Get real, Sen. Inhofe!

Public officials can be both dumb and stubborn.

This morning I was thinking, for some reason, of the Florida Supreme Court's bizarre decision in the Bush v. Gore case- the one in which it decided, among other things: 1) that the legal test for the intent of the voter, for which Florida law provided a very specific test (at least two corners of the chad had to be punched out), the intent of the voter- was actually... well, the intent of the voter, with no particular test employed; and 2) which authorized a process notoriously both less reliable and more susceptible to fraud and manipulation- the manual recount- as the remedy for questions of about the integrity of an automated count supervised by the very people who had done the first count, and would also do the second.

These were intelligent men and women, trained in the law and demonstrably more capable than the average bear of logical thought. Yet their bias in the case was so pervasive- and doubtless so unconscious- that they collectively managed to render one of the most logically cockeyed judicial decisions in American history at the very moment when the people of both Florida and of the nation as a whole most needed lucidity from them.

Scientists can suffer from the same syndrome. Regardless of how one stands on the global warming issue, it is clear from the so-called Climategate scandal that orthodoxy played at least as great a role as science in the "overwhelming consensus" which Al Gore and others have touted among them about catastrophic climate change. Moreover the "peer review" which the proponents of catastrophic global warming so loudly complain that dissenting studies lack seems clearly at this stage to be as much about ensuring that new studies don't let the side down as they are about making sure that they represent good science.

In fact, the politicization of science- like the ongoing politicization of the courts, and in fact of just about every area of our common life- is one of the greatest threats our democracy has ever faced. We need unbiased justice, unbiased science, and the unbiased dissemination of facts in the journalistic realm. That human nature probably prevents any of us from ever being totally unbiased does not change the fact that never before in our history has the border between fact and opinion been as permeable. And it is not clear that any democracy can long survive such a state of affairs.

Or, perhaps, any society at all. Lacking as we do much of a common ground on the nature of objective reality- indeed, the prevalent philosophical orientation of the age, whose poisoning of the scientific mind I strongly suspect as one of the chief culprits in the ongoing undermining even of science inself as a credible describer of objective reality- is Post-modernism, the denial that such a thing as objective truth even exists.

But it isn't merely the Left which is infected by this nonsense. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok), one of the loudest critics of climatic alarmism, has gone of the deep end and called for a criminal investigation of Al Gore and the climate alarmists on a charge of conspiracy.

That is silly. It is the kind of paranoid thinking in which the extremes on both the Right and the Left have always excelled. To be mistaken- and even to be hysterically mistaken- about something, and to engage in concert with others who agree with one to advance that mistaken viewpoint while under the mutual delusion that it represents objective truth (or what passes for it in this day and age) is not yet conspiracy. Conspiracy involves a conscious awareness that one's own position is fraudulent, and a conscious desire to deceive.

I do not doubt that there are many on both the Left and the Right who have been so taken in by post-modernism that they are guilty of just such intentional deception,"truth" being re-defined by the philosophy, as Nietzsche, one of its leading proponents, famously argued, as nothing more or less than the will to power. But to be mistaken is not a crime. And neither is being stubborn. To criminalize even what has been shown to be a massive attempt to suppress certain subjectively disliked viewpoints and to advance subjectively favored ones is simply to take one more step down the road to subjectivizing everything.

One eliminates the distinction between being a fanatic and being a fraud at the peril or both our freedom and our capacity for living together in the same society. They are two different things. And I can think of no more corrosively cynical assumption, nor one more subversive of our ability to function as members of a common society, than to assume that there is no such thing as an honestly self-deceived fanatic.


HT: Drudge