Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I will respond to questions and comments as time permits, but if you want to take issuewith any position expressed here, you first have to answer this question:
What evidence would it take to prove your beliefs wrong?
I simply will not reply to challenges that do not address this question. Refutabilityis one of the classic determinants of whether a theory can be called scientific. Moreover,I have found it to be a great general-purpose cut-through-the-crap question to determinewhether somebody is interested in serious intellectual inquiry or just playing mind games.Note, by the way, that I am assuming the burden of proof here - all youhave to do is commit to a criterion for testing.It's easy to criticize science for being "closed-minded". Are you open-mindedenough to consider whether your ideas might be wrong?
There are plenty of studies out there that show pretty conclusively that academia tilts left. Studies of political registrations of college faculty show a strong preponderance of Democrats over Republicans, even in "conservative" departments like the sciences or business. In many social science departments there is not a single Republican.
I'm politically conservative, and the purpose of this page is to explain that the "academic monoculture" is principally due to stupid conservatives.
A good example of what can happen playing the diversity game happened a number of years ago on my campus. We held a search for a vacant faculty position, and our top choice was someone who had been on campus a long time in a non-faculty capacity and perfectly fit the position. The mere fact that we had to conduct a search when we had a suitable candidate immediately available was bad enough, but our recommendation was overridden and the position offered to a minority candidate.
Now this candidate was a fine person. This is not one of those stories where a seriously unfit individual was given preference. He was competent, easy to get along with, and fit in well. He counted as a minority solely because he had a Spanish surname. He was actually Cuban, or more specifically, he was a white guy who had a Cuban paternal ancestor. He was no more Hispanic than I am. In fact, I speak far more Spanish (moderately functional) than he did (none whatsoever). After a year, he did exactly what every one of us knew all along he would do, got a better offer from his doctoral institution and moved back where he came from. Next go-round, we hired our candidate of choice, our temporary colleague had a good job where he wanted to be, and everybody lived as happily ever after as possible in this world.
The reason discrimination is viewed as unfair is that it targets people for arbitrary reasons over things that are beyond their control. Nobody chooses to be male or female or belong to a particular race or ethnic group. Things like religion are matters of choice, but trying to coerce religious belief is such a deep invasion of personal privacy and conscience that most of us find it morally repugnant. But there are some choices that reflect directly on professional competence. A flat earth believer would be demonstrably incompetent for a position in geography; a Holocaust denier would be unqualified for a position in history and a creationist is unqualified for a position in geology or biology. The same people might be suitable for positions not affected by their personal beliefs. Any of the three might be suitable to teach algebra or computer programming.
In many academic disciplines, ideological diversity is simply irrelevant. Nobody much cares whether a chemist or a German professor or an ancient historian is Republican or Democratic. Then, as the examples above show, there are lots of areas where there is no room for diversity. There is no legitimate academic diversity on the age of the earth or the reality of the Holocaust. The University of Wisconsin-Madison recently drew criticism for hiring an adjunct faculty member to teach a course on Islam even though he believed the attacks on 9-11 were plotted by the U.S. government. The University defended the choice on academic freedom grounds, but this was a case where the person's beliefs reflected closely enough on his professional competence to be a matter of concern.
There's an old scam where you mass mail a prediction on the stock market to a lot of people. Half of the predictions say the stock market will go up, the other half say it will go down. Then you send another letter to the people who got the correct first prediction, again telling half one thing and half the other. You keep on until there's a small group (about 3% of the original group) who got five correct predictions in a row. Then you hit that group with a subscription pitch for a pricey stock advice service.
Now let's imagine you run the same scam again, only now you only send letters to people who got the wrong guesses. Where do you think you'd stand in the eyes of the folks who got five wrong predictions in a row?
About where conservatives stand in the eyes of many academics, and for about the same reasons. Since the New Deal, and even before, conservatives have been on the losing side of too many issues - and stayed there long after it was obvious the cause was lost.
In principle, the buying public should have forced products to be pure through marketplace forces. In practice, it didn't happen until the Food and Drug Administration came into existence. It would be nice, in principle, for everyone to assume personal responsibility for saving for retirement, paying for their health care, and paying to educate their own children. The fact that no society in history has pulled it off at anything above a Third World level suggests that it simply can't be done that way. For one thing, too many people don't get paid enough to save anything once they've taken care of bare survival. And even affluent societies just won't do it on their own. All those years before we had public schools, churches could have taken the lead and provided affordable school systems for everyone, but they didn't. The Catholic Church had the largest system, but it ultimately turned out to be a near-Ponzi scheme that depended on young women entering the sisterhood to live regimented single lives working for a pittance teaching and taking care of elderly sisters. A funny thing happened when women decided that was no longer a viable option.
