I was pointed to this three-year old book excerpt from Yuval Levin’s Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy by a post at America’s Shittiest Website. Surprisingly, the excerpt turned out to be quite interesting, even though the introduction and conclusion are badly flawed. Mr. Levin is a deeper thinker than you normally find at The Corner.
He starts out his piece by stipulating that the left, or liberals, or progressives, or Democrats, or whatever you want to call them, are indeed the Party of Science. And he lays out the philosophical and political history, placing a belief in progress, human and societal perfectibility, etc., as a foundational belief of the left. It’s good that he does this, because defending the right as natural allies of science would be as absurd as saying that King Louis XVI believed in voting rights.
I won’t bore you with his whole history of the intellectual movement, except to say that he presents a fair and reasonable recounting of philosophical currents up until at least the early 20th-Century.
What’s interesting about this piece is that he has convinced himself that environmentalism is fundamentally an illiberal movement that places a brake on the left’s belief in human progress. Here’s how he sets up this conflict. He starts with Francis Bacon’s (1561-1626) original vision.
Nature, moreover, is the chief constraint on human power and human comfort, and the extension of the empire of man over nature is a noble and necessary goal. For too long, they thought, human beings had been subject to the whims of nature and chance, but by coming to know the workings of nature, we could master it, both removing natural obstacles and constructing artificial advantages for ourselves. “Nature, to be commanded,” Bacon wrote, “must be obeyed,” so the purpose of the new natural science was to learn nature’s ways so as to overcome them. This desire for knowledge of and power over nature was not power-hunger, it was humanitarianism. Nature, cold and cruel, oppresses man at every turn, and bold human action is needed in response. Science arose to meet that need.
And then he contrasts this optimistic progressivism with modern environmentalism:
If you had to devise a complete opposite to this scientific view of nature, a mirror image in essentially every respect, you would probably end up with roughly the notion of nature that gives shape to the modern environmentalist ethic. Nature in this view is, to begin with, a complete and ordered system, to be understood in whole and not in part. “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” wrote John Muir, a founder of modern environmentalism. Far from conquering and manipulating nature for his benefit, moreover, man must be careful and humble enough to tread gently upon it, and respect the integrity (and even the beauty) of its wholeness. We are to stand in awe before nature, and never to overestimate our ability to overcome it or underestimate our ability to harm it (and with it ourselves)…
…Taken to the extreme, this approach turns the scientific view of nature on its head, and looks at man as an oppressor of the natural world instead of the other way around.
It’s actually an incisive and rather beautiful point, but it doesn’t do the work that Mr. Levin wants it to do. It might not be clear from the above excerpts, but Levin has attached progressivism to
the wrong sail. Progressivism is dedicated not to the belief in a straight-line road of ever-increasing mastery over nature, but to a commitment to empiricism. I mean ’empiricism’ in the sense of testing theories and following the facts, not as a commitment to the purely philosophical meaning of that term.
Just because 16th to 19th-Century liberals were extremely optimistic about science’s ability to improve the human condition doesn’t mean that the hard lessons of the 20th-Century didn’t provide us with some sense of caution and limitation. Mechanized warfare, mechanized genocide, unleashing the power of the atom, and increased awareness of societal sustainability are all the results of scientific activity. The evidence tells us that we must learn to avoid war and limit it when it breaks out. It tells us that we must put individual human rights above any impulse to perfect mankind. It tells us that we cannot go on living the same way we do now because our lifestyles are radically changing the climate we’ve evolved to live in. It’s true that the environmentalist movement is less optimistic than the traditional liberal view, but it’s based in an empirically-based realism and humility.
Think about these problems this way. The left reacted to the horrors of the World Wars by attempting to prevent a repeat. First the League of Nations was created, and then the United Nations. Within the United Nations’ umbrella we set up the International Atomic Energy Agency to limit the use and spread of nuclear weapons. After the Holocaust, all ideas about eugenics were abandoned on the left in favor of a robust assertion of individual rights and dignity, and the Civil Rights Movement followed inexorably from there.
