(Basic Books, 2005, 342pp, including 86pp of interview credits, other credits, notes, and index.)
This is journalist Mooney’s first book, from 20 years ago, and it’s especially apropos to look back at now given the hostility to and/or misunderstanding of science by the current administration. Back in 2015 — 10 years ago! — I read the author’s 2012 book, THE REPUBLICAN BRAIN, and reviewed it here. Very broadly, this first book documents the extent Republicans were hostile to science, from the 1960s through the early 2000s, while the second book sought to understand why. (And that entailed how variations in human personality traits have lead to different takes on the world, especially in a present society that is so different than the ancestral environment where our minds evolved.)
Gist
The 10,000 foot view: Republicans’ increased hostility toward science came, beginning in the late 1950s, from its incursions into religious and business interests. Thus the antipathy toward regulations. (In parallel, not discussed in the book, is the right’s antipathy toward civil rights and the 1960s “counter-culture.”)
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Outline
So I won’t outline this one in great detail. It’s basically a litany of bad behavior, especially by the George W. Bush administration, which made news stories at the time without being drawn into a cohesive pattern. This book shows that pattern.
The keynote event, in chapter 1, was how in Summer 2001 Bush made an inaccurate claim about the number of existing stem-cell lines. The issue was whether stem cells could be used for scientific research. (Theoretically, stem-cells can mature into *any* kind of cell, thus suggesting the artificial growth of any kind of organ, e.g. for transplants.) Conservatives viewed the stem-cells as the moral equivalents of embryos (presumably with incipient souls) and opposed such research. So Bush argued that there enough existing stem cell lines in existence (some 60 or so) for scientific purposes, and so he could forbid the harvesting of any more without undermining the science. What Bush ignored was information about why most of those existing lines were *not* suitable for scientific research. By suppressing that information, Bush managed to appease the conservatives and *pretend* to support scientific research.
A couple quotes from this stage-setting, again with Mooney writing in 2004 or so. P4b:
…the modern Right has adopted a style of politics that puts its adherents in increasingly stark conflict with both scientific information and dispassionate, expert analysis in general.
P5.3:
At its most basic level, the modern Right’s tension with science springs from conservatism, a political philosophy that generally resists change. The dynamism of science — its constant onslaught on old orthodoxies, its rapid generation of new technological possibilities — presents an obvious challenge to more static worldviews.
M/w conservatives accuse their opponents of abuse of science, of ‘politicizing’ science. They claim theirs is “sound science” even as they defend “creation science” aka “intelligent design.” They’re driven by religion, and the bottom line. (We’ve just read about the right’s distortion techniques in a couple other books.)
Chapter 2 provides a skeleton for the rest of the book. The author defines science, and points out that it works. Even those who misuse science shroud themselves in scientific terms, as if understanding the authority implied by scientific thinking. How politicization works: undermining the science e.g. “just a theory”; suppression, e.g. reports about acid rain; targeting individual scientists, e.g. what Bush did to James Hansen on climate change; rigging the process, e.g. packing committees with idealogues. And how they deal with scientific results: errors and misrepresentations, e.g. Bush and embryonic stem cells; misrepresentations or distortions, e.g. climate change; magnifying uncertainty, e.g. “more research is needed”; relying on the fringe, e.g. handpicking “experts”; ginning up contrary “science”, e.g. the tobacco industry; and dressing up values in scientific clothing, e.g. refusing the approve the Plan B pill.
From here I’ll bullet points the main topics in the rest of the book.
- Ch3. Science was very strong in the 1940s. What happened? Business interests and religious conservatives. Buckley, Goldwater; Roe v. Wade; Silent Spring, inspiring regulations that businesses resented. Industries founded their own organizations to promote their interests and undermine people like Rachel Carson. Nixon was uninterested in fact, and dissolved his science advisory committee.
- Ch4. Reagan refused to acknowledge AIDS in the 1980s, and he claimed great flaws in evolution and endorsed creationism. Falwell and the Moral Majority. Creationists adopted scientific trappings rather than simply quoting scripture. Duane Gish, “flood geology” and the like, all easily refuted. Reagan’s EPA exploited “uncertainty” about acid rain to justify doing nothing. Yet he embraced the idea of “Star Wars,” despite lack of support by science. People like Dinesh D’Souza were Very Concerned about the health consequences of abortion. And EPA refused reports about CFCs and the Ozone layer. Bush I was better, but Gingrich far worse.
