One of the most telling but least commented upon lines in President Obama’s inaugural speech was his promise to "restore science to its proper place". Since he doesn’t expand upon this restoration in the remainder of the speech it’s not immediately obvious what this amounts to. Of course, this assumes that science has been unjustly abused or neglected by the previous administration but even if one concedes that (and I don’t) that still wouldn’t settle the much thornier issue of how precisely we should understand the relation between science and politics.
It’s instructive to consider Obama’s defense of science in light of the more developed attack on the enervating effects of partisan politics–Obama promises to transcend the political differences between us for the sake of realizing a previously elusive common good. It’s not clear how Obama will achieve this or even if he’s capable–neither his primary or national campaign captured the whole of American support. This is not a criticism of Obama but an observation of the stubborn recalcitrance of partisan dispute. He has consistently advocated a kind of post-political brand of governance that seems to assume that partisan conflicts are never reflections of genuine versus spurious disagreement, are always based upon miscommunication or ideological dogmatism, and are never the result of competing worldviews that are held with deep, thoughtful conviction and are therefore resistant to facile revision. In other words, if politics is reducible to technocratic competence then there is something benighted about the clash of interests–out interests seem to be little more than idiosyncratic expressions of our rationally indefensible attachments.
For our new President, the proper place of science is beyond the murky waters of political compromise–it must be untethered from our old fashioned moral strictures and the bumbling roadblocks to progress that are the consequence of political restraint. Just as he denies in the speech that there are any potential tensions between our ideals and the practical demands of ensuring our security in an often less than ideal world, he simply rejects that there are any moral or political complexities born of out technological innovation that might justify some measure of political prudence, or even the admonishment of science. Obama’s view is not merely a oversimplification of the relation between science and politics, and consequently of science’s “proper place”, but a willful ignorance of the lessons regarding the dangers of a science divorced from prudence the twentieth century has provided.
January 26th, 2009 | 4:00 am
Well, I’m thinking Obama is referring to two issues wherein the Bush Administration went against what are termed “scientific consensuses.” The first would be on Darwinian evolution, which the president questioned. This is, of course, nonsense on Bush’s part–pandering to the base of “stupid tories” who reject an idea they don’t like largely because they don’t understand it. But that being said, Bush didn’t really DO anything based on this misapprehension. And for Obama to do anything about it would require a new expansion of federal power in education–something that always gives me shudders. So, nothing was removed so restoring anything here doesn’t make any sense.
What he’s probably referencing more directly is the way the Bush Admin refused to swallow anthropogenic global warming. We hear all the time that there is a “scientific consensus” that humans are to blame for global warming. This is simply not true. There was such a consensus among climate scientists, a field which is brand new in terms of scientific disciplines. Their primary tool is computer modelling of the climate, models which have serious flaws–namely that they fail to take water vapor (a dreaded greenhouse gas) and the water cycle’s impact on the climate into account, a function of the large gap in our knowledge as to what exactly this impact is. The result is that if you retrodict climatalogical conditions with these models–plugging in past variables to see how close it gets to what actually happened–they are only mostly right. But to take the so displayed level of error into predictions for the next century or more makes it impossible to speak of what impact we are having (if any) with any precision whatsoever. Geologists and paleontologists interested in ancient prehistoric climate conditions are far more skeptical about the claims of climate scientists. They point to periods about 150 million years ago where CO2 levels seem to have been 15 times higher than today and the Earth was under an ice age of heavy glaciation. They put the lie to any idea of “scientific consensus” on this point.
Furthermore the climate science consensus is starting to crack on the edges. For one it seems that the warming trend Al Gore and his cronies have wrapped themselves around the axle over reached a peak in 1998. Since then things have been getting progressively cooler, to the point that the Russian government is giving grants to climate scientists there worried about a global cooling trend. And naming man-made CO2 for all these problems seems particularly inane–CO2 makes up less than one tenth of one percent of our atmosphere and 97% of that is naturaly occurring. That something which accounts for .003% of our atmosphere is causing such a huge disturbance is suspicious. Not only that but man made CO2 levels actually peaked in 1929! After the big crash (uh, the first one that is…) there was a huge drop off in industrial production. By the time things got rolling again the technologies were cleaner and we never got back to that level, believe it or not.
