{"id":153,"date":"2012-06-02T18:51:22","date_gmt":"2012-06-02T18:51:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genotopia.peachpuff-wolverine-566518.hostingersite.com\/?p=153"},"modified":"2013-07-09T19:58:39","modified_gmt":"2013-07-09T19:58:39","slug":"whos-afraid-of-the-neuroscience-of-politics-i-am","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scienceblog.com\/genotopia\/153\/whos-afraid-of-the-neuroscience-of-politics-i-am\/","title":{"rendered":"Who’s afraid of the neuroscience of politics? I am."},"content":{"rendered":"

So I\u2019m reading Chris Mooney\u2019s The Republican Brain<\/a><\/em> and I\u2019m sure I\u2019ll have more to say about it once I\u2019m finished.\u00a0Alex Berezow and Hank Campbell don\u2019t seem to have read Mooney\u2019s book either, but they did read a recent article<\/a> by Mooney in HuffPost, summarizing his argument, and boy, did it make them mad. <\/a>Mooney then gave a guest spot to his pal the behavioral psychologist Andrea Kuszewski, who served up a characteristically fiery and entertaining riposte called,\u00a0“Who’s afraid of the neuroscience of politics?”<\/a>, defending behavioral psychology, journalism, and liberal politics against the anti-anti-conservatism of Berezow and Campbell.\u00a0Kuszewski answers her own question thus: “From the looks of things, it appears to be conservative journalists.” But I\u2019m<\/em> afraid of the neuroscience of politics, and I’m no conservative journalist. In fact, I’m a liberal historian of science and medicine (with, fwiw, graduate training in neuroscience).<\/p>\n

Let me be clear at the outset: if I’m on anyone’s side in this debate, either rhetorically or politically, it’s Mooney and Kuszewski. I am appalled at the assault on knowledge and the way ignorance has become a viable political stance in this country. But as a good Enlightenment liberal, I believe in critique as a means of advancing understanding.\u00a0And I’m personally vested in honing our arguments and developing our understanding as much as possible. I’m making this argument in the interest of rational, constructive discussion with the likes of Mooney and Kuszewski, not out of any allegiance to right-wing ideologues.<\/p>\n

Berezow and Campbell are the authors of the forthcoming book, Science Left Behind<\/em>, a counterweight to Mooney\u2019s thoughtful, impassioned thesis about the anti-scientific tendencies of the American political right wing. Left-wing opponents of vaccines, GM food, and nuclear power are anti-science too, Berezow and Campbell argue; conservatives don\u2019t have a monopoly on ideologically driven opposition to politically charged scientific issues. If Berezow and Campbell had read Mooney\u2019s book, they\u2019d have seen that he addresses each of those issues himself; further, there\u2019s light-years\u2019 difference intellectually between opposition to GM food and rejection of evolution or, for Christ’s sake, relativity. So the counterweight is really a duck on the other side of the scales from the accused witch; if the pans seem to balance, it says more about the experiment than about nature.<\/p>\n

Anyway, in their article, Berezow and Campbell accuse Mooney of being dilettante, a philistine, a charlatan, a mountebank, and possibly a mummer and a picador, although I don\u2019t want to read too deeply into their argument. They make lots of positively silly statements, such as that as a (mere) journalist, Mooney can \u201cpractice scientific malpractice with impunity.\u201d Though that is literally true, rhetorically it is really a high-handed slap at those who would deign to write about science without holding a Ph.D. in microbiology, as does Berezow. Which is amusing, given that his coauthor Campbell edits Science 2.0<\/em>, <\/a>a website whose home page offers, \u201cKnow science and want to write? Register now to get your own column!\u201d, and which, on the About Us page<\/a>, says, \u201cWe created a place where everyone who wants to write about science can write to a large potential audience, regardless of popularity.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is, then, overall a dopey article, irrational and ill-informed, whose flaws Kuszewski enumerates and I don\u2019t need to repeat. However, Berezow and Campbell almost make an interesting criticism. They say that Mooney\u2019s argument\u2014that there is a biological underpinning to conservativism\u2014amounts to eugenics. Now taken literally, this is idiotic. Eugenics has been defined in many ways over the last 130 years, viz.:<\/p>\n