A pair of completely unrelated events got me thinking about this over the weekend. Republicans are chest-thumping mouthbreathers that would rather not educate their children in a formal school setting if it meant less time with the Southern White Man's Version of the Holy Bible. I get that. Theirs is not a party of deep thinkers. I'm sold.
But where does that leave us? Are we as open-minded to all avenues of science and scientific thinking as we seem to be? I'll lay all of my thinking on this after the jump.
Let me just say first that I am no scientist. Any foray into science on my part is a dilettante's effort that attempts an everyman's perspective (which, in my role as a language educator, is what I do during most of the working week at school - I try to simplify things so that I can understand them, in the hopes that others can understand them). I would like to submit, however, that even if I am mistaken on some of the scientific details on the issues I am describing, what should be the focus of this diary is the position I am putting forth that we, as Democrats and progressives and liberals, are not necessarily putting forth a philosophy that embraces open-mindedness in the realm of new ideas in science, while we could be the antithesis of Republicans who otherwise just plug their ears to new concepts they've never heard of before, like grammar and numbers.
Anyways...
As mentioned above, the first of the two moments that got me thinking about the question was on Friday night. Real Time had both Markos and Democratic Gov. Schweitzer of Montana on the panel, with Anna Deveare Smith in the middle (by the way, saying disappointingly little on any subject, because she's a very smart person). One of the topics was on "clean coal."
Unfortunately, the segment I'm looking for is split between two YouTube clips, the end of the first one (post 6:15) and the start of the second one (pre 3:31):
In a nutshell, Governor Schweitzer described his opposition to the way cap-and-trade has been set up in the proposed legislation in Washington, but also explained the process of capturing carbon produced by coal-fired power plants and how it has been applied in a number of plants for a few decades now. The caveat is Schweitzer is from a coal-producing state.
Markos' response is that any attempt at focusing on clean coal is "delaying the inevitable", a future that ultimately has cleaner energy sources that don't put carbon into the air or provoke climate change.
I think of it this way: I don't believe that coal will ever be clean. But it's a belief. It should be challenged by people who know more than I do. And if I'm wrong, that's fine, because it means they actually did figure out a way to keep carbon from going into the air or otherwise harming natural life on Earth. What is to stop us, as Americans, from pursuing the avenues of wind and solar energy while allowing others with whom we disagree to pursue an option that may or may not be fruitful?
Bear in mind, this diary is not just about renewable energy. Let's go to the second thing.
Apollo 11 landed on the moon forty years ago today. After six more trips (five of which also made contact with the lunar surface), man has not set foot on the moon or any other extraterrestrial surface since. While China is making leaps and bounds with their space program, we are on the verge of retiring the Space Shuttle while struggling to determine how we as a nation can sustain our leadership role in human spaceflight and continue research beyond the surface of the Earth.
Any talk of spaceflight along the liberal side of the blogosphere is met with two possibilities. Most likely, it is marginalized and talked about very little.
Sometimes, however, a more frank sentiment bubbles to the surface, as was the case in the treatment of a USA Today article on Democratic Underground. I am not interested in singling anyone out so I will not name names, but I do want to highlight some of the comments:
It's going to be far cheaper to fix the planet we've messed up than to even think about living elsewhere in large numbers (a very unlikely option).
Mars and the moon can wait, they'll always be there. Feed the planet, end the wars.
I don't think it can be morally justified to send people to the Moon or Mars when we have hungry people here living in poverty and millions in need of basic health care just trying to live and make ends meet.
In all honesty, it never really occurred to me that this kind of thinking, connecting two totally unrelated concepts as if they were mutually exclusive was progressive or liberal thinking. The party of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Obama is a party of big ideas, not one that is restrained by conservative pragmatics. My view of basic research is that it doesn't stop just because people are hungry.
And people are hungry, no doubt about it. Which is why our party was responsible for wildly new ideas like Social Security and Medicare and jobs programs. All of them existed in the Apollo era (Medicare from 1965, as we were racing to the moon alongside the Soviets). It's not like we had to make a choice, or feel forced to make a choice.
These events may be indicative of a pattern on the left. We have fully and rightfully backed embryonic stem cell research while decrying adult stem cell research. We rightfully tried to follow Al Gore's lead in advocating ways to reduce our carbon footprint while ridiculing Bush's State of the Union call for investing in switchgrass and wood chips. We have pushed for electric cars while calling hybrids a meaningless half-measure.
All of this leads me to a possible conclusion: we as the blogosphere left may be quite selective in what science we would like our leaders to pursue.
Now, I get that some science is junk science, if it could be classified as science to begin with. As one who reads the research journals of language education, I can tell when some people have an agenda and are just wasting my time and the time of other interested teachers. Intelligent Design is a non-starter, if you ask me. Comparing greenhouse gases to exhaling is just being childish. In a corollary, narrowly defining the torture of prisoners in the extreme may make the language sound more sophisticated, but it is no more legitimate than creating an ultra-conservative think tank, slapping "Climate Change" onto part of its name and calling it a leading voice on the subject.
But tactically and philosophically, are we on the left significantly different in thinking than those on the right? If we really are for education and preparing our children for an information-age world that requires critical thinking and evolving, unconventional perspectives, what are we doing, not just dismissing alternate viewpoints that have the slightest chance of being valid but also taking steps that they don't deserve a hearing?
If clean coal and adult stem cell science is potentially real but negligible in its benefits, what is to stop us from saying that, while we want our tax dollars instead funding what we believe to be more direct avenues to environmental and medical progress, the private sector has every right to pursue it on its own, as it did the automobile and the personal computer, after which it can persuade the public for future funding with the results it reaps?
Whether or not space travel in the post-Cold War era is pure, unguided research, what prompts certain liberals to stop all new learning in the name of social equity and world peace? With the largest military in the world fighting two wars of questionable value, when did space flight become the source of child hunger and joblessness?
Put more broadly, if this is a country that has unlimited potential as was promised in the American dream, why not explore every option for progress open to us?
Granted, if we are for choosing what science to pursue to meet our political and policy ends, we should come out and say so. If that is the case, I have no problem, and my thinking then becomes not a Democratic philosophy but a philosophy of general open-mindedness.
But a recent poll (publicized on The Young Turks) said 55% of all scientists in America are self-identified as Democrats, while 6% are considered Republicans. Do we agree on fundamental concepts with those scientists that actively identify with us? As the aggregate of the liberal end of the political spectrum, we may be presenting a potentially false image of ourselves as a party and a political extreme (in the best sense of the word) if we present ourselves as unconditionally for science and scientific thinking as a matter of principle and as a means to achieve real, tangible progress for our country.