In the wake of three Surgeon Generals testifying on Capital Hill about Bush administration political interference in medical science, raising once again the issue of how the Bush administration has been relentlessly attacking any science that doesn’t agree with their agenda, Andrew Sullivan thinks Virginia Postrel is making sense…

"Scientists have gotten way too fond of invoking their authority to claim that "science" dictates their preferred policy solutions and claiming that any disagreement constitutes an attack on science. But, even assuming that scientists agree on the facts, science can only tell us something about the state of the world. It cannot tell us what policy is the best to adopt. Scientists’ preferences are not "science." You cannot go from an "is" (science) to an "ought" (policy). Social science, particularly economics, can tell you something about the likely tradeoffs (hence some of my frustrations at Aspen). But it can’t tell you which tradeoffs to make,"
– Virginia Postrel, making sense as usual.

Postrel is referring to an op-ed defending Governor Girly Man’s sacking of Robert Sawyer, chair of California’s chair Air Resources Board.  Schwarzenegger had appointed him in December of 2005, calling him "an exceptionally accomplished scientist, teacher and environmental policy expert who has devoted his career to using science and technology to improve air quality not only in California, but across our country and the world." 

The grim irony in Postrel’s blog post is that what the Schwarzenegger camp would have you believe is that Sawyer was fired for doing exactly what Postrel said needs to be done: weighing the science against the public interest.  Against the wishes of environmentalists, the state air board led by Sawyer voted by a 7-1 margin to let San Joaquin Valley polluters have until 2024 to come into compliance with the Federal Clean Air Act.  The San Joaquin Valley is California’s, and by extension much of this nation’s, food basket.  But it wasn’t this decision, so much as Sawyer’s insistence that the State Air Board remain politically independent, that got Sawyer his pink slip.  That is what Postrel is defending here; not the idea that public policy often has to be a compromise between various necessities, but that science must serve politics.

Postrel’s post is dishonest claptrap of the sort that homophobes use when they bellyache that they’re being called bigots merely for "disagreeing with the gay agenda".  It isn’t disagreement the scientists are calling attacks, it’s when politicians censor them, and then rewrite their science outright to fit a specific political agenda, that’s the attack on science.  It’s one thing for politicians to say that they have to weigh the science against what they see as the public interest, and another for them to force science to tell the public things that are not true.  But this has been Bush administration policy from day one, and republican party policy now for decades.  Intelligent Design anyone?

I keep turning to Jacob Bronowski on this, but he said it absolutely right…

Picture the state of German thought when Wener Heisenberg was criticized by the S.S., and had to ask Himmler to support his scientific standing.   Heisenberg had won the Nobel prize at the age of thirty; his principle of uncertainty is one of the two or three deep concepts which science has found in this century; and he was trying to warn Germans that they must not dismiss such discoveries as Relativity because they disliked the author.  Yet Himmler, who had been a schoolmaster, took months of petty inquiery (someone in his family knew Heisenberg) before he authorized of all people, Heydrich to protect Heisenberg.  His letter to Heydrich is a paper monument to what happens to the creative mind in a society without truth.  For Himmler writes that he has heard that Heisenberg is good enough to be earmarked later for his own Academy for Welteislehre.  This was an Academy which Himmler proposed to devote to the conviction which he either shared with or imposed on his scientific yes-men, that the stars are made of ice.

-Jacob Bronowski, Science and Human Values.

For years after reading that I wondered why the hell anyone would want to force scientists to say that stars are made of ice.  Then I came across this web site run by a group of people who still believe in the Ptolemaic earth centric model of the universe and then it made sense.  There are still some nutty fundamentalists out there who insist that the earth must be the center of the universe, because they bible says so.  But in that case the stars simply cannot be suns like our own, and light years away from us, because then the outer edges of the universe would be whipping around the earth once each day at speeds even a fundamentalist could not accept.  So the stars must be a lot closer to the earth and the universe must be a lot smaller.  But if the stars are a lot closer to the earth then they can’t be objects like our sun.  So they must be made of ice instead, and are merely reflecting the light from our own sun back at us.

It’s crazy.  But that’s apparently what Himmler believed, because his screwball religion told him it had to be so.  And never mind what the evidence says.  Contrary opinions are not merely wrong, they’re heresy, and even worse, they’re rebellion against authority.  This is why theocrats and totalitarians hate the practice of science.  The only authority science accepts is the evidence.  At the end of the day nature speaks for itself.  This is why science is always going to have a tense relationship with politics.  But it’s not a hopeless one, so long as everyone is willing to tell the truth. 

It’s one thing to say that we have to weigh the costs and benefits, and make hard decisions sometimes that maybe nobody really likes, and another to try to make scientists say things that aren’t so.  No, science can’t tell us what policy is the best to adopt.  But it can sure as hell narrow it down.  You can’t even begin to guess what the best policy is, if you don’t know what the goddamned facts are.