In yesterday's NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, after sketching the growing power of the irrational right-wing "climate skeptic" movement, Judith Warner writes: >That taking on the scientific establishment has become a favored activity of >the right is quite a turnabout. After all, questioning accepted fact, >revealing the myths and politics behind established certainties, is a tactic >straight out of the left-wing playbook. In the 1960s and 1970s, the push back >against scientific authority brought us the patients’ rights movement and was >a key component of women’s rights activism. That questioning of authority >veered in a more radical direction in the academy in the late 1980s and early >1990s, when left-wing scholars doing “science studies” increasingly began >taking on the very idea of scientific truth.
> ... But somehow, in the passage from Bush I to Bush II and beyond, the > politics changed. By the mid-1990s, even some progressives said that the > assault on truth, particularly scientific truth, had gone too far, ... many > on the academic left experienced some real embarrassment. But the genie was > out of the bottle. And as the political zeitgeist shifted, attacking science > became a sport of the radical right. “Some standard left arguments, combined > with the left-populist distrust of ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ and assorted > high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us, were > fashioned by the right into a powerful device for delegitimating scientific > research,” Michael Bérubé ... said< Warner suggests a line of causation from the "anti-science" attitudes of the "left" to the New Right "climate skeptic" movement, so that donations received by the latter from the oil industry are totally irrelevant. I guess it goes against Warner's science to define how causation works here, so somehow it was the amorphous but still sinister "left" that let the anti-science genie out of the bottle. She sneaks in the assumption that anti-science attitudes are somehow new, so that they had to be invented by the "left," which then introduced that snake into the pro-science Garden of Eden, corrupting even the normally-rational and until-now pristine right wing forces. The John Birch Society and similar folks were all in favor of fluoridation of the water until the "left" came along to lead them astray, of course. (There _is_ some connection between the left and the right of course. Both wings of the political bird have their loonies, while both share the same broadly-defined political culture. It's also true that a lot of old lefties become new righties over time, but the two wings don't really communicate with each other. And unlike the right-wingers, the leftists are much less likely to get big bucks from wacko oil millionaires and their kin.) It also goes against Warner's science for her to specify which "key component of women’s rights activism" and which "left-wing scholars doing 'science studies'" she's lambasting. She leaves her accusations as dangling innuendos. It would be unscientific to present some sort of empirical evidence or to make untethered accusations more concrete? Worst of all, she must be assuming that there's absolutely no truth to the "left wing" criticisms of science _as actually practiced_ (something that she makes no effort to separate from "scientific truth"). She seems to be saying that no scientists or experts were bought by the Pentagon to defend the Vietnam war or by the nuclear power industry to promote profits over safety. I don't agree at all with those parents who don't give their kids the MMR vaccine because of unscientific fears that it will cause autism, but part of that attitude arose because of the venal drug-pushing by Big Pharma. I'd also bet that there's a connection to the movement among US troops that resisted the forced application of anti-anthrax vaccines back in the 1990s. As for the "patients' rights movement," I know for a fact that, despite some improvement, there are still a large number of doctors who _define themselves_ as high-and-mighty muckety-mucks who think they’re the boss of us. The _only_ truth comes from the doctor and no word is needed from the patient. (My wife is a health educator and meets these types often.) And for the aforementioned improvement in the attitudes of doctors toward patients, to the extent that it's happened it's because of such evil forces as the women's rights activism and the patients' rights movement. It's not as if the doctors _volunteered_ to get of their high horses. I really don't know anything about Warner. Louis has written about Sokal and Bérubé (both cited approvingly in her article). What do you know about her? -- Jim Devine / This Space for Rent. No Reasonable Offer Refused. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