- Ch5. Gingrich was a science fiction fan and technophile, whose foremost idea was that government should shrink and the private sector fill in the gap. That politicians should each do their own “research” by finding their favorite “experts” (to support whatever conclusion they wanted). They promoted the phrase “sound science”. That members of Congress should decide which scientific views were right, on matters like global warming and the greenhouse effect.
- Ch6. They “manufactured uncertainty,” were against “regulatory overkill”; their hidden agenda was to require a higher burden of proof before taking action to protect health and the environment, accusing the other side of “junk science.”
- [[ All of this fits Lakoff’s duality: the motives of liberals are to protect people (i.e. by regulating the extent business interests can pollute the environment), while the motives of conservatives are to make money. ]]
- Four chapters cover themes of the George H. Bush administration. 1, James Inhofe and the idea that global warming was “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people”. 2, Something called the Data Quality Act, supposedly to prevent “bad information” from “needlessly hurting companies’ profits”, in reality making it more onorous to release data to the public, and abusing the idea of “peer review.” 3, How US Sugar struck back against WHO advice to cut back on fats and sugars, by attacking the scientists. And 4, conservative attacks against the Endangered Species Act, by redefining science to exclude modeling and muddying data from different contexts.
- A section about “scientific revelations” concerns the Republicans’ “paranoid distrust of the nation’s intellectuals” due to threats to the economic interests of private industry. One strand of this was “intelligent design” in which “controversy” in evolution was imagined as a “theory in crisis,” pretending to do science while advancing religious and moral goals, with a “Wedge Document” that made their guiding principles explicit: the Old and New Testaments. Philip Johnson, William Dembski, Michael Behe, Rick Santorum.
- A second strand was that one about stem-cell research.
- And a third was the supposed link between abortion and breast cancer, led by a one-time scientist, Joel Brind, who’d found Jesus. With similar issues of sex education and condom effectiveness, and Plan B, and how they claimed their science was validated by God.
- [[ The big theme here is that conservatives pretend to do science while masking their religious motivations; they’re arguing in bad faith. If they were doing science, why do they keep coming to different conclusions than legitimate scientists? There aren’t two versions of reality. ]]
- And the final section is about the “antiscience president” (at the time Mooney was writing) — George W. Bush. The Union of Concerned Scientists denounced him for his attitudes on embryonic stem cell research, climate change, and missile defense. His diminishment of scientific advisors, and assaults on committees. With that famous quote by an aide who said, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” (p243)
Epilogue: What can be done?
We need scientific experts to make informed decisions to run our democracy. But the modern conservative movement has brought us to a divorce between democracy and technocratic expertise. This can lead to calamity. What to do? One, we could try to warn conservatives of this danger. Or, we push for safeguards to protect expertise from manipulation and abuse. Revises the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. OTA. Or something like it. Restore the science advisor to the president. Safeguard advisory committees from political manipulation.
Further, dismantle incursions of “sound science”, the Data Quality Act, the “peer review” linked to it. Oppose politicizing laws. Journalists should do their jobs better, pretending that controversy exists where none does. Resist attempts to spin reporters. Examples of articles in major papers that failed to reflect the consensus on climate change, in favor of ‘balanced’ accounts. This is what science abusers exploit. Beware industry promotion of scientific abuse. Fight science-abusing religious conservatives in the schools. Support defenders of Enlightenment values: the scientists themselves.
Finally there are political problems. Oppose the antiscience right wing of the Republican party. Oppose political gains by the modern Right. See last lines, p255:
But if we care about science and believe that it should play a crucial role in decisions about our future, we must steadfastly oppose further political gains by the modern Right. This political movement has patently demonstrated that it will not defend the integrity of science in any case in which science runs afoul of its core political constituencies. In so doing, it has ceded any right to govern a technologically advance and sophisticated nation. Our future relies on our intelligence, but today’s Right — failing to grasp this fact in virtually every political situation in which is really matters, and nourishing disturbing anti-intellectual tendencies — cannot deliver us there successfully or safety. If it will not come to its senses, we must cast it aside.
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Of course this problem is *much* worse now than it was 20 years ago.
