Should Science Be King In Politics? 737
Layzej writes "According to former Republican representative Bob Inglis, being conservative means dealing in facts. He suggests that energy and climate policy warrants a conservative approach based on science and accountability, rather than a populist approach based on denial and wishful thinking. He also proposes an intriguing free market solution to our energy and climate challenges."
Re:Note the 'former' (Score:3, Interesting)
Bob Inglis was my (republican) congressman until the tea-partiers ran him out on a rail during the primaries. He was accused of not being sufficiently conservative. On fiscal and economic policy he was consistently conservative, but not so much on social issues. In other words, he is pretty much a Liberterian, and has not shifted his positions since leaving office. I do not know him personally, but he appears to be a thoughtful, principled man.
He was originally elected in the Clinton era, promised to limit himself to two terms, and kept that promise. He was succeeded by Jim DeMint, and was persuaded to return to congress when DeMint was elected as a senator.
Republicans are often accused of being dismissive of science and beholden to religion. I agree with this view. However, from my point of view as a non-religious person, the Democrats are the same, but in different ways. They have a mystical conviction of environmental catastrophe which is unsupported by real science. Environmentalism should be labeled a religion and treated as such. Also, Democrats propound economic theories of "fairness" which demonstrably lead to worse outcomes for the people they claim to represent. Remember, Republicans are no better.
For myself, I believe global warming is happening, but I am unconcerned about the consequences. So I am more worried about the response to global warming, than I am about the warming itself.
Re:Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to believe, I really do (Score:5, Interesting)
The scientist Ben Franklin (No, it wasn't Albert Einstein) said, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
We had 8 years of a science-and-fact-loving conservative government, after which we had a doubled national debt, two wars, an economic crisis second only to the Great Depression, the demonizing of evolution, and oh yeah, a new attitude in the country that climate change was questionable and that it was probably the scientists that were to blame. Please excuse me if I remain skeptical that a single former representative is going to change much.
There is a reason why Mr. Inglis is a "former" Representative - his commie ideas about actually believing the scientists were clearly not well received by his former constituency.
Science as a candle in the dark (Score:5, Interesting)
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - when the United State is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."
Re:Start your party and let democracy decide (Score:2, Interesting)
Except, science cannot tell you values or what you should do. Everything... and means everything... starts from values.
Science can just as easily lead you to build clean energy as it can to build a nuclear bomb and slaughter a million people.
The core of science is the scientific method. It is completely and utterly valueless. And modern people, especially progressives like to pretend as if their policies are based on science... and they're not ideological or based on values. Yet they are.
I should note, when I say progressive, I don't just mean 'leftists'. They are equally there on the right as well. I'm talking about the progressive movement which views the government's job to lead society via rational administration to progress.
A progressive will have a scientific report that says... reducing transfats will extend life expectancy by 1.5 years therefore we should legislate banning transfats.
They will claim that action is irrefutable as it is based on science. Well no... the fact that transfats will extend life expectancy might be based on science. The proposed action is not. Implicit in that is a value judgment. They value extending human life.
Now who could argue with that? Well there are other values in life. Freedom, leisure, fun, spirituality, responsibility, love...
Everything in politics is about competing 'good values'. Even Hitler didn't campaign on being evil. He campaigned on rebuilding the great German society. A very good value.
How much you value competing values determines your value set.
People who want 'Science' as king are really just intellectually lazy people who deny they have values, and typically want to only use easily measurable values. As 'science' is much easier to do when you have things that are easy to measure.
Value wise, something like freedom and health are there. People feel just as strongly about both. But life expectancy is easy to measure. Which do you think the 'progressives' decide to adopt as a value? They're intellectually lazy.
And quite frankly, it is insanely easy to find flaws with anything human made. I've yet to see anyone come up with a reasonably alternative to constitutional democracy.
Nothing is easier than thinking 'if only I could be in charge, we could solve all the problems.' That is something common to kings, theocracies, dictators, and progressives.
They don't want to deal with the complexities of society, of dealing with people, of convincing them, of dealing with life in general.
It's easy to say science should be king. Well who do you decide to put on the scientific panels in government? If you politicize it, you end up where we are with judges today... no different than democracy. If you leave it up to scientists, then you have this unelected supreme council which politically isn't much different from having a theocracy. You can say, but they have peer review... But Catholic Priests also had a code forbidding molesting children. It didn't stop them from abusing their power and molesting children and covering it up.
Once you create such a institution, it corrupts itself with power. It doesn't matter what their 'code' says.
So I challenge you, think up a system of governance and work out all the details. Don't be intellectually lazy like most progressives. Think it through. You want a scientific council? Who gets to be on it? What powers do they have? What do you if the 'idiot masses' resist?... you know the actual things if importance.
Re:Contentious Subject Matter? (Score:5, Interesting)
High-quality science [is] struggling to get out," Francesca Grifo, of the watchdog group Union of Concerned Scientists, told members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. A UCS survey found that 150 climate scientists personally experienced political interference in the past five years in a total of at least 435 incidents. "Nearly half of all respondents perceived or personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words 'climate change', 'global warming' or other similar terms from a variety of communications," Grifo said.
Source [newscientist.com], 2007.