One of my ongoing laments about the current (post-Gingrich) incarnation of the Republican party has been its anti-intellectualism and its disdain of expert culture as a liberal elite leading it to construct its own extra-academic phalanx of “experts.” Take economic policy. On one hand, the Bush administration relies on supply-sider think thanks while drawing on academics on the outskirts of the discipline as proof of economists’ endorsement. The pattern is repeated in foreign policy or environmental regulation or in implementing privatization of utilities.
In this context, the Globe’s piece this weekend calling for the reinstatement of a congressional scientific advisory entity deserves attention. Of course, scientific opinion is desparately needed on the issues that made conservatives politicize science to begin with: climate change, missile defense, stem cell research. But even beyond these, the resistence to science ties our hands in fighting biological and terroristic threats.
TWO YEARS AGO, as anthrax-laced letters arrived in Congress and at New York media offices, reliable scientific information was in short supply….
The press and members of Congress needed better scientific analysis — and they found it, among other places, in two reports on weapons of mass destruction published in 1993 by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA). One report contained key facts about the number of spores required to produce inhalation anthrax. The other report estimated that given the proper weather conditions, the release of 100 kilograms of anthrax from a plane upwind of Washington could kill more people than a hydrogen bomb.
Faced with America’s first major bioterrorism attack, why was Congress dusting off decade-old reports? OTA hadn’t produced anything more recent because the agency, once dubbed Congress’s “defense against the dumb,” no longer existed.
Despite the implications of cultural elitism, technocracy is not all bad and in fact is necessary. What has to go wrong before we start to reverse its dismantling?
No comments have been added to this post yet.