Bloodless Coup

A Continuation of the Gremlins Thread

[NOTE: This started as a comment in the Gremlins thread, but then I started picking apart Krugman's piece and it grew to post size. For newcomers (all 2 of you?) to the discussion, the original thread was one of the many in the blogosphere criticizing the president's comments on intelligent design.]

That damn Krugman is going to have to stop reading Bloodless and writing columns about it. (just kidding, folks, just kidding). Note his discussion of the way politics work. Excerpts below with minor snippage, all emphasis mine.

Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking.

Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit."

"Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government."

OK, this is what I was talking about above. The facts about fringe theories be damned, all opinions are "equal."

Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers.

I find it interesting that he doesn't mention tobacco here.

You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences.

The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil.

Here, about why the average person can't always discriminate between science and propaganda. Note that this does not suggest people are unintelligent, but that they are being deliberately manipulated.

There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science?

Krugman continues to explain how the mainstream media is complicit in this false dichotomy.

Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close.

And here, he gets to the meat of what I think a lot of these debates degenerate into. As baltar pointed out in his post yesterday, and has been on display in numerous comment threads in the blogophere, this argument rapidly generates into "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO THINK!" vs "DON'T TELL ME WHAT TO BELIEVE!" As baltar said, some people are galled that they cannot make the rest of us live like they do. Others of us are galled that our thinking is not valued as much as other people's believing. Of course, each side believes the other has the wrong mechanism for achieving the final result. The respect for modernity by those of faith and and the respect for faith by "men of science" that allowed some of the great progress - as well as great disasters - of the mid-twentieth century is unraveling but it's not because the scientists are seeking to enter churches and change the bible.

Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us.

Again, calling out the anti-elitism of the opponents is right on target. And again, related to what I said in a comment to baltar's post about it being hard to be an oppressed minority when you are more than three quarters of the population, it's hard to be an "elite" when you (read:scientists and non-scientists who reject creationism) are the vast majority. Yet as explained above, that the elite are the vast majority and the pro-ID people a tiny fraction doesn't matter to those who seek to create and then politically exploit the public's confusion. This is why I focused so heavily on the idea of the much-touted 70 biologists versus literally millions of other scientists. The pro-ID claim that there are two equally valid sides to the argument. That's akin to me insisting that the sky is red while everyone else in my town says it's blue, and then making the claim that both arguments are equally valid. Let me reiterate that what I am talking about here is the cynical political exploitation of the populace in seeking to convince them that two positions are of equal scientific validity when they are not.

Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools.

But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations?

Begging Dr. Krugman's pardon, but I think that if he still thinks it is a question of "what if" he needs to get his head out of his latest book project and pay attention to what's going on in this country.

Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed.

The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom.

So, you see why I teased about him reading our debates. Alas what it probably means is that we have replicated here the sum total of thousands of others. In all the above discussions I have tried to remind us to keep our eyes on the ball - the politics - despite efforts to divert the discussion to "proving" that religious beliefs stand on equal scientific footing with evolutionary theory. Note that I emphsize "equal scientific footing." I do not deny that in societies a particular religion may share footing with other religions as well as with secular ideas and morals in the self-determination of a people. This is why for centuries we have had philosphers.

And see PZ Myers if our little discussion hasn't been enough.

Posted by binky at August 5, 2005 12:24 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics