In the third paragraph of his lengthy and provocative article on “Science and the Left” in the Winter issue of The New Atlantis, senior editor Yuval Levin swiftly dismisses five headline-grabbing objections raised in recent years to conservative blindness on science policy. With a sweeping rhetorical gesture, he minimizes the debates over human embryonic stem cell research, sex education, energy and climate policy, the rejection and suppression of scientific evidence in government decision-making, and the appointment of ideological pedagogues to public positions demanding scientific integrity.
Dismissing these most recent arguments allows him to clear the way for a more fundamental critique of liberal political thought and its relation to science. While setting aside contemporary battles to analyze intellectual history makes sense, the disputes he brushes off the table can hardly be taken lightly. One of the scientists behind last year’s breakthrough in induced pluripotent cells penned an editorial in The Washington Post explaining that the Bush administration’s policy on stem cells set research on life-saving cures back by several years. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only sex education. Almost every other country represented at the Bali climate talks last year understood that arguments over climate change and energy policy are in fact what Levin presents as caricature: “a clash of simple scientific facts against willful ignorance and greed”–and what he misses is that some of the richest companies in the world will eventually be those on the same side as the thousands of scientists and policy makers armed with those simple scientific facts. If a decidedly conservative Supreme Court reminding the Environmental Protection Agency of its responsibility to regulate greenhouse gas emissions of mercury pollution isn’t evidence of retrograde anti-rationalism in the executive branch, then I’m not sure what is. And appointing an anti-contraception activist without a medical degree or experience in family planning to the Office of Population Affairs was just one demonstration that in this conservative administration, scientific knowledge is no prerequisite for managing taxpayer dollars on issues that demand scientific integrity, like public health.
But Levin’s point in bracketing these recent issues is to clear the ground for his more complex thesis: That thinkers on the left have not grappled with the dialectical nature of the enlightenment and scientific rationality. That is, scientific rationality can contain its own opposite; strict adherence to purely rational thought can lead to a dogmatic mythology reminiscent of the theocratic teachings that enlightenment thinking pushed aside in the West in the 18th century.
Denying the legitimacy of current claims about scientific policy, he instead ploughs through the intellectual history of the 18th and 19th centuries and completely disregards the substantial body of 20th century scholarship that deals precisely with the tension between scientific rationalism and modern life. In fact, the work of Frankfurt School thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who penned Dialectic of Enlightenment, dealt in part with the need for theory to operate in a self-aware manner that never denied the ideological conditions of its own formation. Many significant critiques of the original iterations of this “critical theory” subsequently demonstrated its shortcomings, but ignoring the influence of these and other thinkers, like Herbert Marcuse, on liberal thought in the 20th century is an oversight that dramatically destabilizes Levin’s claim that the left’s “blindness to the power of science is a…perplexing quandary.”
Others versed in the history of the subject will deal far better than I could with his subsequent attempt to claim that unfortunate support for eugenic programs from some prominent progressive leaders in the first half of the 20th century now has any bearing whatsoever on the mainstream left.
But Levin is right to point out the tensions between left thinking on dynamic responses to climate change and the some of the deeply conservative impulses of the environmental movement. Yet I can’t help thinking that this critique would have been more pertinent before the significant alliances between mainstream progressives and environmental activists that began in the late 1990s. I can’t help thinking that this critique would have had more bite in the 1970s, or even the late 1980s.
Some of the most powerful and important progressive thinking of the current moment is already well beyond the either-or tension Levin describes between “science beholding nature” and scientific mastery over the natural world. This new framework goes by the name “sustainability,” and while it has not yet filtered into the upper echelons of U.S. political discourse, it is the synthesis of this dialectic. It is about focusing the power of scientific rationality for the simultaneous preservation of the natural world and the project of promoting human equality.
Sustainability is grounded in the idea that equality means that everyone who lives on the planet–and everyone who will live on it in the future–deserves access to healthy and productive resources. And we should think twice before dismissing earnest critiques of governments that fail simultaneously to promote equality by impoverishing the resources of its current and future citizens and to support the science that can fuel that justice.
