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.