All this to say that liberals get so enraged that anyone would doubt the creed of human guilt in the recent (and perhaps recently passed) warming trend that they must accuse them of anti-scientism. Obama promises to restore science to its rightful place by tossing skepticism to the wind and going wholehog for an idea whose evidence is slim and getting slimmer by the day.
And before I’m accused of being a flack for the oil companies or a right wing whackjob know that I voted for Ralph Nader, identify as a post left anarchist, smoke pot and have a big bushy beard. But facts are facts and dogma is dogma. The global warming hysteria is of questionable parentage of best.
January 26th, 2009 | 8:09 am
Andrew, thanks for this detailed analysis. (And for providing your bushy-beard credentials! That helps.) I’ve read information along these lines from so many sources, and yet, when I try to share them with my liberal husband, he literally goes ballistic and won’t listen. He simply cannot separate the issue from its politics. To even consider the idea that Al Gore doesn’t know all seems like blasphemy to him, like he’s suddenly on the side of the Hannities and Limbaughs… it’s like an affront to his very identity and sense of self. I’m afraid that may be what we’re up against, from a PR perspective, anyway. One would hope President Obama is less knee-jerk than that, though…less invested in his identity as a “liberal” than his identity as the president.
When I heard Obama make the “science in its rightful place” comment, my mind went immediately to stem cell research, and the fact that President Bush limited government funding of said research. Of course, the left enjoyed spreading the rumor that Bush had “banned” stem cell research, and many believed that lie, and probably still do. I certainly hope that when Obama talks of returning science to its “rightful place,” he’s not referring to some untouchable pedestal where ethical concerns are completely ignored… or deemed non-existent.
January 26th, 2009 | 10:14 am
Consider reading Chris Mooney’s “The Republican War on Science” for a start. It wasn’t just creationism, global warming and stem cell research (sorry to say but the Bush administration did lie about the number of usefulness of the stem cell lines he approved for use). Other areas of improper interference and re-writing by non-scientific appointees in subjects like animal & plant census reports, impact assessments for pollution, and land use data.
January 26th, 2009 | 2:06 pm
The FDA has approved serious testing of embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries. If those tests are successful, the moral objections to that research will suffer the same fate as a tortilla that has been stepped on by an elephant. And so will those who hold to those objections.
Be prepared to be squashed.
The dustbin of history awaits those who oppose science.
January 26th, 2009 | 4:06 pm
Ivan, thanks for your thought provoking comments. The President’s promise to restore science to its rightful place means simply that it is to become even more the handmaiden of big government than it has been in the past. Obama, and others of like mind, are infatuated with the idea of AGW, because then every human action by definition has a potentially adverse effect on the planet, and hence must be regulated. (Not that it’s easy to think of an aspect of one’s life that isn’t already regulated.)
January 26th, 2009 | 9:01 pm
Ah yes. Science in its proper place. The old liberal dream of a technocratic utopia where there will be no war, no hunger, no hatred…. I think someone wrote a book about it once… oh yea. He called it Brave New World.
January 27th, 2009 | 11:24 am
Um, no, Kevin V. The Scientism you describe is not what he meant. A major notion is letting scientific reports get published without intermediate censoring.
Another thoughtful take on the discussion comes from John Wilkins:
http://scienceblogs.com/evolvingthoughts/2009/01/the_place_of_science_in_societ.php
Bill Parsons, it is important to note that I, like many other scientists in the US are less interested in being ‘handmaidens of big government’ and more interested in seeing legitimate reports not being edited, suppressed or twisted by ideologues. Let the reports out an let the chips fall where they may. That a moderate like Christine Todd Whitman, while serving as director of the EPA, couldn’t operate unscathed by Cheney et al., speaks volumes.
January 29th, 2009 | 1:44 pm
I will cheer whole-heartedly with the rest of the scientific community when the President’s Starchamber of Bioludditry gets ridden out of town on a rail.
I hope those guyz never work again……actually a little tar and feathers would be nice for those creepy anti-science sellouts.
Sweet!
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