Those were cases where conservatives were on the wrong side because, shades of Marxism, they focused on what their system could do in theory rather than its poor performance in practice. Then there were the cases where they were flat-out on the side that was not merely wrong, but positively immoral. Opposition to civil rights stands smack in the center of this issue. In theory lots of issues should be decided at the local level. In theory Brown versus Board of Education opened the way for court intrusion into a host of other issues. In theory equal opportunity laws deprive employers of discretionary abilities they should be able to exercise.
In fact, you could once kill a black person in a large part of the U.S. with near impunity and rape a black woman with complete impunity. In fact many people exercised their right of choice in the same way, so that blacks were systematically excluded from good jobs, public accommodations, and decent housing. The problem was that these systems were enforced both by local and state law and by terrorism.
And conservatives could have left decisions to local government, never had a Brown versus Board of Education, never had civil rights laws. All it would have taken was for them to clean up the system first. Marginalize the hard-core racists, ridicule them so they didn't dare show their faces in public, and elect candidates to repeal segregation laws.
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You can't very well expect intellectuals to take you seriously if you're always ridiculing them, right? Can we all hear a big "Duh?"
The state of Wisconsin likes to tout the "Wisconsin idea," which was the notion pioneered by the Progressive era of using the state university as a public problem solving tool; effectively a think tank. We don't talk so much about the other "Wisconsin Idea": the Ed Gein - Jeffrey Dahmer "Wisconsin Idea." Wisconsin's embarrassment is that it has produced two of the worst anti-intellectuals in American history, one conservative as well as one liberal. The conservative, of course, was the infamous Joe McCarthy. The liberal, also one of the worst anti-intellectuals in American history, was the late Senator William Proxmire who regularly vilified research projects with his Golden Fleece Awards.
Conservative anti-intellectuals, and McCarthy was wholly typical, aren't merely opposed to ideas widely held in academia. Often they're downright stupid as well as being morally venal. McCarthy was a drunk and a womanizer; so was Senator Ted Kennedy. The difference was that Kennedy managed to function in Congress and occasionally did a few worthwhile things, whereas McCarthy was a one-trick pony who managed to alienate everyone who might have supported him, and who did nothing other than inflame anti-Communist hysteria. Indeed, McCarthy did so much damage to our foreign expertise in the State Department and elsewhere that one might be tempted to think he was a Soviet agent.
Both liberals and conservatives indulge in denial games. Liberals tend to engage in denial games about philosophy or sociology. They find it hard to believe that mitigating the effects of stupid choices encourages people to make those stupid choices. They can look at the universality of warfare in history and somehow not wonder if the problem might have a broader base than mere inequality or childhood spanking. They could look at the repression in the former Soviet Union and seriously equate it with shooting four students at Kent State. On the other hand, social issues are complex. There can be many rival explanations for phenomena that satisfy the data equally well. So it ought not surprise us when people let their sentiments get mixed up with the facts.
Liberals also tend to engage in crackpot historical revisionism. If you thought the Civil War was about slavery, just because all those people living at the time seemed to think so, historical revisionists will set you straight. Try writing a term paper or a paper for an academic journal that describes the Civil War in those terms, and see what happens. Except, mysteriously, when it comes to displaying the Confederate flag. Then, miraculously, it turns out the Civil Warwas about slavery.
Denial games about social phenomena are at least understandable. Criteria for deciding facts about social phenomena are a lot fuzzier and more ambiguous than for physical phenomena. It takes a very special kind of stupid, on the other hand, to deny physical realities. And that's what too many conservatives do. They can look at a finite earth and believe it is possible to get an infinite amount of oil out of it, or cram an infinite amount of people onto it.
From: Dutch, Steve [mailto:dutchs@uwgb.edu] Sent: Friday, June 29, 2007 8:34 AM To: Editor @ American Thinker Subject:
Whenever people complain about being "marginalized," the blame-the-victim part of me always wonders if they deserve to be marginalized, even when it comes to conservatives. Hark back to the civil rights campaign of half a century ago. By digging in to defend segregation, a cause that was indefensible and lost from the outset, conservatives lost credibility as thinkers, as a moral force, and as a political force.
Then there was 2006. The most cursory glance at the papers or the internet made it glaringly obvious that voters were fed up with corporate and political corruption. By failing to take action - and the time to do it was when the dot-com bubble burst - the Republicans handed the Democrats victory on a silver platter. It's awfully hard to commiserate with people who shoot themselves in the foot.
In addition to picking the wrong side of specific current debates, there are entrenched ideas in conservatism that guarantee its permanent marginalization. While conservatives loudly lament the fact that intellectuals don't take them seriously, many don't want to reform the things that most discredit conservatism in the eyes of intellectuals.