However, the right prevented the ratification of the League of Nations in the U.S. Senate, constantly complains about the United Nations, has historically played around with using nuclear weapons (in Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba, for example), and opposed the Civil Rights Movement with fury. As for the problem of climate change, the right now simply takes a check from Exxon/Mobil and convinces itself that it isn’t happening.
So, the fundamental core of liberalism or progressivism isn’t a pollyannish belief that we’ll move in a straight line towards a better world. The fundamental core is to follow the facts and respect them, come what may.
The right’s response to this is to accuse us of ignoring what science has to say (or doesn’t say) about equality. In the simplest terms, the argument goes that science tells us that we are not equal in either physical or mental abilities, and it makes no value judgment on whether we ought to be equal in other ways. If liberals are so respectful of science, why are they so upset by inequality?
It’s not uncommon for this argument to have heavy racial undertones. In fact, that is the norm. Mr. Levin is careful to avoid broaching that subject. Still, there is a distinction between egalitarian equality and basic fairness. I think at some level, every child thinks there’s something wrong with the fact that some people live in mansions and some people are starving to death. Why do some people have more than others, and why is that fair? Shouldn’t Daddy Warbucks give the starving baby some food from his pantry? The only questions are how far you’re willing to go and how are you going to organize a redistribution of wealth? Evidently, there are plenty of adults who overcome this impulse to fairness and convince themselves that giving to the poor only encourages them to remain poor. It’s true that you can set up a system that will have that effect on some people, but you can also use scientific methods to fine-tune such programs and improve them.
In any case, while there is a certain impulse towards equality of outcomes in almost all humans, and it is true that this manifests itself on the far left of the political spectrum, mainstream liberal thought only seeks equality of opportunity combined with a social safety net to protect the unfortunate and unlucky, and to provide us all with at least minimal and meaningful access to health care. This is not based mainly on egalitarianism, but on basic decency and fairness. We never said people are all the same or could all be made to be the same, but they shouldn’t be denied opportunities because they had poor nutrition in the womb or as an infant, or because of the color of their skin, or their religion, or their gender, or their sexual orientation, or because their parents were too poor to provide them with an education. We can minimize and even prevent some of these things from standing in people’s way. Science doesn’t tell us to let a child go without food, or that it’s imperative that people go to lousy schools. A commitment to fairness is not touched by the scientific realization that people are not, in fact, equal in any measurable way.
There is no conflict between progressivism and environmentalism, and there is no conflict between a belief in science and a commitment to equality. Mr. Levin’s critique of the modern left fails. And his defense of the right never materializes. He opens by saying, “The American right has no desire to declare a war on science, and nothing it has done in recent years could reasonably suggest otherwise.” But he does nothing to back up his claim. In fairness, this is an excerpt, so it’s possible that he provides a defense elsewhere in his book. The end of the excerpt looks at the debate over abortion and stem-cell research and claims that this, too, presents and example of the left having a conflict between equality and commitment to science. But that whole argument is based on the idiosyncratic view that an embryo is protected by the Declaration of Independence, and so it is not worthy of my time.
~Alexander Berkman
As I’m sure you know who Alexander Berkman is, what’s with this nonsense that the “far left” doesn’t support this idea? You can’t get much farther to the left than an anarchist.
Unless they are a right-wing anarchist, who glories in winning a Hobbesian war of all against all.
“Right-wing” anarchism is fairly new, and it’s highly criticized because of its contradictions. Imo capitalism, especially capitalism as we’ve always known it, cannot exist without the state.
But feudalism can.
Shorter Booman:
“Progressives change their theories to suit the facts. Conservatives do the opposite.”
That aside, very interesting post!
A valiant effort, Boo, but the real problem in Yuval’s argument (and yours as well, I think) is that while “the Right” and “the Left” are correlative concepts, (which means that neither concept would mean anything without the other — so that at any given time, in any given place, we can roughly identify a left and a right , nevertheless exactly what they advocate is highly variable according to the specific conditions of time and place.
