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.