Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Postmodern Conservatives

Well, I've been saying it for some time now, and the Hastings Center agrees with me: modern conservatism is striking for its intellectual reliance on postmodern cultural relativism.
To quote Salon's fairly devastating article on the Republican War on Science:

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."

(Which is exactly what I've said. Proof again that Foucault makes one stupider.)

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.

Well, you'll never lose trying to convince the public that intellectuals are out to get them. Maybe it's just interesting to me, but I find it amazing that public policy decisions like these could have been made by Nietzsche.

But, the cynicism about "junk science" is hardly limited to know-nothing conservatives. Oh, how many know-nothing liberals have told me of the evils of The Bell Curve! My first question is always "Which sections of the book were the least convincing to you?" And the answer is always: "I haven't read it. But, I don't need to because it's junk!"

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