In this recent incarnation, Senator Tom Coburn (R.-OK) is castigating studies funded by the National Science Foundation which seem silly or frivolous to outsiders to bolster his cred as an anti-waste, anti-tax crusader. He has repeated called for the elimination of the NSF altogether, although he has no idea where American scientists would get their funding if he did so. In past years, the charge was led by Rep. John Dingell (D.-MI), who has served in the House since 1955, the longest serving member of the current Congress. A generation ago, it was Sen. William Proxmire (D-WI), who replaced Joe McCarthy in the Senate and served for 44 years. Proxmire created the famous “Golden Fleece” awards, which publicize what he regards as useless research. Or take a recent quote from that paragon of education and science, Sarah Palin, is in the same vein: “Some of these pet projects, they don’t really make a whole lot of sense and sometimes these dollars they go to projects having little or nothing to do with the public good, things like fruit fly research.”

The Palin quote, however, reveals the problem with the whole issue of outsiders criticizing science funding: ignorance of scientific research and its context. Anyone who has had any real exposure to biology (as Palin obviously has not) knows that for over a century, the fruit fly has been the model organism of genetics, since it is easy to study and breed, and its genes work wonderfully for research. Fruit flies have taught us more about genetics and evolution than studies on just about any other animal. The same problem permeates all these debates: many areas of science seem obscure to the layman, and don’t seem worthwhile, but in the context of a particular research discipline, they are important or significant.

As the article goes on to point out:

But there’s more to duh research than meets the eye. Experts say they have to prove the obvious — and prove it again and again — to influence perceptions and policy.

“Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,” said Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. “There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.”

Indeed, people are still arguing about cigarettes almost 50 years after the U.S. surgeon general first linked their use to cancer and lung disease. In a recent issue of the Canadian Medical Assn. Journal, a detailed analysis painstakingly laid out a notion that most take for granted: that secondhand smoke in cars is bad for children.

Duh.

Or consider the case of Harvard sleep expert Dr. Charles Czeisler, who has spent about $3 million over the years demonstrating over and over that doctors who don’t get enough sleep make mistakes on the job.

This seems painfully clear. But getting the medical establishment to start believing it — much less change the rules governing doctors’ working hours — has taken Czeisler the better part of three decades. Long shifts for interns and residents are a staple of hospital culture.

When Czeisler presented evidence that workers on rotating shifts at a chemical plant suffered on disrupted sleep, the medical establishment said that doctors were different. When he published results showing that physicians’ 24-hour-plus shifts contributed to car accidents and attention lapses at work, some acknowledged it might be true — but not for them.

Everyone had an anecdote. Czeisler had data. “It was dismissed out of hand,” he said. “They use the same argument over and over, even when we’ve tested it. It drives me up the wall.”

In 2008, the Institute of Medicine issued guidelines calling for limiting interns’ and residents’ shifts to 16 consecutive hours. Last year, authorities did cut back to 16 hours — but only for interns. Why? In part because that’s who Czeisler had studied.

“I was astonished,” said Czeisler, who is now researching whether residents’ performance also is affected by lack of sleep. “I can’t believe we have to do this extra study.”

There’s another reason why studies tend to confirm notions that are already widely held, said Daniele Fanelli, an expert on bias at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Instead of trying to find something new, “people want to draw attention to problems,” especially when policy decisions hang in the balance, he said.

In addition, studies that seem to be confirming the obvious are not so trivial as the media and politicians portray them. Many ideas which we consider everyday wisdom turn out to be wrong—and it takes studies like these to demonstrate the falsity of commonly-held beliefs. Or just to test the hypothesis in the first place, so even if it is confirmed, it is has at least been tested, and it’s not just folk wisdom. Ideally, science should be testing any and all ideas, whether they seem to be common sense or not, because in many cases what we think is common sense turns out to be wrong once scientists have worked on it. After all, your common sense tells you that the sun moves around the earth, that the earth is flat, and that heavier objects fall faster than lighter objects—all ideas which have proven false when scientists examined them. Much of science (whether relativity or quantum mechanics or molecular biology or cosmology) is so specialized and hard to explain to the lay man that they are almost impossible to render on commonsensical layman’s explanations without grossly oversimplifying.

Commonly, you will hear politicians and the media criticizing science that just seems obscure to them, often with cries for restricting funding just to practical research that can be made immediately useful to humans. But again, the layperson is in no position to judge what is good research in nuclear physics or in molecular biology, since they know little or nothing about it. Most of the time, the critics of science don’t even try to critique research in highly specialized fields like nuclear physics or molecular biology—yet they feel expert enough in fields like psychology and sociology to critique those kinds of research, even though such research is vetted just as rigorously by the peer review process as research in fields laymen have no clue about.

