Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

The disrespect of science among American right-wing politicians has been documented by the journalist Chris Mooney in The Republican War on Science and has led even stalwarts (such as Bobby Jindal, the former governor of Louisiana) to disparage their own organization as “the party of stupid.”⁴ The reputation grew out of policies set in motion during George W. Bush’s administration, including his encouragement of the teaching of creationism (in the guise of “intelligent design”) and the shift from a longstanding practice of seeking advice from disinterested scientific panels to stacking the panels with congenial ideologues, many of whom promoted flaky ideas (such as that abortion causes breast cancer) while denying well-supported ones (such as that condoms prevent sexually transmitted diseases).⁵ Republican politicians have engaged in spectacles of inanity, such as when Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee, brought a snowball onto the Senate floor in 2015 to dispute the fact of global warming.

The previous chapter warned us that the stupidification of science in political discourse mostly surrounds hot buttons like abortion, evolution, and climate change. But the scorn for scientific consensus has widened into a broadband know-nothingness. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, has harassed the National Science Foundation not just for its research on climate science (which he thinks is a left-wing conspiracy) but for the research in its peer-reviewed grants, which he pulls out of context to mock (for example, “How does the federal government justify spending over $220,000 to study animal photos in National Geographic?”).⁶ He has tried to undermine federal support of basic research by proposing legislation that would require the NSF to fund only studies that promote “the national interest” such as defense and the economy.⁷ Science, of course, transcends national boundaries (as Chekhov noted, “There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table”), and its ability to promote anyone’s interests comes from its foundational understanding of reality.⁸ The Global Positioning System, for example, uses the theory of relativity. Cancer therapies depend on the discovery of the double helix. Artificial intelligence adapts neural and semantic networks from the brain and cognitive sciences.

But chapter 21 prepared us for the fact that politicized repression of science comes from the left as well. It was the left that stoked panics about overpopulation, nuclear power, and genetically modified organisms. Research on intelligence, sexuality, violence, parenting, and prejudice have been distorted by tactics ranging from the choice of items in questionnaires to the intimidation of researchers who fail to ratify the politically correct orthodoxy.

My focus in the rest of this chapter is on a hostility to science that runs even deeper. Many intellectuals are enraged by the intrusion of science into the traditional territories of the humanities, such as politics, history, and the arts. Just as reviled is the application of scientific reasoning to the terrain formerly ruled by religion: many writers without a trace of a belief in God maintain that it is unseemly for science to weigh in on the biggest questions. In the major journals of opinion, scientific carpetbaggers are regularly accused of determinism, reductionism, essentialism, positivism, and, worst of all, a crime called scientism.

This resentment is bipartisan. The standard case for the prosecution by the left may be found in a 2011 review in The Nation by the historian Jackson Lears:

Positivism depends on the reductionist belief that the entire universe, including all human conduct, can be explained with reference to precisely measurable, deterministic physical processes. . . . Positivist assumptions provided the epistemological foundations for Social Darwinism and pop-evolutionary notions of progress, as well as for scientific racism and imperialism. These tendencies coalesced in eugenics, the doctrine that human well-being could be improved and eventually perfected through the selective breeding of the “fit” and the sterilization or elimination of the “unfit.” Every schoolkid knows about what happened next: the catastrophic twentieth century. Two world wars, the systematic slaughter of innocents on an unprecedented scale, the proliferation of unimaginably destructive weapons, brushfire wars on the periphery of empire—all these events involved, in various degrees, the application of scientific research to advanced technology.⁹

The case from the right is captured in this 2007 speech from Leon Kass, Bush’s bioethics advisor: