I read Chris Mooney’s book "The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality" and was very intrigued by it. So it was with eager anticipation that I looked forward to reading this book. First, let me say that I love science, and relish the hunt for truth about the world and the cosmos we live in. In reading this book, I became quite frustrated as I learned about the assault on science by right wing interests. Science is dynamic; it provides a constant onslaught to the old orthodoxies challenging the more static worldviews. Part of the problem is modern conservatism’s distrust of “big government,” which increases tension with science since much science depends on government funding or takes place in government agencies. “The conservative faith in industry and unrestrained capitalism seems to fuel a parallel assumption that industry-sponsored science – like the free market itself – stands above reproach,” says Mooney.
He starts with a discussion of what he calls the politicizing of science, which results in an abuse of scientific truth. He provides a catalog of politicized interferences with science such as attempts to undermine science, suppression of scientific reports, targeting individual scientists, magnifying uncertainty, ginning up contrary “science,” and more.
The ideological merger between religious conservatives and business interests began in the 70s and 80s. Also at this time, notes Mooney, alarmed by the new wave of environmental, health and safety rules, big business developed powerful lobbying groups, (PACs) and a new way of thinking about how to spend their money in sponsoring research and intellectual inquiry. In 1972, Nixon even dissolved the President’s Science Advisory Committee and abolished the office of the science advisor. The attack was well underway! The assault on science continued. In the 1990’s the Gingrich Republicans dismantled the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which had been created in the wake of the supersonic transport controversy (1972) to provide the Congress with an independent source of scientific analysis. The mantra came to be “sound science.” This term had little to do with scientific rigor; it had “everything to do with blocking government controls on industry by raising the burden of scientific proof required to justify action,” according to Mooney.
The attacks involved the science of acid rain, CFCs and the ozone, and, by the 1990s, global warming. Today we see so much “dubious science and outright nonsense” in respect to climate science – thanks to, at least in part, the “Gringrich Congress” of the 1990s. The political misuse of science did not begin with the 104th Congress in 1995, but the Gingrich Republicans represented a new level of abuse. With these attacks came new terminology, such as “sound science” and “junk science.” The term sound science, for the right, actually was an ideological term connected to a science-abusing regulatory reform agenda resulting in “paralysis by analysis.” The term “junk science” became frequently attached to any research that didn’t mesh with the laissez-faire policy of regulated companies. If you can’t beat them, confuse them became the mantra. Concerning the global warming denial campaign, which Mooney elaborates on at length, he noted very incisively that “climate change has become an issue on which conservatives have elected to fight over science at least as much as over as over economics, relying on stunning distortions and a shocking disregard for both expertise and the most reputable sources of scientific assessment and analysis.”
Not content at inhibiting regulatory reform directly, it became effective to attack the science that might lead to any unwanted regulatory action. Through the efforts of people like lobbyist Jim Tozzi, legislator Jo Ann Emerson, and White House administrator John Graham, we see programs such as the Data Quality Act, the Shelby amendment, and a “peer review” system of Graham’s design – all efforts to quash any attempt to pass industry despised regulations.
Mooney now considers the Endangered Species Act. He devotes an entire chapter to showing clearly how Republicans engaged in a disturbing quest to use science to gut the ESA, and presents evidence of Bush administration tactics to suppress scientific information coming out of agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Services and the National Marine Fisheries Service. This suppression of science continued with stem cell research, where the quest to “generate arguments sympathetic to a religiously conservative moral agenda” was fully explored. Next we are confronted with the Christian right’s war on sexual health. Here we learn about the false claims concerning abortion – it causes breast cancer and psychological illness, as well as the false claims that condom use is ineffective, or that abstinence programs actually work.
Mooney concludes by providing some insight on what we can do. Perhaps the conservatives can be reasoned with – “begging that they step back from the abyss before it’s too late.” We can restore the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, the Office of Science and Technology Policy can be restored to its previous strength, eliminate the political litmus test for committee membership, roll back the “sound science” regulatory reform movement which is designed to create paralysis by analysis, and so on. These political attacks on science succeed, in part, because they confuse everyone by making us think that a controversy exists when actually there is none. We need journalistic balance, that is, report the facts rather that give equal weight to true science and it nemesis – false science. Mooney laments that “we cannot escape the reality that we face a political problem, one that requires explicitly political solutions.” Let’s hope they’re forthcoming.
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