Musings on Politics and Science

An assortment of thoughts at various degrees of development. (Try not to faint from shock that I've actually written a substantive post.)
As always, comments are welcome and encouraged.

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I've heard often that Party X needs to "put ideology aside in favor of doing what's good for the nation." This is not an entirely new sentiment, but it does seem to be more prevalent now than during the previous administration.

This is more than a false dichotomy; it's completely absurd. It fails to grasp that political ideology is about "what's good for the nation." Many (most?) of the people who opposed the stimulus bill did so precisely because they believed that doing so was "for the good of the nation."

Ignoring ideology in favor of "doing what's good for the country" would be akin to ignoring medical science in favor of "doing what's best to treat the patient"; in both cases, the former critically informs your approach to the latter.

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Is the middle of an economic crisis really the best time to worry about dramatic new programs? Health care reform, alternative energy, educational improvements...these are not inexpensive projects. Given the magnitude of the crisis (remember how we couldn't wait for Congress to actually read the stimulus bill?), shouldn't economic recovery take precedence over other concerns?

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President Obama has said that he wants to "restore science to its proper place" by "taking the politics out of science" (paraphrases from memory). I would find this amusing were it not so tiresome (not to mention backward).

First of all, exactly what is the "proper place" of science? Note that that's not a scientific question. So who gets to answer it? Also note that if a politician (especially the president!) makes a ruling about science (like assigning it a "proper place"), he has--by definition--"politicized" science.

Second, President Obama clearly doesn't mean what he says. In his stem-cell executive order, he calls for "free and open inquiry" so that scientists can "do their jobs, free from manipulation or coercion" and so that "we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology." Why, then, does he insist that "our government never [open] the door to the use of cloning for human reproduction"? Surely reproductive cloning holds great interest from a scientific perspective; think of what we could learn about human development. It is only ideology that leads the president to impose this manipulative limitation. He has just made a "scientific decision" based on ideology rather than facts.*1

This is as it should be: Science by itself tells us only about what we can do, nothing about what we should do. If we were to completely divorce scientific practice from political and ethical ideology, there would be nothing to prevent any form of human experimentation. (And your opinion about the morality of various kinds of experimentation is not ultimately a scientific decision; science makes no value judgments.)

The Wall Street Journal puts it somewhat more succinctly: "The question of whether to destroy human embryos for research purposes is not fundamentally a scientific question; it is a moral and civic question about the proper uses, ambitions and limits of science."

*1: As the president uses the term, "facts" appears to be limited to empirical data, since it doesn't include the possibility of moral facts.

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President Obama has promised to fix the economy, reduce or eliminate the national debt, restore America to a position of international authority, initiate universal health care, transform our energy economy, and overhaul our public education system, all without raising taxes on 95% of taxpayers...and all in his first term. I think there are only two ways to account for such a claim: insanity or deceit.

Obviously, one of us is delusional.