Let me give an example. In the late 19th century, there was a movement in the USA to divide Indian reservations by allotment in fee simple. This would not only integrate reservations into the general property system of the US, but, with individual Indian heads-of-households now property owners, they would be integrated into the American system and out of “tribalism”. It was believed that communal ownership of land held Indians back from the progressive incentives of capitalism and thus from the benefits of human progress. They would need to learn how to manage property (i.e. usually through agriculture) and would then be granted individual citizenship and individual property. When the reservation had been fully “allotted” in this way, a great deal of unallotted tribal land would be left over; this would be declared surplus, and put up for sale.
Through the Dawes Act and related legislation, the Indian tribes of the US lost 2/3 of the land they held AFTER THEIR RESERVATIONS HAD ALREADY BEEN CREATED.
The point is, the Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) and all similar legislation was the culmination of a great deal of activism on the part of well-wishers to Indians. At the time, it was considered progressive. One of its champions, for example, was Carl Schurz, a great liberal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schurz
The actual conservatives of the time believed that Indians were of a lower order of humanity, they were “a dying race”; they were unable to compete, and therefore should be left alone on their reservations, where at least they would be protected.
It was precisely because the progressives of the time believed that Indians were (potentially anyway) equal, that they must be provided with the opportunities to compete, and therefore, that “tribalism” was their greatest enemy. That was the ideology behind even forcing them to go to highly disciplined boarding schools, cutting their hair, forbidding them to speak their own languages, etc.
Present-day progressives are of course horrified by all this, as well they should be. It was the FDR administration that saved what was left of the reservations by ending the allotment system, now due to more or less PROGRESSIVE activism. After WW II, it was the Conservatives who wanted to end “tribalism”. Their policy was called “Termination” and the ideology behind it was almost identical to what, in the 19th century, had been advocated by liberals.
Something similar can be said about environmentalism. The environmental movement was not a left-wing cause in this country until Rachel Carson, i.e. late 1950s. I remember very well, as recently as the early 1990s (and in certain industries it is still true) there was tremendous tension between labor interests (“jobs”) and environmental interests.
During the Vietnam War, American organized labor was mostly pro-war. This was probably the precipitating cause of the “Reagan Democrats”.
An important part of the Right (especially among conservative Catholics) was anti-corporate as late as the 1930s and even to more recent times.
But certainly the industrialists and capitalists, in England and the USA anyway, have always been the biggest promoters of scientific research, in both the private and government sectors — it used to be called (maybe still is) R&D, research and development.
So the right and left have many different “sects”, shall we say, and these change through time. The anti-science part of the right has long been troglodytic even from the perspective of the right, and the fact that they now appear to control the Republican Party is not exactly typical. But it all has to do with Darwin, because in the 18th and 19th century, even conservative calvinist protestants championed scientific thought, e.g. Isaac Newton, because science was reconciled with the Bible in ways that they found acceptable.
Ultimately, the problem is that ideologies are not really philosophies, they are pseudo-philosophic rationalizations of opinions based on class and cultural interests. And this results in each side being a collection of interests which appear, at the time, to be closely related, but which on deeper analysis, or with the benefit of hindsight, at least in many respects reveal themselves to be more or less accidental alliances.
I do think you are right in identifying the left as the more empirical side at the moment. But there is plenty of ideology on the left side as well.
the left and the right don’t really move. Where they intersect moves.
You can point to the issue of race, whether it be blacks or Native Americans, and show how the left’s view has evolved over time, but the changed view is still basically empirically inspired and based in a sense of fairness.
When liberals wanted to domesticate or tame the Indians and turn them into successful farmers, it was because they thought that would give them the best shot at a successful future. When they discovered that that belief was a bit naive and overly simplistic, they changed their view.
One wishes for a writer who actually has studied science or better yet “done” science.
An intellectually obfuscating shill for the oil companies is still a shill. That and that alone is why environmentalists have become targets.
Science doesn’t identify “oppressors”. That is where his whole argument goes down the tubes.
Your argument fails in too tightly identifying “progressive” and “modern left”. The modern left has many different movements in it. Progressivism is only one of them.
The intellectual change he observes is the criticism of a reduced element of humanism’s adage “Man is the measure of all things.” That reduction that conservatives still push is “An individual is the measure of all things.” A denial of networked phenomena is the hallmark of modern conservatism.