Left Center Left

It was only a matter of time before enterprising souls would apply public relations techniques to blogging. This arrived in my mailbox recently.

Greetings,

My name is Leighanne cole and I found your Blog and I am currently working on a massive Get Out the Vote effort to help reclaim the White House and Congress. We are going to be organizing in 20 swing states and 10,000 precincts to mobilize Kerry supporters, independents and undecided voters to help defeat President Bush. We are in the process of hiring 500 organizers to work in these states and I am hoping you can help us out. I know there are a lot of activists, political junkies, liberals, progressives etc that read your blog and I would love to get the word out to them about our campaign and the jobs we have available. If you can help us out by posting the following message on your blog, it would be greatly appreciated. In addition, feel free to forward this message to any and all fellow bloggers, listservs etc, and I’d love to hear about any other resources we should be in touch with.

She must have more optimistic site statistics for Left Center Left than I have!

On a more consequential note, Chris Mooney - indefatigable chronicler of the politicization of science - has a good post on the supposedly incontrovertable evidence that some are claiming against global warming. Taking a study as a case for settling the debate, he notes,

is particularly hilarious given how much energy “skeptics” have expended in the past arguing that the science of climate isn’t settled. And now suddenly we’re supposed to believe that it’s settled in their favor? Riiiiiight.

More generally, this is classic behavior from the contrarian camp. When a new scientific study appears in the literature, contrarians suddenly flock to the op-ed pages, send out press releases, and make dramatic proclamations about what it all means. Except, that’s not how science works. It takes time for experts to assess what a new study does or doesn’t mean–and what its impact will be on the general understanding.

To me, this gets at the heart of the problem of the politicization of science. It’s not that one group of people have political (or personal) biases and others don’t. It’s that the heterodox pretenders to the scientific throne are so sure of their correctness that they forget that process is the backbone of science, what guarantees that it will have the best chance of approaching truth about the empirical world. Sometimes that process gets corrupted, especially in the “softer” social sciences, and should be subjected to refinement and critique. But politicization of science goes beyond that, using political means and public relations to circumvent the process itself.

Public relations, in fact, may be the key to understanding politicization of science. Itself a corruption of the public sphere to begin with, the essence of PR is to apply the logic of advertising to public debate. The most effective PR is that which appears to be disinterested abstract discussion while in fact shilling for narrow pecuniary interests (e.g. the ability of telecom firms to proceed with minimal regulation). Similarly, politicization of science relies on the ability to disguise narrow political imperatives as abstract, value-free “science”.