Science and Liberalism

Although this pew poll is few months old, I found it fascinating so I thought I would talk about some parts of it in different posts. For this post, I'd like to focus on the section "Good times for science":

More than half of the scientists surveyed (55%) say they are Democrats, compared with 35% of the public. Fully 52% of the scientists call themselves liberals; among the public, just 20% describe themselves as liberals. Many of the scientists surveyed mentioned in their open-ended comments that they were optimistic about the Obama administration’s likely impact on science.

For its part, the public does not perceive scientists as a particularly liberal group. When asked whether they think of scientists as liberal, conservative or neither in particular, nearly two-thirds (64%) choose the latter option. Just 20% say they think of scientists as politically liberal. However, a majority of scientists (56%) do see members of their profession as liberal.

I found this very interesting because although most of my fellow graduate students at UC Berkeley are fairly liberal, I thought this was just because it was, well, UC Berkeley. This was pretty fascinating, too, since science itself is a pretty small-c conservative institution. Ideas are debated, and debated again, and then debated even more until any new concept is fully incorporated into a current theory. A good example of this is quantum mechanics, which even Albert Einstein had a hard time accepting throughout his life. ("God does not play dice with the universe!") As I thought about it more, though, I realized that although science is in fact conservative, it still moves forward at a very rapid pace compared to the whole of human consciousness. You can see that in public attitudes about evolution or climate change in this survey even.

However, scientists may be so liberal because the party that most represents conservatism, the Republican party, has gone out of its way to ignore scientific studies that claimed inconvenient things about everything from tobacco to climate change. At least, this is why I dislike the Republican party. It seems like no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, they stick to whatever silly talking point or ideological position they've always held. The persistent anti-intellectualism, which comes off as more arrogant than the supposed arrogance of the "elites", is probably another factor in turning me off to Republicans. (see Sarah Palin or George W. Bush) There are certainly many on the left who act the same way, but perhaps because they are on "my" side, I don't notice it as much. (Although I do think organic food is a joke.) This doesn't have to be the case though! Many concepts that Republicans (used to) stand for are appealing to me, such as a fair tax structure or ensuring that welfare assistance is modest and temporary. Unfortunately, the modern Republican party has turned into a bunch of tax cut zombies, so we won't see the true party of Reagan for some time.

Complaining about the Republican party aside, I think that having scientists be basically liberal may become problematic to many of our political conversations in this country. As scientists become increasingly liberal, perhaps turned off by the current conservative movement, the tendency to ignore claims from the "other" side becomes stronger. What if there is something that scientists may have missed with climate change or evolution or what have you? By not listening, we may be missing something important. Even worse, by not listening or responding to the other side's claims and concerns, they increasingly tune science as a whole out. At what point do we stop having a conversation and just keep talking past each other?