Yuri Levin, "Science and the Left"

Classes started yesterday, so no time to go through this with a fine-tooth comb...but here are a few thoughts.

First, I've long thought that American liberals (there's no real American "left," IMHO...) should maybe be a little less smug about their relationship to science. I've heard liberals say the damndest, dumbest things when scientific findings do conflict with their commitments. To use an example recently discussed by Kevin Drum, try to have a sensible discussion with liberals about the heritability of intelligence and see what happens to you.

If liberals' political commitments conflicted more frequently with science, I think they'd act a little more like conservatives in this respect.

But that's a fairly weak criticism--if liberals, like conservatives, did hold bunch of positions contrary to the scientific evidence, then they would be more likely to reject science. But they don't, and they aren't.

I do think that the liberal temperament (as I've often said) tends to be less dogmatic than the conservative temperament...so my prediction is that liberals would be more likely to concede the point to science...but it's not clear.

As for the substance of Levin's piece...well, it's not terribly good.

1. Bacon held, notoriously, that knowledge is power, and that the point of science is to control nature and improve man's estate. Levin argues that, by taking environmentalism seriously, the left has abandoned this view, ergo it is anti-science. This argument is fallacious for several reasons. First, the Baconian view of knowledge and science is not the only view and, in fact, it is not the dominant view. The dominant view of science in the West is a view that dates back to the beginning of Western thinking about knowledge. According to this view, knowledge is good for its own sake, and the point of scientific inquiry is acquire knowledge for the sake of knowledge. We find this view, for example, in Aristotle. Technology may improve man's estate by manipulating nature, but science qua science seeks knowledge with no ulterior motive.

2. Environmentalists do not hold that it is wrong to manipulate or control nature. They hold that it is wrong to destroy nature. Levin is attributing crackpot views of environmental extremists to all liberals. On the right, anti-science is orthodoxy; on the left, it's fringe.

3. Levin speculates that it's some kind of postmodern obsession with/aversion to power that drives liberal environmentalism. This is false. It is, rather, the view that nature is valuable, partially in virtue of being beautiful and necessary for our survival. Liberal environmentalism is a fairly modest view that goes roughly like this: hey, how's about we not fucking destroy the entire planet? You don't have to be a postmodern nut to think that this is a decent suggestion. Postmodernism has fair influence on the lefty left...but exerts no influence on your garden-variety American liberal.

Levin in no way shows that liberals are as bad as conservatives on this score, nor that they're anywhere near as bad.