The Republican War on Science

The Republican War on Science
by
Chris Mooney
(Basic Books, 2005)

The Republican War on Science is an excellent book of great interest to anyone who has a stake in science, education, or the future of our civilization. This call to arms to defend science is a must read. This is one of the most vital issues of our age, because it hits at the very core of modernity itself, scientific reason and the reason for science.

Check out The Republican War on Science website.

An excerpt from an interview with Chris Mooney in Mother Jones:

MJ: How did we get to this point, where science is so blatantly abused for political purposes?

CM: Well, I think it’s part of the history of the modern conservative movement, and you see it coming to fruition recently with that movement's total control of the Republican Party and of the government. Here you have a movement anchored in, among other things, a distrust of big government. And of course a lot of science is funded by government, and a lot of science takes place in government agencies. This is also a movement that has plausibly been accused of having anti-intellectual tendencies, that thinks big universities and the academic elites are biased against ordinary folks.

But most importantly you have raw politics, or catering to your constituents. With the conservatives, you have industry, which is coming up against science all the time, and religious conservatives, who come out against science any time [it conflicts with] their moral view of the world.

So, you combine all of those things—not liking government, distrusting universities, catering to your base—and then you get control of the government and I think what you get is exactly what you'd predict.

Excerpt from a Crooked Timber review:

"Mooney’s book delivers a damning indictment precisely because it shows that these various abuses aren’t unrelated; they’re all symptoms of the same problem, a deep-seated corruption of the policy process, linked to an attack on the basic principles of scientific integrity."