The Moon rises on London

Could it be a coincidence that this column summarizing the political right's infatuation with bad science in England appeared only a couple of days after Chris "Republican War on Science" Mooney arrived in London?

Polly Toynbee of the Guardian writes about the right-wing's shift from climate-change denialism to nuke-power advocacy. She suggests it's all part of a pathetic trend:

The old right has been on an arduous journey, with most finally converted to the truth universally acknowledged, except by flat-earthers: the world is warming at life-on-earth threatening speed. When the climate-deniers' case collapsed, they retreated to an ideological redoubt claiming global warming was a natural phenomenon, not amenable to man-made remedy. But that fortress crumbled too, and even George Bush, last of the deniers, conceded.

For some reason the old deniers, barely batting an eyelid, shifted over to nuclear as the only salvation, though those who have been so wrong owe a little humility when it comes to next steps. Many hail from a bizarre tradition of rightwing bad science: remember Andrew Neill as Sunday Times editor running a dangerous campaign that denied HIV caused Aids, branding the latter as a disease only of gays and the wildly promiscuous. Consider the continuing claim of the Mail and Melanie Phillips that the MMR vaccine causes autism, panicking mothers into failing to immunise babies. Posing as hard-headed realists, those on the right are more prone to pit their ideology against the weight of science. Seat belts? Motorbike helmets? Chlorofluorocarbons and the ozone layer? Smoking bans? Advertising junk food to children? The science-based realos tend to be on the left, conviction fundis on the right.

Toynbeen lifted the terms "realos" and "fundis," by the way, from the popular description of the schism that developed in the 1980s in the German Green Party. Not sure if that's the best analogy, but the general idea is one I can get behind. Just consider the difference between two of the more respectable magazines to be printed in London: New Scientist and the Economist. The former regularly embraces positions that are quite decidedly to the right of the latter, although New Scientist does tend to moderate itself on a few subjects, such as GMOs. It's no surprise that businessfolk prefer their news with a conservative slant, but why should it be that scientists take it with a lump of liberalism?

Unless, of course, Stephen Colbert was right when he said that reality has a liberal bias. Some would caution that that kind of position is the height of arrogance. However much truth there is to Colbert's humor, I don't think it was always thus. The Republican Party wasn't always anti-science. Democrats aren't inherently better at grasping the nature's true nature.

All this to point out, once again, that it is the right's embrace of religious fundamentalism that changed everything.

On a related note, there's an interesting exchange at The Society of Environmental Journalists website in the form of an interview with American journalist Mark Hertsgaard and one of his British counterparts, Fiona Harvey, both of whom have covered climate change for a while now. The topic the differences in coverage patterns in the UK and the US. Hertsgaard opines that "part of the reason is the takeover of the Republican party by the far-right."

Tags
Categories

More like this