That’s the crucial point: unless you are qualified by specialized professional training to criticize a particular type of research, you cannot render a useful judgment over what’s good science and what’s bad science. That is the job of the scientific community itself, which polices itself using peer review to fund only the research that meets the highest standards of a given specialty. Peer review isn’t perfect, and not everything that is funded is great science, but it is the best device we have to screen out less important and worthwhile research in the judgment of scientific experts qualified in a given field. And I know from personal experience that most funding is not frivolously thrown away. In my career, I’ve gotten funding consistently from the NSF, and even flown to D.C. to be on panels that screen out the proposals and the mountains of reviews that were generated. It’s brutal. In my branch, at best about 20% of the proposals get funded. That means that 80% of the proposals (many of which are outstanding research, proposed by well-regarded scientists) get turned down just because the competition is so stiff and the funds for scientific research are so scarce. In the last cycle of Sedimentary Geology and Paleontology (my branch) only 10% were funded; 90% were turned down no matter how good they were simply because the funds were so limited. Would you want to waste months of your time and effort to write a pre-proposal, wait for the OK,  and then send in proposal, knowing that the odds are only 1 in 5 or 1 in 10 that it will be funded? That’s the dilemma that faces many scientists, and yet they are under continual pressure to keep the grant funding coming, and maintain their research careers in this highly competitive atmosphere.

So keep these things in mind when you hear yet another superficial story in the media or from a politician or  reporter who doesn’t really understand how science works.

Many readers of this blog will recognize the name of Rolling Stone writer and journalist Matt Taibbi. A gonzo investigative journalist in the style of Hunter Thompson, he was a regular correspondent on Real Time with Bill Maher during the 2008 election. He routinely cracked up the panel with his witty and savage comments, and has also appeared frequently on The Rachel Maddow Show. Famous for his lacerating political commentary and analysis, he has a long track record covering not only U.S. politics, but also he was embedded with the troops in Iraq (described in the book reviewed here), spent a number of years in Moscow as a correspondent, and has worked all over the world as a journalist. He even played professional baseball in Moscow and professional basketball in Mongolia, and had to flee Uzkbekistan after offending the president.

Even though it is now a few years old, I finally got the chance to read his 2008 book The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics and Religion, which spent many weeks on The New York Times best-seller list. The events described in the book occurred from about 2005-2008, so they seem a bit dated in the perspective of what has happened since the 2008 elections. But in most respects the same groups are saying and doing the same things, and in some cases, the actions of people and the events since 2008 are even more deranged and unhinged than they were when  he wrote his book, so his wickedly funny analysis is even more apropos.

The premise of the book is that American politics is so dysfunctional, and the American people are so  disillusioned and jaded about the political gridlock in Washington, and its inability to respond to the needs of everyday Americans, that we have turned to all sorts of false prophets and bizarre notions in order to find comfort and comprehend a complex world that defies simple explanation. Taibbi begins the book by covering the way the U.S. Congress acts today, and it’s a disgusting portrait. During the daytime a few politicians in the nearly empty House and Senate chambers waste the taxpayers’ money and time doing meaningless business,  bloviating about naming post offices and honoring police officers or firemen to get their names in The Congressional Record. That’s why watching CSPAN these days is a sure cure for insomnia. The real business of running the country goes on after  hours and behind closed doors, when powerful committee chairman of the majority party get to write the bills that favor their biggest donors, and stick in their pet projects and earmarks where there is no oversight. The bills are often written to accomplish the exact opposite of their official purpose, as when Taibbi describes how Texas Rep. Joe Barton (infamous for calling President Obama a liar during a speech) pushed a bill ostensibly for Hurricane Katrina relief that had nothing for the victims or hurricane safety and readiness. Instead, it was a thinly disguised effort to give polluters a big break from taxes, regulation and emissions controls. The minority party tries to challenge some of it, but as long as the majority party has the votes in place, no one has the time or inclination to read the fine print on bills once they emerge from committee with no warning and only minutes on the House or Senate floor before they are voted on. That’s how our great democracy works, folks, and the hypocrisy and sleaze applies to both sides. Taibbi starts by describing how slimeballs such as Tom DeLay and Barton got away with it before they lost their majority in the 2006 elections, but after the Democrats took over, it was almost as bad.

