Obama: Alan Freed / Shutterstock.com, dinosaur: DM7/Flickr
Following on the last post, I can now share my written Mother Jones rebuttal to Michael Shermer on the left, the right, and science.
Shermer penned a piece on the “Liberal War on Science” in Scientific American–I explain why he’s way off. This, in particular, is noteworthy:
“Shermer’s article ends with a statement that, as far as I can tell, is just incorrect: ‘Surveys show that moderate liberals and conservatives embrace science roughly equally,’ he writes. I’m not sure where he gets this, but for a direct rebuttal let me point you to a recent study in the American Sociological Review by Gordon Gauchat, which finds that unlike liberals or moderates, conservatives have lost trust in science rather precipitously over the past several decades.”
You can read the full item here.
I’m curious if Shermer may have been talking about the European liberal thinkers because those folks are the ones who distrust scientists. Yes, just opposite of the liberal thinkers here in the USA. Unless he has stumbled onto a new trend in some small region of the USA… he would be mistaken.
Maybe. It’s pretty clear that the European left is worse–and more mainstream–than the American left. Why this is the case is a very big discussion.
I lived in Hungary for 6 months with a conservative thinking family. Their fears were American influences in regards to processed foods, GMO and possible gun freedoms. For me, a more liberal thinker, I could justify those concerns too. I remember how Hungarians were shocked by American cows being given hormones and you can see some references to this cultural shock in some of their media- movies, TV shows, etc.
Well as you point out in your book there is a big difference between the political identification of “conservative” or “liberal” vs the more accurate scientific one as a personality trait resistant to change or open to new experiences. The political affiliation allows for considerable fudging. Vague definitions only give you vague results. Political definitions also are highly subject to bias since you are relying on people’s sense of what other people’s politics are and on self reporting. Which is usually…. not that accurate.
I think all this gives market *fundamentalist* Shermer too much credit. He’s really only a nominal atheist and his “skepticism” plays both sides when it comes to pseudoskepticism. I say nominal, because he rarely doesn’t pander to market woo. I don’t know what else to call his Mammon worship: we should subordinate mere human beings to immortal, all-powerful, invisible persons who fix things up without any analysis or human intervention, via Invisible Hands and the “magic” of their interactions. We had to beat the market fundamentalists over the head with climate facts for decades, exactly like had to happen with Christian fundamentalists over evolution. The market fundies’re still full of crap on nuclear power, for instance. I remind everyone of the “don’t worry, be happy, the media sucks!” article by a business supply chain student “at” MIT that virtually every science blog featured prominently and defended – though it was in fact a compendium of nonsense, lies and wishful thinking. And no one, to my knowledge, ever apologized to (a) the media, which did a great job in a crisis situation w/r/t Fukushima or (b) the readers, for lying to them and putting them down when they protested being lied to.