The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (12 page)

(This raises a few concerns: To begin, Lewis’s conclusion raises a simple question: “Is Lewis really sure about this?” I mean, if you’re certain that certainty is evil, what does that make you? More important, this is dangerous
nonsense. If Osama bin Laden and John Ashcroft are both enemies of humanity and decency because they are certain of their beliefs, then so are Mother Teresa, Elie Wiesel, and Jesus. To suggest one is a threat to decency and humanity for being sure that Nazis or jihadists are threats to decency and humanity is the very definition of asinine sophistry.)

Dewey’s student Horace Kallen helped invent the language of pragmatism because it “dissolves dogmas into beliefs, eternities and necessities into change and chance, conclusions and finalities into processes. But men have invented philosophy precisely because they find change, chance and process too much for them, and desire infallible security and certainty.”
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President Obama paid homage to this grand tradition when he vowed in his inaugural an “end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.” As with every progressive pragmatist, the past is the enemy and dogma its greatest weapon.

As we’ve seen, the self-styled empiricists of liberalism have convinced themselves that they are only concerned with what works. They are like rats behind the pied piper of data, and they will go wherever it leads them, regardless of ideology or convention. Bentley University economist Scott Sumner writes on his blog: “I can’t think of any real world policy disputes facing Congress, now or in the past, where liberals did not take what they saw as the roughly utilitarian position. And I can see lots of cases where conservatives, dogmatic libertarians, or econ-nuts took non-utilitarian positions.”
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The fact that Sumner cannot think of situations where liberals were nonutilitarians is not evidence that liberals are nonutilitarians. It is evidence that Professor Sumner hews to the dogmatic mythology that liberalism is simply the doctrine of clear thinking applied to politics. But one need not rehearse the countless ways in which liberalism sneaks its values into policy debates under the guise of utilitarianism (or realism, pragmatism, empiricism) to recognize how palpably untrue Sumner’s interpretation of reality is.

The armies of liberalism pour out of these Trojan Horses to do battle for social justice at every turn (see
Chapter 11
, Social Justice). Head Start, among
the holiest of social programs, has never worked, and each time this unwelcome fact presents itself it is greeted as proof that the program simply requires more money. The War on Poverty was less successful at reducing the poverty rate than ignoring it was. In 1966 the poverty rate was roughly 19 percent. In 1974, after the antipoverty programs were fully institutionalized, the poverty rate was 11.2 percent. Thirty years later, in 2004, when antipoverty spending was enormously greater, the poverty rate was 12.7 percent. And as of this writing, under Barack Obama it is over 15 percent (admittedly after a major recession, but also during a time of massive domestic spending and a relatedly weak recovery). Meanwhile, in the twelve years from 1949 to 1961—the supposedly scandalously apathetic Ike Age—poverty rates were cut roughly in half, from 41 percent to 21 percent. In other words, the cause of social justice was served more by a government that didn’t bother with social justice.
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Science and reason are hailed as the greatest antidotes to dogma because they are a more concrete, more provable, form of truth. George Eliot writes in
Middlemarch
: “Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.”
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Elliot was right, but it’s worth noting that this is not an indictment of dogma part and parcel. It is true that many dogmas are built upon mistakes. But that doesn’t mean the resulting edifice is not worthwhile. A ship may sink due to the blunder of the captain, but the resulting sunken wreckage beneath the waves may serve as a bountiful reef supporting a wealth of new life. So it is with humanity and her institutions. Columbus “discovered” America by mistake and the world is better for what was built upon that mistake. How many beloved children were born thanks to some capricious accident? We are told that the institution of monogamous marriage between a man and a woman was a mistake, unchartered by the laws of evolution and unlicensed by the conclusions of science. Maybe so. But what was built upon the rock of that “mistake” is not so easily or desirably undone even if we are willing to admit the existence of an error committed somewhere in the ancient recesses of prehistory. If tomorrow science tells us that it would make more sense to make stoplights green instead of red, the price of the resulting chaos would not be worth the gains in rational organization. Indeed, a reasonable man
understands that the costs of ripping up the old and tried are often too expensive for the theoretical promises of the new and untried.

Lincoln’s wisdom was only outstripped by his eloquence when he proclaimed in 1861, “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”
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In his triumph Lincoln not only forged a new conception of our nation free of slavery, he forged
a new dogma
that it must never return to that evil. If all dogma is wrong, then it must always be considered a live proposition that slavery might in some circumstances be a worthwhile institution. Surely a mechanistic utilitarian could craft a perfectly consistent argument that the slavery of the few would maximize the happiness of the many. The only plausible utilitarian retort is that the many could not be happy while enjoying the fruits of slave labor. But such an argument hinges on the inconvenient fact that such unhappiness would be made possible only if the majority felt the sting of a properly formed conscience. And such a conscience can only exist when informed by a fundamental dogma about what is right and wrong. After all, the history of humanity unfolded for millennia with happy majorities benefitting from the miseries of an enslaved minority. It’s a sign of civilizational progress that we—in the West, at least—believe that any happiness enjoyed at the expense of another’s enslavement isn’t a morally legitimate happiness.

William F. Buckley understood that dogma is a source of progress because it sets boundaries of acceptable discourse. He illustrated this point nicely when discussing a libertarian’s idea of privatizing lighthouses. Buckley thought the idea absurd (and Buckley was famously wrong about that), but he noted that he wished the effort success, for “if our society seriously wondered whether or not to denationalize the lighthouses, it would not wonder at all whether to nationalize the medical profession.”
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Unfortunately, as my friend Mark Steyn has noted, we now have a world that is perfectly happy to discuss privatizing lighthouses even as we nationalize the medical profession.