Given the American public’s justifiable loss of faith in Congress, it’s Taibbi’s premise that they turn elsewhere for answers and comfort. The heart (and best part) of Taibbi’s book is when he puts on his undercover chameleon disguise and “embeds” himself as a new member of fundamentalist Reverend John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. Hagee is famous for being the fundie preacher who founded “Christians United for Israel”. His pro-Israeli stance is not based on any real love of Jews, but because having a Jewish state in place is important to End-Times prophecies. Taibbi provides a hilarious, snarky description of the contradictions and bizarre thinking of a typical Hagee sermon, which has the usual fundie demonization of secularism, evolution, science, homosexuality, and abortion. Then, with no apparent connection, Hagee rails against anti-Semitism or attacks on Israel. But the funniest part of the book is Taibbi’s detailed account of pretending to be a convert in the Hagee Empire, where cult-like indoctrination is a big part of the process. He goes through the motions and prayer meetings and confessionals, gets anointed and baptized, and “speaks in tongues” (actually, instead of babbling the meaningless gobbletegook of “tongues,” he chants song lyrics in Russian). He even attends a fundamentalist boot camp, where they break down your connections to your family and former friends, and force you to accept their church cult as your only source of comfort and community. (Here the infamous Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort make their appearance, peddling creationist nonsense). Throughout the entire exercise, Taibbi’s snarky comments and witty analyses point out the absurdity of the entire process. Even more disturbing, when he says something to his new church friends that is sarcastic or might make them think or question their absurd beliefs, they completely miss the point and cannot comprehend what he is talking about. To me, that is the scariest part of the whole book. These lonely, broken people who are simply looking for answers or comfort or some sort of community that accepts them get sucked into this huge political machine which indoctrinates them into believing that anything they hear outside the Church is the work of the devil. Not just the usual villains, like homosexuality and abortion and evolution, but even science and—believe it or not—philosophy are the work of Satan, too. When you come to think of it, that shouldn’t surprise us, because these church dogmas must be believed without question or reason, and anything that might allow the individual to challenge the dogma is diabolical to their way of thinking.

These churches violate all sorts of tax laws, since they are openly political when they endorse certain candidates and demonize others. During Taibbi’s stint, Hilary was The Great Beast that struck fear in their hearts, but it’s easy to see now why so many conservative Americans believed garbage (back during the Bush years) about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake uranium or (more recently) about Obama being a Kenyan Muslim—and they still do, even though all of these things have been shown to be patently false. These people don’t need to get it from Fox News. They don’t even watch the news or read the papers in the first place. They learn everything they know about the world from their church community, so when their church leaders demonize the President and tell lies about him, they don’t have any other source of information to provide a reality check. Likewise, when they’re told lies about evolution and science for their entire lives, it should not surprise us that no amount of proper coverage of evolution in the schools or books and blogs by us “secular atheists” do not even reach them, let alone influence them. On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher and Keith Olbermann made fun of the conservative “information bubble” where people only heard news as distorted by Fox-Limbaugh-Beck conservative echo chamber. They had an “typical Republican voter” sitting in a large lucite sphere, eyes glazed over and unable to hear Maher and Olbermann shouting demonstrably true statements at him. But if Taibbi is right, that “bubble” is even more hermetically sealed, since these conservative churches are the only source of information about the outside world for most of their followers. Most things they encounter are considered to be Satanic and should be shunned. In some ways, they are like the Amish of Pennsylvania: sheltered, isolated, adhering to an outdated dogma, yet shunning anything about the modern world that their church does not condone.

As a counterpart to the insular world of fundamentalist churches, Taibbi provides an interesting insight into the looking-glass world of the “9/11 Truthers.” Instead of going undercover, Taibbi attends their meetings, reads their blogs and literature, argues with many of them, gets deluged with their hate emails and death threats, and gets deep into the intricate and strange debates over minutiae of 9/11. Like the fundies, this group is a dedicated extreme subculture with its own peculiar dogmatic view of the world that cannot be shaken by outside reality, and bizarre notions (that the Bush Administration was competent enough to carry off such a great conspiracy; that all the conspirators have managed to keep their silence after a decade; that the Pentagon was hit by a missile, not a passenger jet, while C-130 transports rained jet fragments and body parts down on the Pentagon lawn in broad daylight—and no one saw them; that the passengers of the Pentagon jet are being imprisoned somewhere) that are not even remotely plausible when subjected to any kind of common sense or scrutiny. But plausibility and reality have no meaning in the deranged world of 9/11 Truthers. The bizarre stories they concoct, and their conspiratorial view of the world as run by the Trilateral Commission/ Illuminati/ Freemasons/ “black helicopter” set fits their paranoid conception of the globe controlled by mysterious unseen forces. These weird ideas make sense to them in a world where everything else is equally deranged to their point of view. Apparently, Taibbi views the 9/11 Truthers as a leftist counterpart to the fundamentalists, but the parallel doesn’t run true. Certainly during the Bush years it appealed to some with leftist sympathies, but the 9/11 Truthers are stronger than ever in the Obama years. They don’t have a clear political leaning, but the entire idea mostly appeals to people who view the world as controlled by big, unseen government forces. This is a right-wing nightmare, not a leftist fear.

Even though the  events of the past three years have changed the political landscape a bit since the book came out, so much of it (Congressional gridlock and ineffectiveness; the Fundamentalist echo chamber; the 9/11 Truthers) still remains relevant today. But Taibbi continues to write about the foremost political and social events of our time, including his new book on the financial meltdown, Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the most Audacious Power Grab in American History. Typical of his prose is a description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of  humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”. In addition, there are his stories in Rolling Stone, and his continuous blog posts. Perhaps his best recent writing is his coverage of the Tea Party movement during the 2010 elections. He argues that the Teabaggers have no coherent leadership or message. In Taibbi’s view, they are merely older middle-class white folks who fear the demographic and social changes that are coming to this country, and resent the idea of minorities getting any government aid (even as they cling to their own Medicare and Medicaid). Taibbi suggests that this is why they parrot meaningless ideas like shutting down the Federal Government as a solution to complex economic problems, or radically cutting the Federal Government (not realizing that most of the federal spending is for Social Security and Medicare, which they don’t want cut). Or they fall for ploys like the flat tax or Cain’s “9-9-9″ plan, which are regressive rather than progressive, and will raise their own taxes but radically reduce the taxes of the rich.

So if you enjoy reading a sarcastic, snarky, extremely witty and perceptive gonzo journalist analysis and insights into the world of Congress, Fundamentalists, and 9/11 Truthers, I heartily recommend The Great Derangement.

Reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled.

—Richard Feynman

To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, but to imagine your facts is another.

—John Burroughs

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

—Philip K. Dick, author

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.

—Former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, 2003

What’s real is what’s real, and, like it or not, no one can change the nature of reality. Except, of course, with mushrooms.

—Bill Maher

It happens so often that we are inured and desensitized to it. Creationists spout lies and distortions about science and reality, and no one disputes them (except an occasional high school student who challenged Michele Bachmann’s assertion that Nobelists denied evolution). Politicians like Rick Perry and Bachmann get up and brag about their doubts about the reality of global climate change and evolution, and they become the darlings of the GOP. Partisan media like Fox News and their parent company NewsCorp admit that they are receiving money from GOP candidates, or funneling it to them, and no one seems to care. News Corp and Rupert Murdoch get away with all sorts of outrages in their tabloids, yet they are so powerful that British politicians and cops dare not cross them—until their actions are so extreme that all of the UK is disgusted with them. But every once in a while, the cat is let out of the bag, and someone says something that reveals how these people are either abysmally ignorant of reality because of deluded ideology, or they are smart enough to recognize it but play along in a cynical grab for power over those who are ignorant or ill informed.

The latest incident occurred when two pundits on Fox News were discussing the GOP candidates. They point to Jon Huntsman as the sole candidate who would admit that global warming is real (Romney, Gingrich, and others who also once admitted it are now backtracking to kowtow to the extremists who vote in GOP primaries and caucuses). They comment that he’s losing ground to Rick Perry, who made false claims not only about global warming but also about how scientists were allegedly committing fraud. One of the Fox anchors, Clayton Morris, says it it in no uncertain terms:

Certainly, if you dive into the weeds a little bit on this global warming thing, you see that it seems the facts are certainly on Huntsman’s side on all of this and fact checkers have come out, and we’re actually having our own brain room look at this right now, that any of Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water. But it doesn’t matter, because what’s resonating right now in South Carolina is helping Governor Perry tremendously. He fired back at Huntsman on global warming and gaining traction, facts or not.

There it is, in black and white. Pundits on Fox News admitting global warming is real, that it is supported by the scientific community—yet it matters not to Perry or others in the GOP craving power because their base doesn’t believe in reality. Political strategy aside, is this not among the most cynical things one could hear in the media? That facts are clear but don’t matter, since the GOP candidate must tell the extremists in their party what they want to hear, not tell the truth?

