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elfsThis has to be one of the weirdest things I've read in awhile. Daniel Sarewitz at Slate has an article today about how in a survey of scientists associated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (I think that's an important caveat missing from other discussions), only 6% identify as Republican, and 55% identify as Democratic.
Sarewitz then gets weird:
But being "Republican" is an identity; it's a choice. Even more to the point, it's a choice that embraces an entire slew of identifying beliefs. I have no wonder at all that scientists reject the "Republican" label; Republicans are explicitly anti-science. I don't know why the party of Lincoln has decided to become the party of the Luddites. Quiggan's reasoning that they'd like science to keep putting out nifty new toys but cannot reconcile their need to constrain the discourse with science's need for free and accurate exchange sounds nice but doesn't quite fit the vehement stupidity of someone like Cantor or Bethell.
Over the past 16 years, Republicans have become more and more opposed to the scientific endeavor. Global warming, intelligent design, cosmology, even nutrition this week, have all become part of a partisan divide.
And it's not just the hard sciences. In the political sciences, too, there is a dearth of graduates who identify as Republican or Conservative. As much as we may mock the discipline, we need people with those degrees to go into public service and manage policy-driven offices throughout the executive. The Republican Party has no standing with the people who find and make the inventions that make America great, and as time goes on they'll find it harder and harder to staff their offices with qualified personnel.
Maybe Sarewitz should acknowledge that the legitimacy problem he describes is exactly backwards: It ought not to be that scientists risk losing their legitimacy with the American people because they're overwhelmingly not-Republican, but that Republicans ought to lose their legitimacy with the American people because they are overwhelmingly opposed to reality.
An article going around the web this week, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, puts the blame exactly where I've been putting it for the past eight years: at the feet of the Bush Administration and the ongoing, overwhelming paranoia that the whole world, and not just a few hundred bad-tempered men with beards, are out to get us. As author Alfred McCoy puts it, "Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation."
Unfortunately, I think Charlie Stross has it right when he writes:
Sarewitz then gets weird:
As a first step, leaders of the scientific community should be willing to investigate and discuss the issue. They will, of course, be loath to do so because it threatens their most cherished myths of a pure science insulated from dirty partisanship. ... The issue here is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists.Weird because becoming a scientist isn't the same as being a specific race or gender; you don't get to choose those, and there is no difference in performance between individual black, or Latino, or Asian, or white scientists, or male or female scientists.
But being "Republican" is an identity; it's a choice. Even more to the point, it's a choice that embraces an entire slew of identifying beliefs. I have no wonder at all that scientists reject the "Republican" label; Republicans are explicitly anti-science. I don't know why the party of Lincoln has decided to become the party of the Luddites. Quiggan's reasoning that they'd like science to keep putting out nifty new toys but cannot reconcile their need to constrain the discourse with science's need for free and accurate exchange sounds nice but doesn't quite fit the vehement stupidity of someone like Cantor or Bethell.
Over the past 16 years, Republicans have become more and more opposed to the scientific endeavor. Global warming, intelligent design, cosmology, even nutrition this week, have all become part of a partisan divide.
And it's not just the hard sciences. In the political sciences, too, there is a dearth of graduates who identify as Republican or Conservative. As much as we may mock the discipline, we need people with those degrees to go into public service and manage policy-driven offices throughout the executive. The Republican Party has no standing with the people who find and make the inventions that make America great, and as time goes on they'll find it harder and harder to staff their offices with qualified personnel.
Maybe Sarewitz should acknowledge that the legitimacy problem he describes is exactly backwards: It ought not to be that scientists risk losing their legitimacy with the American people because they're overwhelmingly not-Republican, but that Republicans ought to lose their legitimacy with the American people because they are overwhelmingly opposed to reality.
An article going around the web this week, The Decline and Fall of the American Empire, puts the blame exactly where I've been putting it for the past eight years: at the feet of the Bush Administration and the ongoing, overwhelming paranoia that the whole world, and not just a few hundred bad-tempered men with beards, are out to get us. As author Alfred McCoy puts it, "Chinese innovation is on a trajectory toward world leadership in applied science and military technology sometime between 2020 and 2030, just as America's current supply of brilliant scientists and engineers retires, without adequate replacement by an ill-educated younger generation."
Unfortunately, I think Charlie Stross has it right when he writes:
I think somewhere in the range from 15-30% of our fellow hairless primates are currently in the grip of future shock, to some degree. ...It's no surprise that anyone who can offer dogmatic absolute answers is popular, or that the paranoid style is again ascendant in American politics, or that religious certainty is more attractive to many than the nuanced complexities of scientific debate. ...At which point, sadly, the US won't even be a fading superpower, the way Britain is; we'll be more like Italy, with bare memories of having once been the center of the world but now just another batshit crazy country barely able to manage its own affairs.
Deep craziness: we're in it, and there's probably not going to be any reduction in the prevalence of authoritarian escapism until we collectively become accustomed to the pace of change. Which will, at a minimum, not happen until the older generations have died of old age — and maybe not even then.
