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January 13, 2010
In politics the end is political power, to get it and keep it. For the Liberal Party, it is the religious and corporate constituency who are the people who help them do that, that is their base. A lot of money is raised from industry and a lot of votes come from the religious conservatives. So in that sense the modern conservative movement has a lot of electoral and political tendencies that put it at odds with science.
One of the disturbing aspects of the Liberal Party is the way that it has imported many of the policy stances and strategies of the US Republican Party. Disturbing because this intellectual dependency has involved the unquestioning acceptance of the war on science that was such a characteristic of the Bush Administration in the US. It's a strategy to give the conservative base what it wants.
True, unlike the US Republicans, the Liberal Party has not come out against evolution and embraced creationism, despite its ever growing embrace of the conservatism of Christian fundamentalism. Nope, the Liberal Party's war on science surfaces, and finds its expression within, its scepticism about climate change, even though its antagonism to climate change is also based on right-wing populists associate of climate change with the Left: --with socialism, communism, state planning and anti-individualism.
This kind of political opposition to government policies from Big business and religious fundamentalism around an emissions trading scheme, abortion, stem cell research suggests that the scientific consensus threaten their religious beliefs, their economic power or their social influence.
Though this makes climate change a political, not a scientific issue, underneath this politics of science lies the current that the Left (the party of equality) is the Party of science. The political Right do tacitly hold that the IPCC's science of climate change is akin to junk science. The attack on science is not direct--- because science is seen as good within the Australian polity--- but rather in a belief that uncertainty in findings indicates fatally flawed research.
Because most cutting-edge science--including most research into currently controversial topics--is uncertain, it is dismissed as junk. The inference is that science is an enemy, just like the Left. However, instead of saying that business interests or moral values trump the scientific consensus the conservative Right's strategy is to argue that the IPCC's scientific consensus itself is flawed. Then they encourage a debate between the consensus scientists and the fringe naysayers, giving the two apparently equal weight.
This then plays into the way the media seeks entertaining "balance" by portraying both sides as evenly matched, equally vehement. Though this appeals to viewers' sense of fair play, sometimes even cheering underdogs vs. snooty, scientific authority figures, such "balance" can also empower fringe groups to stay in the fray forever, magnifying uncertainty indefinitely, preventing any conclusion from being reached.
The associated rhetorical strategy is to assert that those making the “war on science” argument, are just plain confused, that the facts of science aren’t under attack from the right, it’s just that disagreements have occurred over ethics and energy policies.
This is happening in the cultural context of postmodernism, which destabilises all claims to truth and creates a widespread mood of doubt and scepticism, and so creates a cultural vacuum in which every form of extremism and identity politics can flourish.
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The upsurge in various forms of religious fundamentalism during the last thirty years, and the unexpected resurgence of religion in the public sphere, has seen the attempt to stage a war between religion and science.
This confrontation and aggression is fuelled by both religious and scientific fundamentalists (the new atheists )