None of this is surprising to those of us in the scientific community who have followed politics since 2000. As Chris Mooney showed in his book The Republican War on Science, the GOP during the 8 years of Dubya pursued policies that were strongly in favor of big corporations, and ignored or rewrote the recommendations of their own science advisors whenever science and reality got in the way of their ideology. These incidents ranged from the subtle (rewriting EPA rules to favor big corporations) to the outrageous, such as the Bush official and  former oil company lobbyist Philip Cooney tampering with and toning down a scientific report on global warming, even though he had no science background and was clearly doing the bidding of the Administration and the oil lobby.

Indeed, the conflict goes back to the early Bush years, when Dubya backtracked on campaign pledges to curb global warming, and soon pursued policies that favored polluters, even while he was bragging to the media that he was in favor of creationism. The most revealing quote of all came when New York Times Magazine columnist Ron Suskind interviewed Karl Rove on Oct. 17, 2004:

he said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Once again, possibly without realizing it, they let the cat out of the bag. They know what is real, but they are cynical enough to play whatever political games they must play, and deny what they know to be real, all in the quest to gain and keep power. Machiavelli would not be surprised, but it is a pretty shameful admission nonetheless.

There were some in the media who have noticed it and commented, but now that the media are so polarized, you won’t hear anyone on the right wing commenting on it (with the exception of Morris above). One of the more measured and non-partisan analyses came from Nobelist Paul Krugman. As he puts it in his recent column:

Jon Huntsman Jr., a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn’t a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that’s too bad, because Mr. Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the G.O.P. — namely, that it is becoming the “anti-science party.” This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

I could point out that Mr. Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind: Mr. Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe, and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr. Romney, the other leading contender for the G.O.P. nomination, responded to Mr. Perry’s challenge? In trademark fashion: By running away. In the past, Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But, last week, he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but “I don’t know that” and “I don’t know if it’s mostly caused by humans.” Moral courage!

Of course, we know what’s motivating Mr. Romney’s sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the G.O.P., extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Now, we don’t know who will win next year’s presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

I concur that those prospects are truly terrifying, especially as we saw the consequences of eight  years of Bush policies that ignored reality and played cynical power games. Fortunately, there is still time for voters to come around and recognize this manipulation of ignorant right-wingers.

In the meantime, I proudly wear a badge which proclaims my allegiance to the “reality-based community”.

I consistently find that the conservative attitude on many science questions tends to be “everything’s fine” and the liberal attitude tends to be “the sky is falling”. And, of course, that’s exactly what conservative and liberal mean: Conserve things the way they are, and change things liberally. I don’t find that either viewpoint is especially more likely to represent the current science more than the other. Conservatives tend to be more accurate in their assessments of food production and medical science; liberals tend to better represent actual science in their perspectives on evolution and climate change. Some issues, such as the environment, are torn right down the middle, with extremists on both ends being about equally wrong, and the moderates being about equally right. Too many fans of science tend to express their fandom only when the science matches the ideology.

Why does this frustrate me so much? I guess it’s because my true love is learning. I jump up and down like a giddy child when I learn something new in my research. Even obscure factoids that seem drearily mundane to many get my blood rushing. I love sharing that excitement with my listeners. And so often, when I try to share something that struck me simply as “cool”, the reaction is one of disgust because it conflicts with someone’s political agenda.

Now I’m not trying to sound all superior and that I’m above petty squabbles — anyone who knows me personally knows a lot better than that! — but somehow I have managed to keep a separation between my opinions and my research. The topic I’m working on this week is one for which my personal feelings are pretty strong, but part of the reason I love doing Skeptoid is that for a few hours each day, all of that melts away. Find a surprising fact, and then verify it — falsify it if possible — and note all the other questions it raises. To me, that’s Disneyland. (OK, so maybe I’m weird, but nevertheless.)

Neither am I foolish enough to think that science questions don’t have very legitimate and real implications to policymakers. My perspective is that I prefer to leave that part of the debate to those who enjoy it. Of course I care about the implications and how they affect policy, but my particular role — at least, my particular preference — is to stay out of that mud hole and stick to the fun part of learning.

I think it’s likely that most people whose opinions on certain science questions happen to match their political ideologies are likely wearing blinders to some degree (though they may be right in most cases, they’re probably not in all). Certainly anyone who listens to my show and receives it with a curmudgeonly attitude is missing the spirit of wonder and learning that I felt when I was researching and writing it. Even if I’m completely wrong about everything, I’ll guarantee that every show brings up something you didn’t know or hadn’t considered.

A worthy homework assignment for everyone might be to take a policy or a pseudoscience with which you disagree, and dive into it until you find something that’s scientifically sound, that you didn’t know, and that’s interesting. They’re everywhere, and they’re thrilling.

