Actually Consistently Believing in Science is Tough
Yes, reality has a liberal bias. But there's plenty of things out there that make liberals really uncomfortable too
Reality, as Stephen Colbert said, has a well-known liberal bias. This is quite true. I could pick so, so many issues to demonstrate this, but here’s three unimpeachable examples:
Global warming. Conservatives and especially right-leaning libertarians could not stand the implications of global warming. So they simply went after the scientists and charged a wide-ranging conspiracy to shut down modern industrial society. That’s so obviously not true. The planet is heating up, and we are already seeing all sorts of consequences. And the solutions, whatever they end up being, are going to contain a substantial amount of the sorts of government power, government regulation, and international cooperation that the right hates.
The coronavirus. Every conservative politician that has tried to wish away the pandemic has ended up with egg on their face, as hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed and millions more have gotten the virus, some of whom are facing long-term, serious health consequences.
Gay marriage is harmless. This is a pet issue of mine, both because I was an early advocate of gay marriage (I first supported it in 1989 or so) and because I always found the particular arguments right wingers made against gay marriage to be even dumber than the mere fact that they opposed it. What I mean is this- gay marriage opponents, rather than simply making anodyne arguments about too quickly changing rules that had been with us for centuries (a perfectly respectable reason to be cautious about any social change, no matter how well merited), instead predicted the apocalypse. They posited marriage as this “institution” (a term I still don’t know the definition of) that was the bedrock of human civilization, and said that “destroying” the institution (something no gay marriage advocate proposed to do) would cause the collapse of society (an argument made without any articulation of the actual causal mechanism by which this would happen). Of course, as I could have predicted, no such social collapse has occurred, and even in conservative parts of America, gay people get married and divorced and nobody really gets offended anymore.
So those are three great examples of where conservative agitprop ran aground on the coast of reality. Conservatives spent years debating these issues (and still do with respect to the first two) and insisting their points of view are completely legitimate, but the problem is that reality is still reality just because one political faction has a debating position.
And on the first two, particularly, they feed a narrative and a self-image liberals love, that liberals are the supporters of science and conservatives are science deniers. (Arguably, even the gay marriage issue has a bit of this, because science does tell us that homosexuality is a normal human variation and is completely harmless, which contradicts the views of religious people who were driving the conservative train on the issue a decade and a half ago.)
But before liberals get completely self-congratulatory, I invite you to look at how folks on the left treat science that they don’t like. For instance, take a look at Jesse Singal’s reporting on the journal Science-Based Medicine, which, as you might glean from its title, prides itself on scientifically supported reporting on medical issues. The short version of this is, Lisa Littman, a researcher, published a survey of parents of teens suffering gender dysphoria that documented social effects in youth transition. Essentially, there has been an uptick of young natal females transitioning (traditionally, most trans people were trans women born male who either suffered dysphoria in childhood or as adolescents), and there appear to be peer group effects- teenage females whose friends are transitioning also often transition.
This generated outrage from online trans activists, who are extremely committed to a storyline where teens who seek to transition should just be “affirmed” in whatever gender they now identify as, because such transitions reflect the actual identity of the teenager and only very rarely, or never, result from any sort of external input such as peer contagion. Then, Abigail Shrier, a Wall Street Journal journalist, wrote a book about the phenomenon. I have my own problems with Shrier’s book, which is too panicky and goes well beyond what Littman found based mostly on anecdotal reporting. But SBM originally posted a positive review of Shrier’s book, which wouldn’t be terribly surprising given that there’s absolutely no evidence out there that Littman’s study was wrong.
What then happened is (1) activists pushed back hard against SBM, (2) SBM withdrew the positive review and replaced it with several negative reviews, and (3) at least one of the negative reviews was full of errors found by Singal. And in response to Singal, you get the comment that starts off the thread I linked to, basically making ad hominem attacks on Singal for having the audacity to say that a piece that was full of errors was, in fact, full of errors.
This isn’t the only example of this. I have mentioned Alice Dreger’s great Galileo’s Middle Finger before, but that book contains several examples of science coming to conclusions that people didn’t like, and the result is always the same- journals and academic institutions are pressured, attempts are made to “retract” claims that are probably true, and the next generation of researchers are chilled from doing science.
Specifically, who would want to pick up the ball from Littman and Shrier and try to find out what is actually happening with teenage females who are transitioning in far higher numbers? If you come to any conclusion other than the one the activists like, you can lose everything.
Another third rail for liberals is race. The David Shor firing— where a data analyst lost his job because he published well established scientific findings that non-violent protests worked better for the cause of Black civil rights than violent ones (something that just about anyone who lived through the 1960’s could have told you)— is a classic example of this genre.
The point is, science is actually hard to love. Because all of us— myself included— are sometimes attached to positions that aren’t consistent with reality. And because people actually have and wield power, it’s not simply a matter of people putting out misinformation and the scientists correcting them. The point of cancel culture is not simply to prevent the canceled person from disseminating his or her ideas, but to chill the next person from even going into that area. And that’s just horrible for science.
We lionize scientists like Galileo who stood up to authorities at great personal risk to tell the truth about their observation. But most people in the sciences are not Galileo. Rather, they are normal human beings who want to keep their friends, keep their jobs, and keep people happy. The way to do that is to avoid working on issues that will offend people. Just like you won’t see someone at a right wing think tank do work on global warming, even from a conservative perspective, the result of this sort of thing is people simply won’t do certain sorts of research, because they don’t want the headaches and don’t want to piss off the wrong people.
To love science, you need to get into Carl Sagan’s spaceship and watch in rapt fascination even as it takes you to places you didn’t realize existed, or maybe even places you don’t want to exist. Science isn’t about validating your feelings- it didn’t validate the feelings of religious authorities in Galileo’s time, does not validate the feelings of conservatives who wish the coronavirus would just go away, and will not validate the feelings of people who wish that simple narratives could provide all the answers on issues as complex as race and gender. But, as Galileo supposedly said to the authorities who were persecuting him, the Earth still moves nonetheless. We should be stronger and prefer to seek the truth even if it sometimes makes us uncomfortable.