The Republican war on science finds a new front

Rick Santorum's views on college - describing it as part of Obama's elitist project to indoctrinate Americans into the secular misery of leftist political thought - have raised some eyebrows. Many analysts have assumed this was a play for the blue collar vote, tied to his rhetoric on the dignity of physical labor. Santorum's grandfather, he'd like to remind you, was a coal miner.

But this isn't the first time Santorum has attacked the academy. In 2008 Santorum said this:

[Satan] understood pride of smart people. He attacked them at their weakest. They were in fact smarter than everybody else and could come up with something new and different—pursue new truths, deny the existence of truth, play with it because they’re smart. And so academia a long time ago fell. You say, well, what could be the impact of academia falling? Well, I would make the argument that the other structures that I’m going to talk about here had the root of their destruction because of academia. Because what academia does is educate the elites in our society, educates the leaders of our society, particularly at the college level. And they were the first to fall.

Another way to view Santorum's attack is to see it as a new wrinkle on the Republican's war on science. Why have Republicans taken such a dim view of science? It has multiple origins. Obviously, the persistent attacks on the evidence of climate change are tied to the harm a switch to non-carbon-based fuels would bring to the quarterly earnings of big oil. The attack on teaching evolution is a reactive defense of Biblical stories about the origins of life. They get away with it, in part, because Americans have such a poor scientific IQ. As I said in 2008:

This is the party that denies the scientific evidence of global warming, despite the fact that the peer-reviewed consenus tells us that human activities are producing ecological effects and warming the planet. This is the party that wants to overturn how biology is taught in our schools, by replacing the teaching of evolution, which is overwhelmingly confirmed by scientific evidence, with stories from the Bible. Science, Republicans like to tell you, is an ungodly assembly of theories and assumptions and probabilities. They'll tell you it isn't fact. Here's where I raise my hand and say: We know that. What we have done is build an architecture for assessing the reliability of findings. Experiments and models need to be carefully described, all assumptions and measurement judgements transparently disclosed, and the findings need to be presented with necessary caveats. Then, everyone else who wants to present a challenge is free to do so. Through a process where peers argue about findings, make necessary adjustments, and assemble a resulting consensus, we arrive at what we know about the world. The problem for Republicans is that they don't like what science tells them, so they offer hard-to-defend counter-claims and launch baseless attacks.

What Santorm has done, though, amplifies the argument, reshapes it in new, strange ways. Interestingly, although Santorum portrays his attack on college as a celebration of the working class, contextualized in the wider history of his hand-wringing over the professoriate, it seems clear that he fears that his faith can't survive a confrontation with the searching, evidence-based academic skepticism that characterizes life on college campuses. He is afraid the scientific method will reveal the holes in his religion.

So Santorum rejects skepticism because he feels his divinely revealed truth will be shown to be a lie. Merely an assembly of superstition and magical thinking and far-fetched stories. It turns out that Santorum's religion is a 96-pound weakling, and science is the bully kicking sand in its face. How alarming to find this holy warrior has no confidence in the faith he is defending.

And how different from the brave faith of my friend Marthame Sanders. His faith was tested by the rigor and skepticism of the University of Chicago. It survived, and is confident. In a recent sermon, offered to his congregation in Atlanta, he employs neuroscience and psychology to understand the limits of our capacities for empathy and sympathy. He reaches into science to see that our wiring makes our capacity for sympathy - our ability to think about the lives of others and make judgements about their worth - unreliable. Marthame isn't frightened by science, he grasps its value, as a vital tool for understanding the world around us. And he finds in this world a place for religion. He sees a world made up of the poor, and vast diversity, and, due to circumstances arising from many causes, we are limited in our ability to care about their suffering, and the misery of others unlike us. In Corinthians he finds a pathway through this, and a sustainable foundation for a deep sympathy for the wide sweep of humanity. And from this sympathy comes a way to address our divisions, and the will to understand the suffering of others - in Iraq and Palestine, in Darfur and Somolia, and in America's inner cities - as indistinguishable from our own. That is a faith with confidence and purpose. So different from Santorum's.