My new friend Michael Adeney, whom I met while speaking at Seattle Pacific University in late February, just recommended Science Left Behind: Feel-Good Fallacies and the Rise of the Anti-Scientific Left, by Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), a fascinating, sometimes funny, hard-hitting but fair book on the really serious problem of unscientific thinking in the contemporary Progressive movement. I began reading it today.
Folks in the movement often accuse conservatives of being unscientific, and in some instances they’re right. But the sword is two-edged. So are plenty of Progressives, particularly in the Green movement. This book documents quite a few instances of such.
Here are a few quotes from the beginning of the book:
“A progressive atmosphere is simply incompatible with producing high-quality science. Though progressives try to claim common cause with liberals, today’s progressive movement is more an umbrella of clustered, socially authoritarian interests.”
“The publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 was the real demarcation point when modern progressives left behind the scientific and über-rational legacy of the past. From that point on, they embraced radical environmentalism and other visions of a natural utopia.”
“Most current wrongheaded progressive ideas can be traced back to these four mythologies: 1.Everything natural is good. 2.Everything unnatural is bad. 3.Unchecked science and progress will destroy us. 4.Science is only relative anyway.” The follow-up discussion of these is insightful.
“While claiming to wholeheartedly trust in science and scientists, progressives do so only until scientific findings fail to uphold their cherished progressive values. When that occurs, progressives accuse the scientists of transforming into shills for big industry or evil geniuses experimenting with world destruction. As soon as a cost-benefit analysis leads a corporation to do something that isn’t green enough, businesses are accused of putting profits over people. As we explore in the book, this leads to policies like Europe’s precautionary principle, putting the burden on corporations to prove that a food or chemical is 100 percent safe, as opposed to the status quo in America, which is that the burden is on the opposition to prove something unsafe. It’s an innovation-killing policy.”
A few chapter titles: “The State of the ‘Pro-Science’ Union,” “Organic Food: the Holy Eucharist of Environmentalism,” “Crappy Conservation and Clean Energy Chaos,” “Sunshine Days and Flower Power,” “Bring on the Vaccines and Viagra,” “PETA: Professional Experimenters Testing on Animals,” “Welcome to the Anti-Renaissance,” and, of particular interest to me as a former newspaper reporter and editor and frequent op ed writer now, “The Death of Science Journalism.”
E. Calvin Beisner says
Well, this is one of those times when you recommend a book early on in reading it and then wish you’d made your recommendation with a strong qualification. The book is very uneven. Some of it expresses pretty sound scientific conclusions, some of it not. And what I’m sensing increasingly–now that I’m about a fourth of the way through–is that that’s because the authors themselves haven’t, in many cases, gone much below headlines in their research, and the book is more a prolonged diatribe of conservative condemnation of Progressive policies on the grounds that they lack scientific basis, when in some instances it’s not nearly so much the science as the ideological disagreements that lead these authors to reject the Progressives’ policies. Frankly, thus far there’s more politics than science in the book. Too bad.