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Obama's Victory and the Continuing Need to Defend Science
As we write in the immediate aftermath of the election, many people,
including scientists, have high hopes in Barack Obama’s victory.
One
science-oriented website put it “Obama promises new era of science
innovation”, and went on to give a positive tilt to Obama’s promise,
along
with some caveats. And certainly after the extraordinary depths
of the
Bush years it might seem that there is at least the possibility of
really
important changes. (To be clear, what we are going to address
here are
mainly the assault on science and related questions of scientific
thinking, not the overall political situation.)
But precisely because of what has unfolded over the last eight years, we
think a clear-headed assessment of what we can anticipate in coming
years
is needed. This includes the fact that the Bush administration
still remains in power and continues to do everything it can to
further lock into place the changes that it has made both at the
policy level and at the level of the overall atmosphere around
science. We have considered this very seriously, including
thinking through whether or not Defend Science should continue.
We have concluded that it should, and that there will continue to be a
need for what the Defend Science project has been trying to do.
This will address why.
We launched Defend Science some years back because we felt that there
was an important mission to fulfill that no one else was fully
addressing
(despite very important work being done by many others.) The Bush
administration represented an intertwining of two basic things in terms
of
science - a political agenda that twisted, distorted and suppressed
science to serve its immediate political objectives; and an extremist
ideological agenda put forward by powerful forces of the religious
right.
Our basic mission in response to this was concentrated in the Defend
Science Statement [ http://www.defendscience.com/statement.html
]. We set out to provide a vehicle for the scientific community
to call this agenda out, and to call on the population broadly to join
in the defense of science.
The Statement received a great deal of support from the scientific
community, many prominent scientists signed the Defend Science
Statement, and many people contributed funds for its publication.
While we never raised the funds sufficient to get the Statement out to
the public fully in the way that was needed, we were able to reach out
in important ways, including most recently in two ads in the New York
Times (one of which will run on Nov. 11) and we do feel that we made a
contribution to
influencing the terms of debate over these questions.
In thinking about the question of evaluating Obama, his science policy
as
advanced on his website and in other places (including his response to
questions posed by Science Debate 2008, and Nature), one thing we did is
look at what Bush put forward about science in the election of
2000. Bush
did not say “I am going to twist and distort science, and bring forward
ignorance and darkness over the land.” In order to see the seeds
of what
he did do, you had to look at some of the overarching ideological and
political positions that he took. He made it clear for example
that he
was going to attack the separation of church and state in various ways;
it
was also clear that he was in an alliance with the religious right, and
intended to promote positions and an overall approach that would advance
their agenda.
Today, in looking at Obama’s positions, there are several important
questions. One is that we really cannot settle for saying that
his stated
position on science is better than Bush’s. This sets the bar way
too low,
to put it mildly. We also feel that we have to assess what
approach Obama has toward the powerful Christian fundamentalist
forces. We need to look at Obama’s own positions on questions
like the separation of church and state. And we need to look at
the economic, political and ideological contours of the larger
terrain. To take one obvious example, whatever his intentions
might be, we cannot accept at face value his promises to fund science
in the face of the deepening economic crisis.
In terms of the terrain around science, we have looked at two things
which
will powerfully impact the situation with science:
1) the Christian fundamentalist movement has grown a great deal
stronger under Bush, and received a major boost from the anti-science
ravings of Palin during the campaign. This movement is already
going after science with a vengeance, including evolution and
science education, and the attack on science from “outside” of the
administration will be relentless.
2) Obama has not waged a determined fight against this movement, and
has instead sought to concede and conciliate with it. This is not
an electoral ploy, but is a consistent and core part of what he has
advocated for years. And Obama himself has repeatedly told people
who support him to listen carefully to what he says - and we would add
- to what he doesn't say. (One significant instance of this from the
campaign: even though Obama did eventually bring out his own
science program, he mainly did this in addressing scientific audiences,
and he almost never made the defense of science a significant issue in
the broader public campaign, even in the face of anti-science
provocations by Palin.) Beyond that, his program includes
undermining the separation of church and state in his own way.
These
things have ominous implications for science.
We do want to be clear here, as we put it in the Defend Science
Statement, that Defend Science is not about science trying to destroy
religion, but that we are about “defending science from a specific
right-wing political agenda which, coupled with a fundamentalist,
Biblical-literalist religious ideology, is setting out to implement a
program that will fundamentally pervert and undermine science and the
scientific process itself.”
We anticipate that critical aspects of the attacks on science will not
necessarily be concentrated in Federal government policy per se, but
rather in a larger social atmosphere (as well as government policy,
including state and local government) which gives a great deal of room
and direct and indirect encouragement to the hard-core Christian
fundamentalist movement. It is very important in this kind of
situation
that the opposition among scientists and people more broadly to the
attacks on science not be “lulled to sleep” by an Obama victory.
Whether
we like it or not, we have to confront a situation in which we will
likely
have very well organized and well-funded lunatics going after science -
and a nuanced Obama arguing that everyone should be calm and not get
excited and to leave everything in his hands. We feel that in this
situation it would be critical for people who love and understand the
importance of science to stand on principle and not cave in to these
attacks - and to get that message out to society.
So, for these reasons, we feel that there is now an important mission
for
Defend Science to “sound the alarm” about the danger to science.
And you can see the outlines of key questions around which the battles
will take
shape: evolution; public health issues that are bound up with
Christian
fundamentalist values (e.g., Bush and company pushing for changes so
that
health providers who do not agree on moral grounds with
scientifically-based medical care can refuse to give care, refuse to
give
certain drugs to patients, etc.) And global warming is another
dimension
- there is no real, serious plan to deal with this, Obama included, and
this will get more and more acute as global warming continues to
develop.
We conclude that there remains a real and deep need for a movement to
defend science. That this is a time when the basic mission of
Defend
Science continues to be urgent and pressing: to bring out the dangers
and
implications of continuing attacks on science and scientific thinking,
and
to find ways to get this message out as broadly into society as
possible.
And we call on everyone to assist in this effort.
As the Defend Science Statement concludes, “this is of crucial and
urgent
importance not only for scientists but for people throughout society,
for
humanity as a whole and for future generations.”
We welcome more
comments. Email
us your comments.
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You can sign the Statement on this
website. Just click here to add your name to
the growing list.
Join in the battle to defend
science!
Scientists and Members of the Scientific Community:
• Sign and Circulate This Statement.
• Help Raise Funds to Have it Printed in Newspapers Across the Country,
and Internationally.
• Get This Statement Adopted by Scientific, Educational and Other
Associations and Institutions.
Members of the General Public:
• Reprint and Circulate This
Statement, Help Spread the Word, Contribute Your Ideas About How to
Wage This Crucial Battle & Join With People in the Scientific
Community and Others to Wage This Battle.
• Help raise funds to print the Statement in as many newspapers and
journals as possible, in the U.S. and internationally.
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