Employing modern political terms such as “liberal” and “conservative” to someone who live 2,000 years ago is an absurd game to play because those terms as they are used today do not even apply to people who lived a scant few centuries ago. The original meaning of “liberal,” for example, was what we would today call a “classical liberal,” or someone who believes in laissez faire capitalism and small government. Followers of Adam Smith were liberals, but today are called classical liberals, or conservatives, because they want to conserve the political and economic principles of classical Enlightenment thought. Those who are vehemently opposed to these conservative principles are sometimes today called progressives, who want to progress beyond—instead of conserving—classical liberalism, and their type specimen is Franklin D. Roosevelt, who originally had the support of pro-laissez faire capitalists until he launched the New Deal. One of FDR’s ideological descendents was Bill Clinton, who turned out to be one of the strongest Democratic proponents of free markets in history, which makes him, what? A conservatively classical progressive liberal? You can see how odious such label making becomes even for modern figures.

Jesus was, for the most part, apolitical. There were a number of political factions in his time, yet there is no evidence that he joined or even endorsed any of them. He emphasized the “Kingdom of God” over the kingdom of man, and heaven over earth, and his central message was to love God and to love one another. When Jesus was asked, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” he replied, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:34–40). In the next chapter in Matthew (23:9–12) Jesus punctuated the point by comparing earthly fathers to the heavenly father: “And call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven. Neither be called instructors, for you have one instructor, the Christ. The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

Lacking clear political leanings we have to examine the moral teachings of Jesus to see if they more closely fit the moral principles of liberals or conservatives. As I read the record, Jesus sounds like a liberal when he admonishes us to turn the other cheek and practice forgiveness, not to judge lest ye be judged, to show great compassion for the poor, and especially when he admonishes the money changers and tells his followers to give up their belongings, abandon their families, and follow his religious movement. Remember, it was Jesus who said, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

And let’s not forget the Beatitudes from the sermon on the mount (Matthew 5: 3-9), which do more closely echo the sentiments of liberals instead of conservatives:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.”
“Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.”
“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”
“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.”

Matthew 7: 1–5 is the classic statement of liberal tolerance:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

Indeed, would any red-blooded, gun-totting, Hummer-driving, hard-drinking, Bible-totting conservative today saying anything like this? (Matthes 5:43-44): “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you….”

Even on the current hot-button issue driving the Tea Party train—taxes—when asked if it was proper to pay taxes, Jesus famously said (Matthew 22:21): “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Of course, I’m cherry picking passages myself here, but I found the process much more conducive to fitting Jesus into left-leaning politics than into the right. I suppose the following passage from the Messiah (Matthew 5:27-30) might be construed as Jesus’s expression of conservative values, but I’m not sure anyone in their right mind would endorse such a moral principle:

You have heard that it was said to those of old, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I say to you that whoever looks at a woman to lust for her has already committed adultery with her in his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and cast it from you; for it is more profitable for you that one of your members perish, than for your whole body to be cast into hell.

Speaking of the 7th commandment, I found one webpage dedicated to this matter of the Messiah’s politics in which the author wrote:

At times, Jesus blended His Liberal and Conservative sides in perfect balance. One example was when He asked the woman accused of adultery, “Where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?”, and the woman answered, “No one, Lord.” Jesus told her, “Neither do I condemn you; from now on, sin no more.” The Liberal Jesus did not condemn the woman, but the Conservative Jesus called her behavior “sin”, which she needed to stop.

So … are we to infer from this interpretation that liberals would not call adultery a sin that should be avoided, and if committed need not be stopped? All married liberals reading this column raise your hands if you think an act of adultery on the part of your spouse is acceptable. That’s what I thought. In point of fact, adultery is a sin because it deeply injures a loved one, it breaks the bonds of trust so essential to the deepest of all human relations, and it leads to the breakdown of families. And you don’t need the Bible to understand this simple fact. Adultery as a sin is an evolved characteristic of our species.

We evolved as pair-bonded primates for whom monogamy, or at least serial monogamy (a sequence of monogamous marriages), is the norm. Adultery is a violation of a monogamous relationship and there is copious scientific data (and loads of anecdotal examples) showing how destructive adulterous behavior is to a monogamous relationship. In fact, one of the reasons that serial monogamy (and not just monogamy) best describes the mating behavior of our species is that adultery typically destroys a relationship, forcing couples to split up and start over with someone new. Thus, adultery is immoral because of its destructive consequences no matter what God or the patriarchs said about it. And evolutionary theory provides a deeper reason for adultery’s immoral nature that is transcendent because it belongs to the species. If there is a God, and if He does condemn adultery as an immoral act, it is because evolution made it immoral.

