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I just ran into an older post on Grey and White Matter (James’ blog) today that caught my eye, and reminded me once more of the linguistically bewildered world in which we live. The post was in reference to Obama’s purported championing of “science,” in the wake of the undoubtedly anti-science Bush administration.

Anyway, here is the first 2/3rds of the post:

President Obama intends to “restore science to its rightful place” in stark contrast with his predecessor, George W. Bush. For eight years, comprehensive sex education, biological evolution, drug policy, embryonic stem cell research, family planning, birth control,  environmental regulation, energy policy, pollution controls, and climate science have been politicized, muzzled, and forced to conform to the neoconservative/Christian Right agenda in a full scale war on science.

Now that the anti-intellectual, anti-science administration is out of office, work that has been neglected for far too long can be restarted to bring America to the forefront of scientific achievement, and raise its population’s scientific literacy.  The benefits of this will be two-fold: (1) it will make America more innovative, competitive, and prosperous, and (2) it will beat back the titanic forces of Unreason that have pervaded and eroded America’s cultural vitality and Enlightenment heritage.

But as always, one really has to wonder: what the hell does Obama mean by “science”? If by science, he means the scientific method, then certainly any true champion of science should be not merely a skeptic of all government, but a staunch opponent. At the very least, he should be a staunch opponent of the government roles which Obama has advocated – economic fact alone bears that out. Science isn’t only physical science, it’s empiricism; and there is little that is consistently scientific about what the government does except, perhaps, the science of sustainable fleecing – and even that is a government policy that has failed (see national debt, economic crisis, decreased tax revenues – it’s also bad for the ruling class, too).

Government economic policies, from the standpoint of social welfare, are always disastrous (see: welfare increasing poverty, monetary policy causing wild boom-bust, etc.) and that’s under the generous assumption that social welfare motives actually power the genesis of those policies. A bogus premise. Any person to scientifically look at how the government actually spends taxpayer money and passes laws would come to the conclusion that government power is always wielded in the name of self-interest, and rarely for the ‘common good.’ Yet pursuing the ‘common good’ is a core principle of those who believe that governments ought to be powerful. Hence, for someone to look at a government as powerful as the U.S. government, and one which will grow even further under the Obama administration, and expect it to be a force to foster the advancement of humanity’s knowledge is a blatant contradiction. Trusting the whole establishment with anything is an unscientific trust. So why trust it with science?

Experience, once more, shows us that political motives shall always defeat some vague and abstract commitment to “science.” The scientists who are funded by the government are embedded in a system that can greatly reward many things besides the discovery of fact. You can not separate the self-interested human element from any human action: people work to bring about a state of affairs in the world that aligns with their values, no matter what those values are. When people are free, this becomes competition, growth, win-win, and ultimately happiness. When there is a gun, this becomes the win-lose game of one interest against another.

This is admitted quite freely when people criticize the Bush administration for setting back science. For example, as James said: “… [sciences] have been politicized, muzzled, and forced to conform to the neoconservative/Christian Right agenda in a full scale war on science.” If the Christian Right can make the government’s science-related policies partisan, that means that the power to do so exists. They have been willing to coercively obstruct the rational pursuit of knowledge in favor of fulfilling their insane agenda. That’s politics if I’ve ever seen it. Sure, some politicians might not be such vocal crusaders against obvious scientific tenets, but that doesn’t mean that they are valiant truth seekers. Indeed, half-truths are always more effective than lies.

So what kind of evidence do we have that Obama really cares more about scientific integrity than being some agglomeration of interest groups’ “Washington man”? We like science, right? So where’s the evidence that Obama isn’t just a selfish and violence-wielding schmuck like the rest of the suited bastards? Because he’s a bullshit artist with a silver tongue? With all the power held in the upper echelons of government, and the profit it can bring to those who can get their hands on it, would a happy-go-lucky lover of mankind ever make it? Would those profiting want someone who is a rational and scientific maximizer of social welfare, or would they want someone who would subsidize the agribusiness, bail out the banks, and dish out the no-bid contracts for $20,000 toilets?

Peaceful individuals use rational interaction with the world and negotiation with others to achieve their goals. It takes very little science to figure out that the government is not a negotiator, but a wielder of violence. So how can we ever be told it is a champion of science – of rationality? As Alexander Solzhenitzyn says in “Violence and the Lie” [emphasis added]:

But let us not forget that violence does not live alone and is not capable of living alone: it is necessarily interwoven with THE LIE. Between them exists the most intimate, the deepest of natural bonds. Violence has nothing with which to cover itself except the lie, and the lie has nothing to stand on other than violence. Any man who has once acclaimed violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose the lie as his PRINCIPLE. At its birth violence acts openly and even with pride. But no sooner does it become strong, firmly established, than it senses the rarefaction of the air around it and it cannot continue to exist without descending into a fog of lies, clothing them in sweet talk. It does not always, not necessarily, openly throttle the throat, more often it demands from its subjects only an oath of allegiance to falsehood, only participation in the lie.

By believing that the Obama administration – or any administration for that matter – could ever be a champion of rationality, we are participating in the lie. We are letting an organization which we should rationally recognize as a threat to our well-being tell us about rationality.

Ultimately, while the assault on science by the Christian Right is considerable, we can’t let ourselves fall into the obvious trap of thinking that some other political force is scientific. If we are to be consistent believers in protecting the integrity of the physical sciences, we must also let those physical sciences reside within a structure of all knowledge that has integrity. Otherwise, what’s the point? Reality is an integrated whole, not some arbitrarily divided realm – it is consistent with itself, all around. And if we look at the greatest force of unreason in the world – the state – what we see is something that foundationally breaks with that integration, but still uses half-truths. Yes, science is good. Yes, creating a sustainable world to live in is good. Yes, peace for mankind is good. These are all principles to which any non-sociopath will heartily agree. This is the truth. That truth is cut in half when someone in the same breath says, “and we can achieve that by using a gun.” It’s simply not good science.