The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (32 page)

The Democratic Party since Clinton has tried to “transcend” interest-group liberalism by treating the whole middle class as a monolithic interest group. From housing policy, to student loans, to health
care, the philosophy driving the Democratic Party amounts to middle-class social democracy. It’s not evil. And, though it makes the libertarian inside me scream in agony to say it, it’s not altogether wrongheaded. A modern society does have an obligation to figure out how to care for those who cannot care for themselves, be they sick, poor, or elderly. That doesn’t require centralized, state-driven policies. Nor does it require policies that undermine the Smithian virtues. But it does require some policies.

The problem with the contemporary liberal approach is that it amounts to middle-class welfare. Not only can we not afford it economically, the middle class cannot afford it morally. To miss out on the opportunity to cultivate the Smithian virtues is to eat the seed corn of social capital. Liberals to be sure don’t see it that way. They see it as an effort to make life easier, to expand the realm of “positive liberty” that John Dewey envisioned and FDR hoped to implement with his “economic bill of rights.” Here’s Nancy Pelosi explaining how the Affordable Care Act (i.e., ObamaCare) would stimulate the economy: “We see it as an entrepreneurial bill, a bill that says to someone: ‘If you want to be creative and be a musician or whatever, you can leave your work, focus on your talent, your skill, your passion, your aspirations because you will have health care. You won’t have to be job locked.’”

Never mind that the causal link between socialized medicine and entrepreneurism is not exactly firmly established. The larger point is that the liberal vision of an advanced society is one where it is finally rich enough to liberate the middle class from their comfortable bourgeois lifestyles and to subsidize their conversion to bohemian ones. If you want to be a “musician or whatever” it’s okay, because we’ll tax the rich enough so that you don’t have to worry about life’s essentials (like health care or housing or food or your kids’ education) anymore. In other words they are going to win their centuries’-old war on the middle class by subsidizing the bohemian lifestyle to the point where it no longer pays to be bourgeois. It probably won’t work in the long run. But in the short run, it will bankrupt us all, not only financially, but morally as well.

^*
I am indebted to Christopher Lasch’s seminal
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(W.W. Norton & Company, 1991) for his discussion of this period.

18

SCIENCE

T
hey do that because they were born that way.”

If you say that about homosexuals, you are tolerant and realistic.

If you say it about blacks, you are racist (unless you’re black).

If you say it about Jews, you’re anti-Semitic, unless it’s in the context of criticizing Israel, in which case you’re simply telling “hard truths” everyone else is afraid to say.

If you say it about women, you may or may not be sexist, depending on who is manning (er, Womanning) the feminist battle stations at the moment.

If you say it about men, you just might be a writer for
Esquire
.

But if you say it about conservatives, you’re a scientist.

If the tyranny of clichés can be understood as the use of allegedly nonideological insights to advance starkly ideological understandings of the world, then “science”—and what it allegedly tells us—is the mother of tyranny (figuratively speaking of course). From climate change to embryonic stem cell research to early childhood education, patently ideological agendas are camouflaged under the tarp of scientific rhetoric while plainly legitimate scientific findings are dubbed “pseudoscience” when they prove inconvenient. Second perhaps only to “health,” science is routinely used as a false flag of reasonableness carried by those who allegedly only care about “the facts,” but are in fact concerned about something else.

A host of liberal activists and intellectuals are deeply invested in the idea that conservatives are “antiscience.” Obviously, not all of these people argue in bad faith. But many argue in very selective good faith. They pick and choose the benchmarks of what constitutes being proscience. So, for example,
if you disagree with not only the diagnosis of climate change but the proposed remedies for it, you are antiscience. Before it became clear that culling stem cells from human embryos was essentially unnecessary, it became a matter of faith that opposition to creating life to destroy it wasn’t a matter of conscience, but evidence of antiscience views. And of course, there’s the issue of “creationism,” which is a very comfortable terrain for liberals to argue on for obvious reasons (the earth is not six thousand years old), even if the political relevance of the underlying questions are ultimately trivial.