This post originally appeared at TRUE/SLANT.

I don’t know why the God question is so interdigitated with political and economic issues, but it is. It shouldn’t be. It’s okay to be a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist. I am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal. I don’t think there is a God, or any sort of anthropomorphic being who needs to be worshipped, who listens to prayers, who keeps a moral scoreboard that will be settled in the end, or who cares one iota about who wins the Super Bowl.

This is why what we do in this life matters so much — and why how we treat others in the here and now is more important than how they might be treated in some hereafter that may or may not exist. If we knew for certain that there is an afterlife, we wouldn’t have great debates about it, and philosophers wouldn’t have spilled all that ink over the millennia wrangling over it. Since we don’t know, it makes more sense to assume there is no God and no afterlife, and act accordingly. That is, act as if what we do matters now. That way, we’ll think about the consequences of what we are doing.

I am sick and tired of politicians, and just about everyone else, kowtowing to the religious right’s hypersensitivities and politically correct “tolerance” for diversities of belief — as long as one believes in God — any God will do, except the God who promises virgins in the next life to pilots who fly planes into buildings. Those of us who do not believe in god have had enough of this rhetoric. This is America. We are supposed to be good and do the right thing, not because it will make us rich, get us saved, or reward us in the next life, but because people have value in and of themselves, and because it will make us all better off, individually and collectively. It says so, right there in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights — products of a secular eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement.

Religion and politics should be treated as separate entities. Religion is private and politics is public. If you want more religion, go to church. If you want more politics, go to the capitol. Don’t go to church to politic, and don’t go to the capitol to preach. That’s a non-overlapping magisterium I can live with.

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First of all, why is it okay to mix science and religion (with atheists eagerly do in debunking religious claims) but not okay to mix science and politics/economics? Why is it okay for liberal atheists to stick it to religious believers and twist the knife slowly, but when it comes to getting your own (political/economic) beliefs challenged, that’s off limits — NOMA (nonoverlapping magisterial) for science and politics? I don’t see how they are different in principle. Skeptic is a science magazine, not an “atheist” magazine; nevertheless, we routinely deal with religious claims and no one ever complains about that. The closest we have come to political/economic issues is environmentalism (Vol. 9, No. 2 — sold out), overpopulation (Vol. 5, No. 1), and global warming Vol. 14, No. 1). For all three we published several articles; in Vol. 14, No. 1, for example, we published articles both skeptical of global warming and accepting of global warming. So I don’t see what would be wrong with publishing articles pro, con, and neutral on political and economic claims.

One person wrote me a private email that said he thought of me as the next Carl Sagan, but now that I’ve gone to the dark side (turning Right, although I’m as critical of the Right as I am the Left), because Carl was “apolitical.” Carl Sagan was many things, but apolitical was not one of them. Carl was a Liberal and proudly wore his politics on his sleeve, such as when he marched in protest at nuclear sites or testified before Congress about the dangers of nuclear winter. I admire him for having the courage of his convictions, which intimately blended his science and (Left) politics. If you think Sagan was apolitical it is because you happen to agree with his politics and so those ideas seem simply correct, not political. If you don’t share his politics (I share about half of them), then it’s obvious that Sagan was not apolitical.

The liberal bias in the skeptical community was identified by many people in the comments section of my blog, for example by “DR,” “James,” and “Devil’s Advocate”:

… Sadly, there is a lot of hatred toward libertarianism at JREF [he means TAM]. I can be an atheist, believe gay marriage is ok, think nothing of smoking pot, and I won’t get half as much grief from a conservative that I do from an American liberal who reels and squirms when I say that the welfare state is immoral or that free trade and voluntary transactions in capitalism promote fair and just outcomes. It’s like the only reason why I have rationalized this set of morality is because I’m a supremely evil person and must be wrong… —DR

… I’m disappointed, but not surprised by the large group of liberal skeptics. I’ve talked to too many Democrat-card-carrying skeptics that spout the same unoriginal, canned rhetoric and continual spewing hatred of Republicans. For a group that supposedly supports tolerance, they’re anything but tolerant …
—James

I’ve three times over twenty years joined local skeptic groups and all three times there was a presumption that if I was a skeptic, then of course I’m also liberal in my politics. Two times I tried to be what I am but was marginalized, treated like a Goldwater (or Reagan, or Bush) mole. The third time I tried to avoid political discussion, but it was not possible, so, unwilling to lie, I left. My refusal to come over to pure liberalism clearly wasn’t going to be tolerated. All I wanted to do was examine UFO claims and crop circles, but… —Devil’s Advocate

