Cheap Slurs

Science in the Propagandist's Hands

In his superb book, The Tyranny of Cliches, Jonah Goldberg has a rollicking chapter on science.  It turns out that science has often become a club to beat up ideological opponents.  One of the most damaging slurs, apparently, that can be hurled at one's opponent is to accuse them of being anti-science.

Here are some classics of the genre:

Now, we don't know who will win next year's presidential election.  But the odds are that one of these years the world's greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge.  And, in a time of severe challenges--environmental, economic, and more--that's a terrifying prospect.

Paul Krugman, "Republicans Against Science," New York Times, August 28, 2011.

More intelligent individuals m ay be more likely to acquire and espouse evolutionary novel values and prefences (such as liberalism and atheism . . . ) than less intelligent individuals.

Satoshi Kanazawa, London School of Economics and Political Science, "Why Liberals and Atheists are More Intelligent," Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2010.

We confess to enjoying great sport at lampooning the idiocy and stupidity of those who invest their own views and prejudiced cant with a veneer of superior intelligence.  There are none so dumb and stupid as those who proclaim their own (or their identify group's) superior wisdom and intelligence, in the vain attempt to assure themselves they are "smarter than the average bear".

Here is Jonah Goldberg's amusing take on the circus:

A host of liberal activists and intellectuals are deeply invested in the idea that conservatives are "antiscience".  Obviously, not all of these people argue in bad faith.  But many argue in very selective good faith.  They pick and choose the benchmarks of what constitutes being proscience.  So, for example, if you disagree with not only the diagnosis of climate change but the proposed remedies for it, you are antiscience.  Before it became clear that culling stem cells from human embryos was essentially unnecessary, it became a matter of faith that opposition to creating life in order to destroy it wasn't a matter of conscience, but evidence of antiscience views.  . . . Defenders of embryonic stem cell research insist that opponents want to deny people life-saving remedies.  This is a horrendous slander on several levels, but if that is the relevant metric, how are we to deal with the armies of activists who oppose the use of DDT, which could save millions from malaria. . . . 

It is a scientific fact fire burns things.  One is not denying science when one seeks to ban arson.  No doubt, we could learn something  useful by conducting horrific experiments upon live human beings.  But conservative and liberals alike oppose such practices not because they are against science but because ethical considerations trump the pursuit of knowledge at all costs.  If Democrats came out tomorrow in favor of human vivisection and Republicans opposed it, Republicans would not suddenly become antiscience.  Rather, Democrats would suddenly become wrong.  [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p. 205f.]

All too often hurling the sobriquet antiscience against one's opponent is a cheap slur, masquerading as an argument.  All too often science is a wax nose to be twisted and manipulated for ulterior ends.  All too often science is made to become the facile tool of  the propagandist.