwin offered his theory in "The Origin of Species" in 1859. In attempting to package intelligent design as science, the ID advocates were rejecting science itself. In a way, this was intellectual hubris of the highest order.

For his troubles, Jones was accused by Phyllis Schlafly, a longtime activist on behalf of conservative religious causes, of being in league with "atheist evolutionists" and, more than that, of betraying "millions of evangelical Christians" who voted for Bush in 2000 and thus made possible Jones's appointment to the bench. In his ruling, Jones "stuck the knife in the backs of those who brought him to the dance," Schlafly thundered in a Copley News Service column.
The intelligent-design movement may or may not be dead as a result of Jones's ruling. But efforts to deny the scientific validity of evolution most certainly are not -- the forces behind intelligent design are merely regrouping. Of course, no one is under any compulsion to accept evolution -- or to accept, for that matter, the proposition that water boils at 100 degrees centigrade under normal pressure. But should popular democracy, as Schlafly implies in her column, get to decide what is and what is not credible science?

Exactly. Science is not "democratic". Its findings do not depend on popular support. In 1632 Galileo found himself deeply isolated in his opinion that we lived in a heliocentric universe. In our own era, as late as the 1930s, only one scientist in the world truly understood how the sun works. When opponents of evolutionary fact argue that most Americans reject evolution, they are making an argument of almost mind-warping idiocy, as if the laws of nature are determined by popular vote.

Starobin reminds us of Big Tobacco's assault on research that proved its products were dangerous. He exposes the cynicism of the Republican assault on environmental science (which uses Frank Luntz derived arguments about the "inconclusive" evidence of global warming). And he also criticizes Richard Dawkins, whom I deeply respect, for his efforts to use science to prove his contention that religious believers are essentially fools. (One scientist is quoted as calling Dawkins an evangelist for atheism and adding, "He's killing us.)

Starobin's arguments will raise a lot of hackles. Good! Let the hackle raising begin. Because, in the end, reality ALWAYS wins, despite our best efforts to ignore it or bend it to our will. The world is as it is. That simple proposition has been fought by too many people for too long. The dangers of the politicization of science lead Starobin to this conclusion:

A fascinating, if somewhat frightening, societal experiment is under way. The question is whether democracy naturally advances science, or whether modern progress in science actually has less to do with heralded forms of government than with the fruit born of a special moment in historical time, the modern European Enlightenment, from which America, courtesy of the Founders, greatly benefited.

Jefferson, the ultimate optimist about progress in science and democracy going hand in hand, died in 1826, at the dawn of what became known as Jacksonian America, a raucous new era of muddy-boots rule by "the people." Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat who toured this America in 1831 and was its most perceptive chronicler, worried about the prospect for science in the new Republic. "Nothing is more necessary to the culture of the higher sciences or of the more elevated departments of science than meditation; and nothing is less suited to meditation than the structure of democratic society," Tocqueville observed in "Democracy in America."

For a very long time, this appeared to be the rare Tocqueville insight that was off the mark. Our current age, though, seems bent on proving him right after all.

Read the whole thing--and become enlightened.