Foremost among these is hostility toward evolution. Conservatives can absolutely forget about ever gaining credibility on college campuses or among intellectuals as long as some conservatives oppose evolution and others fail to speak out against them. Evolution is a demonstrated fact, and religious sects that say otherwise are heretical, man-made cults. When it comes to describing the workings of the physical world, science, not religion, is the lawful authority. Who cares what intellectuals think? You'd better. Conservatives may rule talk radio, but intellectuals (overwhelmingly liberal in their politics) rule education. Only people with certain tastes listen to talk radio (I'm in agreement with a lot of it, but even I still gag after five minutes of it), but everybody goes to school.
The same thing is happening again with global warming. The science is pretty straightforward. Carbon dioxide is increasing. Nobody at all questions that. Climate is getting warmer. The debate on that is pretty much over. Carbon dioxide is effective at trapping heat. An eighth-grader can set up an experiment to show that. So it's pretty much a simple matter of cause and effect. It's interesting that people who have no trouble seeing links between abortion, pornography, or homosexuality and social ills (where cause and effect relations are far harder to prove) stumble over "carbon dioxide traps heat - carbon dioxide is increasing - temperature is increasing."
If you doubt the connection, give me the physics. Show me, step by step, how you can increase a heat trapping gas in the atmosphere and not raise temperature. I don't want to hear about maybes, other possible contributing causes, or problems in climate modeling. Show me the physics of how adding carbon dioxide will not result in more heat being trapped. It's like saying that adding salt to food won't make it saltier, or adding sugar to a drink won't make it sweeter, or releasing criminals from jail won't increase crime. I've been studying the junk science phenomenon for forty years, and what conservatives say in their denial of global warming is classic junk science. We can start with the outright scientific illiteracy of people who confuse weather forecasting with climate modeling, confusing fluctuations with long term averages (for some odd reason cold spells disprove global warming but hot spells don't support it), and the fact that we just plain don't see any credible climate models that predict cooling.
The place to argue global warming is at the level of whether the proposed remedies will actually be effective, whether market forces are more likely to work than government controls (nothing is healthier for society in the long run than rising energy prices) and the whole issue of giving less developed countries a free pass. But pretending there's no problem at all is on exactly the same level as conservatives of fifty years ago saying there was no problem with segregation. It's not merely wrong, it's stupid, and it's doomed to fail.
I have a cynical reason for conservatives to get on the global warming bandwagon, and I can summarize it in two words: Star Wars. The signatories to the Kyoto Accords, with the exception of some of the smaller European countries, are posers. They have no more intention of cutting carbon emissions than anyone else, but unlike the United States, they willingly sign treaties they have no intention of honoring. Only one economy is large enough, robust enough and innovative enough to make the transition to reduced carbon emissions - ours. We sign the accords, launch a Cold War level program to attack the problem, then we hold the other signatories' feet to the fire. Fossil fuels are finite and we can see the day coming when they will not be available to meet demand. Abundant energy is absolutely indispensable to personal freedom, because in a world of limited energy, the people who control access to energy will control everything else. Two words here: Middle East. With a little creative thinking, conservatives can co-opt the global warming debate, discredit opponents of nuclear power and the NIMBY's who oppose wind farms and power plants, and strengthen U.S. leadership.
Or you can stay marginal. It's up to you.
Although American Thinker runs a mix of sane and unsane pieces, even in the relatively short time I read it, I saw a perceptible decline in standards and an increasing tendency to shill for the intelligent design movement. So I was disappointed, but not especially surprised, to get the following reply:
I appreciate you writing, and your fervor for the dogmas you assert. However you seem to fail to comprehend the difference between theory and fact. If you are interested in science, I suggest you read Darwin's Black Box and check out the National Post series on scientific doubts on global warming theory.
I don't have time to correspond further on the subject, but hope that you will avail yourself of the opportunities to examine the evidence with an open mind.
To me, until there is proof, theories remain theories and dogma remains dogma.
Cordially, Thomas Lifson, editor
Well, like I said, you can stay marginal. It's up to you.
As the 2008 political campaign wears on and Republicans lose special elections in previously safe districts, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Congressman Tom Cole, told Republicans they needed to "Change or die?"
Change how? Tweak the commercials? More focus groups?
Are they ready to change on evolution?
Are they ready to change on the environment? Not just adopt a green facade, but admit they've been wrong on every single major issue? That they've been wrong about energy, about endangered species, about global warming, about the voodoo economics used to justify opposition to environmentalism?
Until there's change on those two fronts, conservatism will continue to be a joke in academia.
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