The Republican War on Science [Hardcover]

"The science says you must do what you want to do anyway", seems to be what the Bush administration wants to hear from the scientific community. Only that's not what happens.

Like every other field of human endeavour, science is a fallible, but it does set up a methodology to try and eliminate error and refine truth: the scientific method.

What science does not, and cannot offer, is complete certainty.

So when the world's only hyper power falls into the grip of a group of people who regard the Bible as an alternative to science, you know we have returned to the sort of bigotry which was so widespread before the Enlightenment, and which never fully left us. (Northern Ireland offers a home-grown paradigm.)

Were it happening in any other country, we could ignore it. But it's not. American policy, as we know, has world-wide ramifications. Climate change being a major example.

Chris Mooney offers a history of, and an explanation for, the rise of the religious Right in the USA, and describes its link to corporations, and their resentment of government regulation.

Within this coalition there is both a resentment of education, and a resentment of the findings of scientific research which threaten both the core ideology and policies springing from them.

Whilst the author sounds a valid warning against misuses of science coming from the Left, he believes it to be a much larger problem from the Right.

The AIDS epidemic was an early victim. Ronald Reagan's domestic policy adviser did not want children educated in the use of condoms, so AIDS was not mentioned during Reagan's first term.

The tobacco barons did not like the results of research on passive smoking, so they funded their own "research" group which challenged the findings of the Environmental Protection Agency, and worked to undermine its credibility.

Global warming is not man-made. Exxon funded policy groups to say so. George Bush likes to talk about the "incomplete state of scientific knowledge" on this subject. (In this context The Daily Telegraph frequently publishes "findings" purporting to show that climate change is a fiction.)

Evolution contradicts Genesis. Intelligent design is built-up as an alternative that sounds more scientific than Creationism, but is merely another way of saying God created Man. Ergo, evolution is only a theory, and - thank God! - our ancestors were not apes.

(Creationism tried to stick to the creation-in-4004-BC-theory, which even the American Right now realise does not stand up!)

Abortion is sinful, but it also causes breast cancer, and triggers mental illness. Ergo: abortion is also bad for you, "science" says so.

I hope you get the flavour.

This book is carefully balanced, and it offers detailed explanatory background which is especially welcome on the difficult subject of stem cell research.

Above all it's a good read.

Chris Mooney's passionate, thoroughly researched book concludes: the Bush administration ignores or denies mainstream research to please its conservative base. Business groups and certain religious lobbies helped while Bush-era treatment of scientists did a 180-degree reversal from that of Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Reagan. The Republican Congress passed laws - endorsed by the Bush White House -- designed to disable clean air and water efforts, and has dismantled safeguards, such as the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, originally intended to give legislators unbiased advice.

According to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Mooney, the Republicans' war on science had its beginnings in the Reagan/Bush I and Newt Gingrich many years before the U.S. presidency was a twinkle in George W. Bush's eye. Their assault on rational scientific debate originated in the monolithic, multibillion dollar tobacco industry.

Traditional science and rational policies arrived at with scientific impartiality began to be manipulated - politicized -- decades ago on the heels of medical researchers discovering links between smoking, heart disease and cancer. Big Tobacco heavily financed disinformation campaigns to confuse the smoking public. Exploiting the orthodoxy of approaching all new scientific discoveries with a healthy skepticism, Tobacco's hired guns painted as unreliable all conclusions those smoking produces medically harmful effects. The disinformation campaign worked very well for Tobacco during two decades. That is until the U.S. Surgeon General could no longer conceal the growing, irrefutable medical evidence. He was obliged to conclude that smoking cigarettes had been killing Americans in rapidly increasing numbers over a long time.

Mooney uses interviews and old-fashioned digging out of documents to explain how, during two decades, right-wing politicians created institutions for discrediting working scientists. Energy companies allied themselves with powerful Republicans (such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma) to block or reverse U.S. efforts to curb global warming.

Mooney covers the Bush administration's defiance and dismissal of the worldwide, expert scientific consensus on climate change, on mercury pollution, and even on how to read statistics. Mooney's book tracks Bush White House efforts to spread misinformation and dysinformation about stem cells; the work of religious right regulators like Dr. David Hager (formerly on the FDA's Reproductive Health Drugs advisory committee) in restricting access to birth control; and the attempts of the Discovery Institute (and other think tanks linked to the Bush base) to fight the teaching of evolution in public schools. In the past five years, Mooney documents, many formerly apolitical physicists, biologists and doctors have concluded there is a "pattern" of science abuse under Bush, a push back against the methods of science itself. Conservatives may react with indignation; liberals, moderates and working scientists will find few surprises, but Mooney's very readable, and understandably partisan book is the first to thoroughly document the whole story in one place.

