Respecting Truth by Lee McIntyre

Author:Lee McIntyre
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Political Ideology

Unfortunately, religious ideology is not the only “faith-based” school of thought that has intruded itself into factual debates in recent years. Over the last few decades, the growth of political ideology has presented itself as an alternative system of belief to facts and evidence on a range of subjects.

The guilt for this exists on both the right and the left. But let’s not pretend in any way that the blame is equal. One failure of the media in recent years is that when they seek to criticize one side in a partisan debate (for instance Romney’s claim that Obama went on an “apology tour” just after he was elected President in 2008) they seem obsessed with trying to balance it with some overstatement or distortion on the other side (for instance Obama’s claim that if Romney were elected we would have had an “outsourcing pioneer” in the White House).31 But this is just misleading. Although it is regrettable that one can point to any lies told by either campaign, this does not mean that on every “partisan” issue—especially those that concern science—there are two equal sides, both of which have a reasonable claim to truth.32

The majority of bias against science and reason in recent years has been overwhelmingly Republican. For the definitive study on this point, one may read Chris Mooney’s devastating account in The Republican War on Science (Basic Books, 2005). This is not, of course, to say that there has been no bias on scientific topics that has come from the left and it is intellectually instructive to identify these. Later in this chapter I will consider one such case of left-wing bias. For now, however, we should start where the majority of ideological bias against science can be found and that is with the conservatives. There are literally dozens of examples to choose from: stem cell research, food contamination, birth control, environmental protection, oil drilling, etc. But I will choose the most egregious example in recent years: the denial of evidence for global warming.

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