But it is quite easy to play this game the other way. Why can’t the measure of being proscience hinge on the question of heritability of intelligence? Or the existence of fetal pain? Or the distribution of cognitive abilities among the sexes at the extreme right tail of the bell curve? Or if that’s too upsetting, how about drawing the dividing line between those who are pro- and antiscience along the lines of support for geoengineering? Or—coming soon—the role cosmic rays play in cloud formation? Why not make it about support for nuclear power? Or Yucca Mountain? Why not deride the idiots who oppose genetically modified crops, even when they might prevent blindness in children? Defenders of embryonic stem cell research insist that opponents want to deny people life-saving remedies. This is a horrendous slander on several levels, but if that is the relevant metric, how are we to deal with the armies of activists who oppose the use of DDT, which could save millions from malaria?

During the Larry Summers fiasco at Harvard, comments delivered in the classic spirit of open inquiry and debate cost Summers his job. Summers speculated that there might be more male geniuses than female ones. Some evidence apparently suggests men are overrepresented among morons and brainiacs, while the average woman is smarter than the average man. Scientists got the vapors because he violated the principles not of science but of
liberalism
. During the Gulf oil spill, the Obama administration dishonestly claimed that its independent experts supported a drilling moratorium. The experts emphatically did not and said so in public protest. The president who campaigned on basing his policies on sound science ignored his own handpicked scientists. According to the GAO he did something very similar when he shut down Yucca Mountain.

The idea that conservatives are antiscience is self-evident and self-pleasing
liberal hogwash. It is also hogwash that liberals are intrinsically opposed to science. The reality is that each side sees science for what it is: a tool. In this case they see it as a tool to advance larger arguments. Liberals tend to be constrained by their exaltation of egalitarianism, conservatives tend to be constrained by what pro-lifers would call the sanctity of life. There’s nothing inherently wrong with either value-system and reasonable people can have reasonable arguments about where their principles need to bend. It is a scientific fact that fire burns things. One is not denying science when one seeks to ban arson. No doubt, we could learn something useful by conducting horrific experiments on live human beings. But conservatives and liberals alike oppose such practices not because they are against science but because ethical considerations trump the pursuit of knowledge at all costs. If Democrats came out tomorrow in favor of human vivisection and Republicans opposed it, Republicans would not suddenly become antiscience. Rather, Democrats would suddenly become
wrong.

Obviously, politicians—of both parties—routinely hide behind convenient studies and cherry-picked data and activists—again, of all ideological stripes—have their share of junk science. And while I would cherish the opportunity to take a swatter to the swarm of Naderite botflies that claim they are simply giving human voice to the otherwise cold empiricism of the scientific method, the best illustration of the deeper problem is in the always new science of conservative phrenology.

Okay, it’s not technically phrenology (the old science of measuring head shapes to determine intelligence and character) anymore. The scientists have put away their calipers and replaced them with MRI machines and gene sequencers. The modern-day phrenologists are a mixed bag of political scientists, psychologists, geneticists, and neuroscientists. A generous soul would describe it as a cross-disciplinary field aiming to identify the inborn traits that determine our political views. A less generous—but perhaps more accurate—take would say this is a white-smocked effort to explain away conservatism as a mental defect, genetic abnormality, or curable pathology.

The field has exploded in the last decade. And, in truth, some of the findings have been intriguing. In their 2008 paper, “Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout,” James H. Fowler and Christopher T. Dawes found that “individuals with a polymorphism of the MAOA gene are significantly more
likely to have voted in the 2004 presidential election.”
¹
And researchers reexamining the Minnesota twin studies—surprisingly these have nothing to do with baseball players—have found that political outlook has a nontrivial amount of heritability. It seems there may be genetic and/or biological components to certain political orientations. You can’t predict what politician a person will support from his genetic markers or from his PET scans, but you can make some informed guesses about how he or she sees the world.

One need not gainsay the scientific endeavor to call attention to the remarkably large amount of equine excrement in many of its manifestations and applications that have emerged from this otherwise innocuous finding. For instance, in one particularly famous study, researchers at NYU and UCLA—all committed liberals—asked subjects to take a test. Here’s how the authors of the study explain the test:

If your eyes glazed over, basically the test asked subjects to spot Ms and Ws on a screen for a fraction of a second. (500 ms—“milliseconds”—is one half second. 100 ms is a tenth of a second.) It turns out that the liberals—as per the authors’ definition—did somewhat better on the test than the conservatives. What does that mean? Well, according to the authors, it
means: “Liberals are more responsive to informational complexity, ambiguity and novelty.” Liberals are also “more likely than are conservatives to respond to cues signaling the need to change habitual responses.” Meanwhile, “a more conservative orientation is related to greater persistence in a habitual response pattern, despite signals that this response pattern should change.”