Another critic named John D. Draeger makes a good point that I wish to acknowledge: “He [me] does NOT believe that political persuasions and different economic models for how societies should be run are moral value judgements…. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done. Social services can be paid for in different ways, and in a democratic society it’s up to the majority to define how that is done.” That’s true, in a democracy the majority rules how to divvy up public funds for social services, and that tends to be more of a value judgment than a science. But as someone else wrote just below that, quite cleverly I think…

First of all, democratic societies can still be evil, as the famous saying goes: “democracy is two wolves and one lamb voting on what to have for lunch.” And then in another famous quote (attributed to several), “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. Thus our founding fathers gave us a republic … if we can keep it.

Even this is a value judgment, I agree, but surely we can apply some forms of social science to inform our value judgments. For example, we may as a society make the value judgment that it would be good if every child received a basic K–12 education. I agree with this value judgment, and would add to it the value judgment that it would be equally important for every child to have a computer and Internet access because that is the future of education. So we share that value judgment. However, the next question is a pragmatic one: who is going to pay for this education (and computers/Internet)? Parents? Churches? NGOs? Charities? Government? If the latter — the value judgment we have made — then do parents get to choose among the various government schools of where to send their children? (No.) Do parents who choose to send their children to private schools have to also pay for government schools? (Yes.) Is that fair? You make that value judgment. I don’t think that it is fair. To be consistent, if you are pro-choice on abortion you should also be pro-choice on education. The deeper value judgment here is being pro-choice about everything. Choice = freedom.

Some correspondents hated the political diagram because it seems to elevate libertarianism above the traditional left-right spectrum. Okay, then you come up with something other than the left-right linear spectrum to visualize where someone would fall on that line who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative. You draw it and I’ll publish it in a future blog.

Some people hate the word “libertarian.” I’m not crazy about it either, but haven’t thought of a better label. Labels are useful because they enable people to take cognitive shortcuts, but they also lead to shortcuts to nuanced thinking about what someone believes. “Oh, you’re one of those…” full stop. We all do this, of course, but I call myself a libertarian for the same reason I call myself a feminist, an atheist, and a pro-choicer — because it is the accepted language and we have to communicate ideas with language. But I much prefer to be assessed on specific issues.

Several of you said that I am a victim of one of my own central tenets of baloney detection: the confirmation bias, where we look for and find confirmatory evidence for what we already believe and ignore the disconfirmatory evidence. Yes, I will admit, I do this. Everyone does, and we must guard against it, especially when it comes to religion, politics, and economics. To combat this problem, I read the conservative Wall Street Journal and the liberal Los Angeles Times. I listen to such conservative talk radio hosts as Hugh Hewitt and Dennis Praeger as well as the very liberal Bill Maher. I have read Karl Marx’s books as deeply and carefully as I have read Adam Smith’s books. I have read a host of books from liberal and conservative and libertarian authors on the current economic meltdown. And although I have a few libertarian and conservative friends, because I work in the sciences and in publishing, the vast majority of my friends, acquaintances, staff, co-workers, and colleagues are liberals who I can assure you are never shy about letting me know where they think I’ve gone off the political or economic rails.

Finally, let me add that one of the appealing things to me about the libertarian worldview is that it is optimistic, uplifting, and most importantly (to me) anti-elitist. I’m in favor of doing whatever we can to allow the little guy to succeed and to break up power blocs that prevent the average Joe or Jane from reaching their full potential. The Constitutional divisions of power in our Democracy — emulated by many others around the world — are a huge improvement from centuries past that allowed or enabled some to succeed at the expense of others. That was a zero-sum world. Over the past 200 years the spread of democracy and capitalism has done more toward achieving a Nonzero world than anything else — more people in more places more of the time have more power and liberty and wealth than any time in the previous four millennium. Therefore, the more we can spread democracy and capitalism the better off more of us will be more of the time.

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I can hope that with this new Administration, much of what critical thinkers have fought for these past few years will now only need our support, and not our defense. Of course, the forces against us all still exist; there’s just been a shift of power. And that’s only been in one place.

Creationists still are trying to force their agenda on children in Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, and other states. Antivaxxers still fold, spindle, and mutilate reality in the media. Homeopathic medicine salesmen still make claims that are demonstrably false. Fraud via antiscience is still rampant in every one of these fifty states.

Because of that, unfortunately, there will always be a need for those who support reality, those who will fight for critical thinking, and those who will make their voices heard when some try to impose their narrow view on others.

And so, as always, it’s time to look ahead and continue to fight the good fight.