Sunday, November 17, 2013

Julius Caesar and Modern Politics

Fere libenter homines id quod volunt credunt. Men willingly believe what they want.

Is it any surprise that something Julius Caesar said more than 2,000 years ago resonates today? The above quote is a great example. To put Caesar’s idea another way, people’s beliefs are shaped largely by their mindsets, not by objective facts. Perhaps a more instructive way of looking at what this quote means is through the lens of what has been happening lately in politics: People freely and without question accept lies, half-truths, or intentional misstatements if that accords with their ideology or worldview. Perhaps that explains, at least in part, why conservatives and liberals cannot engage in meaningful dialogue and also why science has taken such a beating from conservatives and some liberals.

To confirm that assessment all you have to do is read the comments following a newspaper article or column that addresses a current political issue. A great example is what people thought of Clint Eastwood’s speech at the last Republican Convention. Conservatives found it energizing and on-target while progressives regarded it as rambling and verging on pathetic. All too few looked at the speech from an objective, analytical view point to identify its weaknesses and strengths in assessing the effectiveness of its message.

If we look at the way science has been buffeted in the past several decades, with conservatives attacking evolution, climate change, and sustainability, the same pattern prevails. Although nearly every single biological research scientist in the world embraces evolution as the most explanatory theory of the historical life development process, conservatives are unrelenting in their opposition. If you don’t believe that statement, you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been happening with regard to the writing and publication of science text books for middle- and secondary schools, and here you better be thinking Texas.

In other words, a great deal of conservative opposition to evolution and climate change is not based on science but on ideology, as Caesar predicted. Not that progressives are blameless in that regard. Noted examples include liberal biases against genetically modified foods, geoengineering as a solution to climate change, and new types of nuclear power (such as thorium).

But, in all honesty, the scales are nowhere close to being close in this matter, despite the biased coverage in news media. Over the past several years numerous social scientists[i] independently analyzed the U.S. conservative movement’s challenges to environmental problems and found that the environmental skepticism controversy stems largely if not entirely from concerted efforts of a powerful political movement composed of right-wing foundations, conservative think tanks, and wealthy right-wingers such as the Koch brothers. No such organized or systematic attacks by liberals on science have been discovered.

It is important to note that the peer-reviewed research by the social scientists mentioned above concluded that the promotion of skepticism and denial as a key tactic of the anti-environmental counter-movement has been coordinated by conservative think tanks and was designed specifically to undermine the environmental movement’s efforts to legitimize its claims via objectively obtained (scientific) evidence.

So, what we have is an innate human weakness that colors how we think, how we react to information, and how we make judgments that has been systematically used by the conservative political movement to bolster support and to attack their liberal opponents. As a result, public understanding of science and scientists has been undermined by intentional misstatements, half-truths, and blatant misrepresentations that constitute the boldest kind of well-organized deception.




[i] See Boykoff, M. T., & Boykoff, J. M. 2004. "Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the US Prestige Press." Global Environmental Change, 14(2), 125-136; Dunlap, Riley E., Chenyang Xiao, and Aaron M. McCright. 2001. “Politics and Environment in America: Partisan and Ideological Cleavages in Public Support for Environmentalism.” Environmental Politics, 10(4):23-48; Dunlap, Riley E., and Peter J. Jacques. 2013. “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks: Exploring the Connection.” American Behavioral Scientist, 20, 10: 1-33; Gauchat, Gordon. 2012. “Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010.” American Sociological Review 77: 167-187; and Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. M. Conway. 2010. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. New York: Bloomsbury Press among others.

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