But let’s get back to science. The idea that dogma is necessarily at war with science is a misunderstanding of the former and a misapplication of the latter. Much of what is true of science is also true of dogma:
Both have many moral strikes against them. Science is the author of infinite boons to humanity and need not be put in the dock because it is also the accomplice to countless crimes. The light of reason hails from a flame that burns as often as it warms or illuminates. Likewise, dogma has kept societies backward and cruel, but it is also what keeps forward thinking and decent societies from becoming backward and cruel (see
Chapter 18
, Science).

Similarly, where dogma triumphs over science should be obvious. Science is silent on what should be done with the fruits of science. Science can cure illnesses and cause them, destroy cities and build them, save lives and take them. It is the realm outside of science, the realm of morality and religion, i.e., the realm of dogma, that tells us what is permissible and what is taboo. The scientist free of moral dogma is a cartoon villain who creates death rays for sport or ransom.

Dogma constrains how science should be done. The Hippocratic Oath, even in its original form, represents not a triumph of science but a triumph of moral absolutism. Whereas until the Hippocratic Oath (as Margaret Mead among others has argued) sorcerers and healers often wore the same hat, the advent of the oath marked the moment when doctors as a class became committed solely to preserving life. There’s nothing within science per se that says medical researchers must not experiment on human subjects; it is the imposition of ethical dogma that constrains the scientist. The mandate “first do no harm” is as rankly ideological and dogmatic a precept as any, even more so. Most Republicans will accept tax increases in one area if offset in another. Many prolifers countenance exceptions for abortion in the cases of rape or incest, and, of course, for the life of the mother. Doctors make no such exceptions to the Hippocratic Oath—save, of course, when it comes to abortion—and only then when another dogmatic obsession trumps their oath.

Alas, this is not the only area where ideological forces corrupt science. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the battlefield of climate science, where the progressive protagonists insist that they are mere servants of the facts and their opponents are backward deniers of the unfolding apocalypse. Whenever a scientist follows the facts in a direction contrary to environmentalist dogma, he is no longer a real scientist. Hence,
when Al Gore’s own scientific mentor cast a skeptical eye on the industry his work helped create, the pupil proclaimed that his former master had taken leave of his senses.

Indeed, green religious devotion runs so deep that adherents to the dogma of climate change must not only subscribe to the diagnosis of a fevered earth, they must show undying loyalty to the proposed remedy as well. It is true that the earth has gotten warmer since the Industrial Revolution, and it is probably true that mankind has contributed to that warming. How much of a contribution and how big a problem are still open questions, no matter how much saying so hurts the feelings of those who believe otherwise. It is also unclear what the ratio of costs and benefits might be. We’ve heard about the costs—real and alleged—ad nauseum: shrinking Arctic ice, floods, lost polar bears, etc. What gets less play are the potential benefits. In 2008, Thomas Fingar, then chairman of the National Intelligence Council, testified before the House Select Committee on Intelligence on the consequences of climate change. He explained that “net cereal crop yields likely will increase by 5 to 20 percent, for example, and most studies suggest the United States as a whole will enjoy modest economic benefits over the next few decades largely due to the increased crop yields.” He also noted that the “growing season has lengthened an average of two days per decade since 1950 in Canada and the contiguous United States.” New sea routes, primarily through the Northwest Passage, will be opened as well.

Regardless, there is nothing inherent to the claim that the earth is overheating that requires we follow a prescription of abolishing fossil fuels and smashing the internal combustion engine with the same zeal the iconoclasts applied to graven images. When a patient gets a fever we do not cure it by reverse engineering the habits that may have fostered the fever. We treat the ailment. Similarly, it is entirely possible that we could cure the earth by treating the symptom by, say, releasing particles into the air that would alleviate the greenhouse effect. Science has much to say on whether that would be a good idea. But unscientific dogmatists in lab coats conspire to keep the question from being asked. Hence, when a Nobel Prize–winning chemist suggested that geoengineering might solve global warming at a millionth of the cost of ineffective rationing strategies and alternative energy fantasies, the environmental community responded like
Church elders presented with a proposal to disestablish the Church itself.
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More broadly, what is lost in these debates is the crucial distinction between science and scientism. The former is a value-neutral enterprise that seeks, through the scientific method, to understand and manipulate the reality of the physical world. Science is a procedure defined by systematic observation and measurement, followed by experiment, and then by the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. It is not the source of moral truths, but moral truths must be informed by them. “The truth of our faith,” observed Thomas Aquinas, “becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels, if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.”
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Scientism, meanwhile, is the act of seeing in science what is not there. It is an act of faith that elevates, nay makes divine, the authority of science to bolster the aims of its acolytes. The practitioners of scientism presume to tell us that we should live a certain way because science tells us we must. It reduces human existence to material causes and humans to bags of water, meat, and bones powered by electrical impulses. It is the ancient naturalistic fallacy updated with more contemporary lingo. Indeed, as the philosopher Edward Feser notes, scientism is itself a fallacy on its face, because it exempts itself from the scientific method. Scientism is not a testable proposition; it is an assertion of faith. No wonder the scientific socialists, technocrats, progressives, social psychiatrists, and environmentalists insist that science is on their side in the same way the mullahs and zealots proclaim that God is on theirs. They respond to inconvenient questions with the same dismissiveness as Bill Murray in
Ghostbusters
when he barks, “Back off man, I’m a scientist.”

But at least the naturalistic fallacy assumes a creator, a larger wellspring of meaning, justice, and order. The fallacy of scientism creates priests answerable to no one and no thing other than the very dogma they mint. The fetus is an unhuman with no more rights than a ham sandwich because the new dogmatists wish it to be so, and they sell the proposition by saying science says they’re right, the same way pagan priests insisted the viscera of goats indicated the will of the gods.