Mooney writes, "in politicized fights involving science, it is rare to find liberals entirely innocent of abuses. But they are almost never as guilty as the Right." By "the Right," Mooney means the powerful alliance of conservative Christians -- seeking to influence policies on abortion, stem cells, sexual conduct and the teaching of evolution -- and advocates of free enterprise who attempt to minimize regulations that cut into corporate profits. The savior of both groups -- and the chief villain of Mooney's book -- is President Bush, accused by Mooney of having "politicized science to an unprecedented degree."

Mooney's impartial -- indeed scientific -- approach in making his case produces conclusions that are compelling and essentially impossible to deny. In the present Republican war, pitting ideology against reason, Mooney takes the side of reason.

By insidiously dismissing real science as "junk science" merely to further their Alice in Wonderland ideology, the Republican assault on reason is a cosmically greater danger to western society than any group of terrorists.

This book is about politicizing science in an effort to gain control for economic and/or religious reasons. As independent journalist Chris Mooney painstakingly documents, what Republicans want is the power to declare what is true and right regardless of what really is true and right, and they don't care about niceties such as scientific research, the scientific method, peer review or anything other than their spurious agenda. In order to get what they want they will lie, obfuscate, confuse, deny, and pay others to do the same.

Here are some of the key issues that Mooney explores:

President Reagan's unworkable Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as "stars wars," in which the technological infeasibility of an umbrella missile defense was ignored.

"Creation science," which became a Republican Party staple during the Reagan administration and a kind of litmus test of party purity during the George W. Bush administration under its new name, "Intelligent Design" or as I never tire of calling it, "Unintelligent Design."

Newt Gingrich's dismantling of the Congressional Office of Technological Assessment in favor of hand-picked scientific "experts."

The adoption of the phony and ironically named "sound science" mantra and some of the other tobacco industry terminology to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific opinion about a number of issues including whether abortion raises the instance of breast cancer (it doesn't) to whether certain chemicals were depleting the ozone layer (chlorofluorocarbons were). Mooney's chapter on this issue is appropriately entitled "Junking Sound Science."

Global warming, the denial of which has become another Republican Party shibboleth. Republican Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe went so far as to say "...could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it?" (quoted on page 84).

The unrelenting attempt to weaken or destroy the Environmental Protection Agency.

Discrediting expert opinion and a report from the World Health Organization linking poor diet, especially one high in refined sugars to obesity, type 2 diabetes, and cancer.

Mercury from coal plants that gets into the environment, especially into fish high the food chain that are consumed by humans.

The continuing attack on the Endangered Species Act.

The unfunding of embryotic stem cell research by the George W. Bush administration.

The attempted suppression of the truth about the ineffectiveness of abstinence as a way to fight venereal diseases while discounting the effectiveness of condom use.

Part Four of the book is entitled "The Antiscience President" and that would be the aforementioned George W. Bush who has favored instead of science a kind of faith-based approach to public issues. I hasten to point out that faith-based is ignorance-based and if it became standard governmental policy in the U.S. we would become a second-rate nation.

There is little that is more dangerous to the health of this country or any other than willful ignorance about matters of national concern, but that is exactly what many leaders of the Republican Party practice, especially people like George W. Bush, Inhofe, and Gingrich. They have all the scientific sophistication of a Glenn Beck or a Rush Limbaugh. People like this are more of a national security threat to the United States than all the terrorists in the world because the suppression of science will lead to our becoming a massive idiocracy easily defeated economically and otherwise by the more advanced nations in the world.

A final question must be asked: why is science so threatening to Republicans? And the answer is, it all comes down to money and/or a fundamentalist religious world view. In the case of the denial of global warming, it's because the people who are increasing the CO2 in the atmosphere don't want to pay the environmental cost of their operations. In the case of creationism, the fundamentalists need to deny the truth of biological evolution because it is in conflict with their literal interpretation of the Bible.

Mooney wrote this book during the dark days of the George W. Bush administration and his tone is one of alarm, and rightly so in my opinion. Today with a Democratic administration in the White House things have improved for a knowledge-based governance. But just as the barbarians were always at the gate, so too the Republican minions of ignorance and stupidity, denial and obfuscation are not only waiting in the wings to get back into the White House but have a stifling grip on Congress. We need to elect officials who understand and appreciate the need for science and government to work together for the greater good of the nation and not just for science-denying special interests.

The main strength of this book is in the thoroughness with which Mooney delineates the stupidities of the Republican attack on science and the fine documentation he provides. He lists hundreds of interviews he conducted with whom and when (and notes which people, like Gingrich, declined to be interviewed). There are 62 pages of endnotes and an index.

[Note: a dozen of my books are now available at Amazon. My latest, "I Think We Survived the Nightmare: Political, Social and Economic Reviews" by Dennis Littrell will be available soon.]