In the prelude to the first section of his book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney laments a lost dream.
The dream was that the power of human reason would eventually stamp out lies, prejudices, and falsehoods, delivering a truly enlightened society. It would be a society in which ideologically driven misinformation would gradually decline or disappear, vanquished and chased from the public sphere by rational arguments (like mine). It would be a society in which everybody could agree on the core facts about the world, especially those that matter to public policy and the future.
Truly, a fantasy world today given how fiercely conservatives avoid core facts and rational arguments. In fact, their rallying principle is to fight against them with their own version of reality and far too many people follow along. Worse, they "turn the tables" and say that it's the Democrats who aren't rational, truly killing this dream or a rational world.
But this dead dream didn't just recently die. It has been dying all along human history. Mooney cites the example of Marquis de Condorcet as an excellent illustration of this idealism. Condorcet was a passionate philosopher during the Age of Enlightenment. He hung out with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. Like all the great thinkers of this time, he championed the science of society and a society of social mathematics. He predicted a world that where reason and facts win out. He saw the villains of this world as dictators and priests and the heroes were the scientists and the innovators.
As Mooney notes...
...free inquiry and critical thinking-"that spirit of doubt which submits facts and proofs to severe rational scrutiny"-must prove unstoppable. It's virtually a law of nature. In the long run, our better faculties will enable not only the expression of human reason, but the creation of political system based upon universal human rights, social contracts, majority rule, and so on-precisely the sort of constitution Condorcet tried to establish in France as the terror descended.
The terror, of course, being the French Revolution. As Condorcet vainly tried to instill this philosophy in the new constitution, angry and hateful men (the Jacobins) rebelled against this rationality. Of course, Condorcet believed that if he got the word out about his type of society, through widespread dissemination via the printing press, rationality would "stamp out" wacky, ideological nonsense. Imagine what Condorcet would have thought about the internet and social media!
What he didn't realize was that the wider nets of communication allowed many other messages to mix in with the rational ones. Further, he neglected to understand that the human mind, in capturing these irrational messages, might be affected by them. The human mind had indeed progressed but, at its base, it was still primitive. So, the question is...how does this happen?
More importantly, what are the facts regarding why we deny facts? Science doesn't always persuade us let alone mere facts. Education doesn't really help either. Even having more information means that there are many more instances to twist reality and skew the facts. Why? What is the science about why we deny science?
This is what Mooney will be exploring in the next section of the book and the topic of my next post in this series.
1 comment:
"What is the science about why we deny science?"
People don't like science because it doesn't give them one pat simple answer. Science is full of ifs, buts and howevers. It changes as we learn more. It's complicated.
Most people don't want complications. They want to be told what the eternal truth is, and have it stay that way forever.
Life, however, is not like that. It's full of uncertainty. Conditions change. Science reflects the flux of knowledge that comes from learning new things.
Just look how frustrated and whiny people get every time the sciences of medicine, nutrition and exercise physiology change as the results of additional studies roll in.
I think this is a big part of why conservatives perceive religion and science as being opposed.
Most western religions (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) are static and dead, and overly obsessed with death.
Science is living, growing, and evolving, like life itself.
With science every day brings something new and exciting. The possibilities are endless.
With religion people just seem to be waiting around to die, so they can go to heaven and adulate god in exactly the same way for the rest of eternity.
Post a Comment