Missing George and the happy medium

There's a brief commentary piece in New Scientist making the same point I was thinking to myself yesterday. Namely, if the science community thought George W Bush's administration was anti-science, just wait til the Tea Party movement starts to exert more influence:

On the surface, the movement seems impelled by the economic pain Americans are feeling. But look more closely and it's hard to miss what historian Richard Hofstadter called the "paranoid style" in US politics, marked by "exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy". An essential strand of that is anti-intellectualism and disdain for science.

Nearly every Senate candidate with Tea Party backing rejects the established reality of human-caused global warming, usually with gusto. "I absolutely do not believe in the science of man-caused climate change. It's not proved by any stretch of the imagination," Wisconsin candidate Ron Johnson has said. "I think it's far more likely that it's just sunspot activity, or something just in the geological aeons of time."

I think a lot of the complaints from lefty scientists about the Bush administration were concerning his attitudes to biology and stem cell research, informed by his pro-life position.

But in fact, while I am consider myself strongly pro-science (yes, despite the fact that I thought physicists were not taking the potential for danger from the LHC seriously enough), the field of biological research is exactly the one about which I think reasonable conservatives (like me!) have a right to be concerned. I'm not comfortable with the virtual routine use of IVF fertility treatments, let alone extracting stem cells from embryos. It's the philosophical and practical implications of the commodification of human life, (or proto-life, if you want,) that I think should concern more people than it does. For IVF, the strong desire to have one's own baby overcomes all such broader social and philosophical issues. I am similarly somewhat sympathic to the concerns of genetic engineering in plants and animals, and have my doubts that patents for genes is a good idea.

Yet it is, as with many areas of politics at the moment, just about impossible to find anyone who strikes the happy medium in the field of science policy. You either have a choice of pro-lifers who share my concerns about stem cells and all forms of fiddling with embryos, but they are almost certainly going to be climate change disbelievers who are happy to completely ignore scientific warnings of global scale dangers. Their opponents tend to be led by gung-ho culture warrior types whose attitude to the environment I can share, but little else. They are often arrogant about, and completely dismissive of, religious impulses, although they will live with a kind of woolly headed environmental spiritualism . And those with the strongest environmental concerns are often very uninterested in space exploration, yet in my view a truly long term view for those who would like to see humanity survive suggests it would be a good idea not to leave all of life's eggs in the Earth basket.

By and large, I guess I do agree with most Catholic sentiment regarding science, yet Catholic politicians in Australia and the US do not seem to feel particularly impelled to do anything about following such idea legislatively. And while the Church is often unfairly criticised for arguing that reliance on condoms is not the magic answer to HIV anywhere, it's much harder to justify from a logical point of view why it should teach that contraception that prevents fertilisation at all should be treated as being morally defective, at least if all other aspects of the sex are licit (like the couple being married.) So even within the Church you have this "all or nothing" kind of attitude that infects teaching with a scientific aspect.

Yes, it has become very hard to find the happy medium in the world at the moment. My installation as the dictatorial but benevolent political and religious leader of the Earth by alien invaders seems to be the only solution. It's a long shot, I know, but hope remains.