The Conservative Rejection of Science Is Just an Instance of The General Dogmatism Problem

Here Drum discusses Kevin Williamson's claim that liberals are no better than conservatives when scientific conclusions conflict with their political commitments.

A few points:

1. Williamson has a point. I've seen liberals tailspin into jaw-dropping irrationality when the facts conflict with their politics. And Williamson picks a good example: the heritability of intelligence. I've seen perfectly reasonable liberals turn into gibbering fools when discussing this and similar issues.

2. As I've asserted many times, I think that one important aspect of this problem is this one: the farther one moves from the center, toward the radical extremes, the more dogmatism one encounters. The current American right is more extreme than the current American left, ergo more dogmatism.

3. However, dogmatism does seem to be more characteristic of the right in general than of liberalism. Characteristic liberal vices tend to be more along the lines of skepticism, relativism, wishy-washy-ness, and so forth. (Here I distinguish liberalism from the left (qua hard left)...so maybe those are really more centrist-y vices.)

However all that shakes out:

4. The conservative problem with science is just a special case of the more general problem of dogmatism on the right. Contrary to what many science-y liberals tacitly believe, science is not magic. The reasons to believe the conclusions of science are not special ones; they are of a piece with the reasons to believe anything supported by the evidence or spoken for by reliable authorities. Science is not a special case.

I've spoken with many conservatives who rejected scientific conclusions when they conflicted with conservative orthodoxy...but those same people were also willing to accept and espouse clearly absurd positions in cases in which the facts were clear and no special expertise in evaluating the arguments was required. For example, they were willing to assert that Obama immediately became responsible for the economy as soon as he took office. (Not: responsible for improving it...but, rather, responsible for its condition.) Now, no expertise in economics is required to recognize that this is an absurd thing to think, so this is not a case of rejecting science, but of rejecting obvious facts that anyone should be able to recognize. Surely such people would, in ordinary cases, recognize the absurdity of such a claim. If I wreck the family business and you take it over on Monday, I can't start blaming you for its condition on Tuesday. This nonsense goes so far as near self-contradiction when they, e.g., blame Obama, but not Bush, for taking vacations, though the latter took something like three times as many vacation days at a similar point in his presidency.

The real problem is not the conservative rejection of science, but, rather, conservative dogmatism. (Again: liberals can also be dogmatic--if you doubt it, try discussing concealed-carry laws with your liberal friends--but they are not currently so afflicted by the vice as conservatives.) In fact, at least in the case of science, conservatives are merely refusing to acknowledge the authority of experts--experts whose credentials and track records they are, in fact, unfamiliar with. This is probably a less egregious error than accepting blatantly bad reasoning about which any ordinary person is well-positioned to make a good judgment. At any rate, it doesn't make much sense to single out the special case of science here.