Friday, September 7, 2012
Science Debate 2012
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2012/09/science-debate-2012.html
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First, I don’t think it’s a “caricature” to characterize the Democrats as “pro-science” and the Republicans, comparatively, as “anti-science.” The Republicans, far more than the Democrats, are in some measure responsible for the fact “that Americans can be notably hazy at distinguishing between academic orthodoxy, vaunting scientistic ambition, and New Age or fundamentalist claptrap,” or the fact that while many Americans “are keen on the idea of science and its promised goods…their familiarity with the facts, theories and practices of orthodox science is demonstrably more shaky than that of many other developed countries” (Steven Shapin). See, for instance, Chris Mooney’s well-known book, The Republican War on Science (2005), and look more recently at statements on evolution and other scientific topics from Ron Paul, Rick Perry, and Michele Bachmann, which I think are fairly representative of many politicians in the Republican Party and the mass constituency of the Right. In other words, Romney is too shrewd to express and to intelligent to hold such views, knowing full well he needs to appeal to those outside the Party as well as “centrist” middle-aged, white-male Democrats who occasionally vote Republican (and some of whom became Independent or Republican with Nixon and Reagan respectively). Thus the “debate” documented here does indeed find Romney taking positions contrary to many Republican activists and politicians as well as many Republican voters generally, one reason why he has garnered fairly lukewarm support and not a little suspicion from the Right, all of which can be set aside or transcended only because he came to be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the only candidate capable of defeating Obama (and we probably can count on one hand the number of potential Romney voters who will learn of his policy positions in this regard).
That said, the understanding of both the nature of science (its philosophy and epistemology as well as motley methods) and science-in-the-turbo-capitalist-world of neoliberalism by members of both parties is amazingly naïve and simple-minded (including all the rhetorical nonsense about the economics of ‘innovation’), as systematically documented and explained, first, in two books by Daniel Greenberg: Science, Money and Politics (2001) and Science for Sale (2007), and, more thoroughly—including a far more sophisticated grasp of the nature of science, the relevant political economy of science, and the ideological role of neoliberalism—by Philip Mirowski (of Notre Dame!) in his brilliant work, Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science (2011).