Site Presented By
Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
This list has become Exhibit A in the argument that genuine scientific controversy exists over evolution, and to the layperson it certainly looked impressive. Bush and Santorum are not likely, however, to mention the National Center for Science Education's hilarious response. The NCSE began gathering names of scientists who agreed that evolution was "a vital, well-supported, unifying principle of the biological sciences" -- but restricted membership to those whose names were Steve, Stephanie or some other variation of Stephen. As of Monday, "Project Steve" -- named in honor of the late Stephen Jay Gould -- had 600 signatories.
But while scientists, political junkies and lay readers alike have been understandably mesmerized by these moral-cum-theological crusades, the corporate right has embarked on an immense stealth campaign to undermine science as a regulatory tool. The details of this clandestine effort, conducted mainly in Washington backrooms and the fine print of obscure legislation, are not sexy or glamorous, but it's here that Mooney's reporting reaches its most impressive heights. As he demonstrates, a little-known lobbyist named Jim J. Tozzi -- a former jazz musician turned corporate hired gun -- got "two sentences of legalese" stuck into a 2000 appropriations bill, and thereby handed big business one of its largest legislative victories in history.
Tozzi's bill, known as the Data Quality Act, has done what Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Republican Revolution" was unable to do: It has reformed the regulatory process such that big money almost always has the upper hand. As Mooney puts it, the Bush administration has interpreted the act as "an unprecedented and cumbersome process by which government agencies must field complaints over the data, studies and reports they release to the public. It is a science abuser's dream come true." Essentially, business interests are now empowered not merely to challenge government regulations (they could already do that) but to challenge the value of "scientific information that could potentially lead to regulation somewhere down the road."
Any time a scientific study emerges that industry doesn't like -- on the effects of secondhand smoke, the link between atrazine and frog deaths, the near extinction of an endangered fish in a dammed river -- lawyers and lobbyists can now tie the science in knots for years to come, requesting reviews and re-reviews and even challenging the findings in court. Aided by friends like Fox News online columnist Steven Milloy -- who seems to view all claims of dangerous pollution or species endangerment as "junk science" -- corporate advocates can effectively swamp any potential regulation in a mixture of public confusion and "paralysis by analysis."
Mooney's litany of conservative assaults on science goes well beyond a listing of interlinked but essentially ad hoc right-wing positions. Rather, this is a well-coordinated campaign, perhaps most noteworthy for the canny and cynical way it manipulates contemporary public doubt about the meaning and value of science. As Thomas Murray, president of the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank, puts it, "What's intriguing about the Bush administration, given their views on most issues, is that they have a postmodern take on science. It's the first postmodern science administration we've ever known."
While Mooney explores this question with his customary clarity and reasonableness, he doesn't do quite as much with it as he could. Whether knowingly or not, the Bush administration and its allies have cashed in on the findings of the contemporary academic field known as science and technology studies (also as the history and/or philosophy of science). Following such philosophers as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault and Paul Feyerabend, this field has explored science as a cultural phenomenon, arguing (for instance) that even when scientists deal with near-certain facts, the understanding of scientific knowledge and the social uses to which it is put are always culturally specific.
It's impossible to say how much this arcane field of inquiry has crept into the public consciousness, but let's put it this way: Ordinary people clearly don't trust science the way they used to. Mooney, like Frank, points to Barry Goldwater's 1964 presidential campaign, with its contempt for the "pinhead intellectuals" of the Eastern establishment, as the moment when this meme was established in right-wing ideology. At the time, moderate Republicans ridiculed this tendency, worried that it would doom their party to know-nothing irrelevance; little did they know how dominant it would become.
One could argue, however, that the real roots of science's contemporary dilemma run much deeper. Conservative contempt for the intellectual and scientific elite is closely akin to the left-leaning, postmodernist spirit of science and technology studies; both reflect the realization that science is a human endeavor and as such prone to errors, blind spots and both ideological and economic manipulation. With Hiroshima, the Holocaust and Chernobyl in the rear-view mirror, the planet poisoned by toxic chemicals and a new frontier of cloning and genetic engineering lying just ahead, it's reasonable to view the scientific project in toto as a morally cloudy exercise.
Furthermore, doubt is an essential element of scientific inquiry, as any honest scientist will tell you. The great strength of the scientific method lies in its production of testable and falsifiable hypotheses, but it yields absolute truth only gradually, if at all. If our certainty about such things as heliocentrism and the basic laws of earthbound physics now approaches 100 percent, it's only because they have survived decades or centuries of ruthless inquiry and no better explanations have emerged.
