Chris,

Thanks for your book.  I have heard you speak and would encourage readers to check out your speaking schedule and go to a book signing or event if they can.

Bruce Reed reported on Slate that Rep. Emanuel was asked on a Sunday talk show for Democratic ideas.  He gave five, which all relate in some way to science and technology:  making college universal, demanding a budget summit, cutting energy dependence in half with a hybrid economy, creating a science and technology institute to rival NIH, and making health care universal over the next 10 years.

The Democrats seem to be thinking about these long-term issues.  The Republicans seem to be thinking about cutting taxes for the wealthy, war, keeping immigrants out, faith-based issues, etc.  Some of them seem to think of technology mostly when it relates to defense contractors. 

I don't know if Democrats can make progress on their own. Republicans, including the big business and the religious conservatives, have such extraordinary influence in this country.  Can they somewhow be persuaded that advancing science and technology is good for everyone?

If the U.S. graduates 60,000 scientists and engineers a year, and China and India graduate 500,000 a year, and U.S. communities are busy redefining science to include theology, is there any doubt where U.S. science and technology is headed in the decades ahead?

Sigh.... 

I'm not Chris, but I will hazard a guess that you could simply respond that the evidence against Galileo did not come from testing and observation; in fact that is what overturned the conventional view.

The same is true of evolution. Testing and observation continually reinforces the case for evolution. What science has not yet given us is a complete, detailed overview of every mechanism of evolution, every alteration, every mutation, etc. Science does have an incredible body of evidence to support evolution.

One obvious answer is that Galileo wasn't up against the scientific consensus, he was up against the church and tradition.  Scientific consensus was developing in favor of Galileo.

A second answer is that scientific consensus today is based upon literally centuries of investigation, and has shown itself to be extremely accurate.  If science were inaccurate, we couldn't send men to the Moon, robots to Mars, or spacecraft (that is, Voyager 2) on a grand tour of the gas giant planets.  If science were inaccurate, computers, television, everything electronic, wouldn't exist.  Science brought us cures of diseases that plagued humanity.

As bad as nuclear weapons are, they still prove scientists to be accurate about nature. If science weren't fundamentally correct about nature, scientists wouldn't have been able to make the Bomb.

For every Galileo or Einstein who discovers something fundamentally different from the consensus about nature, there are thousands who disregard the established facts and the evidence.  In the case of the creationists and the environmental creationists, their primary work is in influencing the public, and they depend on the public not knowing or understanding the facts.

There is a fundamental difference between new discoveries in nature (Galileo) and lying about nature.

 

I believe that the overall rule in reporting today is that "Republicans Win,"  The "He Said, She Said, We're Clueless" aspect of reporting is only one symptom of the problem, or rather only one tactic used to favor the Republicans.

Another tactic is to bury critical information, or facts refuting the conservative position, deep in the bowels of the article or deep in the back pages of the newspaper.

Another tactic is simply to not report the facts. If the facts require more than a sound-bite to explain, they get lost in the shuffle.  But even sound-bite facts were disregarded.

Case 1 -- the Savings and Loan Scandal

The incident receiving by far the biggest coverage was the non-scandal of "Whitewater."

A distant second in the degree of coverage was "The Keating Five."  I almost wrote "Four" instead of "Five" inadvertently, because the coverage always emphasized that four of the five senators were Democratic.  The one Republican Senator in the Keating Five, Senator McCain, was forgotten, as was the fact that Charles Keating himself was a conservative Repulican.

Does anyone remember "Silverado"? Does anyone remember "Neil Bush"?

Does anyone remember that the S&L scandal primarily involved huge high-powered bankers -- way outside the liberal or progressive community?

The S&L scandal may have been a consequence of economics, in that if you (a lender) didn't follow the bad tactics and instead made sound loans, you lost business to those who did follow the bad tactics.

Case 2 -- The Lori Klausutis Death

During the Democratic Representative Condit/Chandra Levy media feeding frenzy, the dead body of a young female aide was found in Republican Representative Joe Scarborough's office in Northwest Florida. Outside of the Northwest Florida Daily News -- complete news blackout.

Case 3 -- The Downing Street Memos

There was a little coverage when they were released, ignored overall. If not for the blogospheric activity, the memos would have received something close to the Lori Klausutis treatment.  One excuse is that it was "Old News." Of course, that means that the "old news" wasn't reported when it was new.

The excuse also implies the reaction "So What?" to the fact that the Bush Administration was going to invade Iraq come hell or high water, and was going to fix the intelligence to support the decision.

Waging aggressive war?  Ho hum.  Deaths of a hundred thousand? Just another day's work. Gay prostitute receiving special White-House treatment? Not so bad, either.

Case 4 -- September 11th

Once the conspiracy-theory module is triggered in someone's mind, he becomes deaf and blind to facts. Enough said.

 

Perhaps the grand unified epistemology you're looking for could be summed up as "anything information that could lead to regulations that interfere with me making as much money as possible is an infringement on my personal freedom and therefore un-American. The information must be wrong because it limits my freedom to exploit the environment for personal profit."

Or as Gordon Gecko said, "Greed is good".

ONe from the left:  Gov. Schweitzer from Montana was attempting to make a  big public splash on synfuel from coal, arguing that was the wave of the future while all but ignoring the environmental costs from coal mining and CO2 production.  This was in the NYT OpEds last week.  IT had a big lead in blog post by Sirota at Huffingtonpost which was even lighter on environmental concern.  If Schweitzer, the darling of many in the blogosphere (read numerous posts at Kos) is to really step out on the national scene, he had better pick a different energy plan than one based on coal derived synfuel.  That is after all a cornerstone of the dig-drill-burn energy policy of Bushco.

Thanks for the careful reflection. 

You said:

"Yet at the same time, I also feel a very powerful desire to understand the material world, it's part of my need to be independent, autonomous and in control of my environment."

I suggest that this need and the needs you outlined immediately preceding this one are not really different.  Both are meaning systems trying to make sense of their world.  Both have truth claims (epistemological issues), but both are attempts toward the same end.  This is something we have in common and is basic to human nature.

Both, may I suggest, offer an illusion of control over one's environment.  Independence, autonomy, and control over environment, I believe, are more illusory than "factual".  This, of course, is a postmodern critique of modern enlightenment epistemology.  "Control" over our physical environment has conceived (if we are to be honest with ourselves) just as much chaos and destruction through the last 350 years of enlightenment thought as has religious attempts at control.

What you have done -- and I appreciate immensely -- is show that both claims to truth are ideological.   How then to proceed?  Do we throw gas on the fire and seek for an internal armageddon?  The extremes of both sides often seek this as we have been discussing here.

Or do we seek for ways of negotiating truth claims -- attempts that will involve less flamethrowing, more careful reflection and analysis, and more respectful listening (offered to those willing to listen on each side).  That center group must increase so that the fringes can be marginalized, IMO. 

DEFINING AND DEFENDING THE "CENTER"
I am in complete agreement with your statement that what I have outlined are different meaning systems that, in an ultimate sense, are not "really different", although I stick by my claim that they appear to conflict with each other on the pragmatic level (that is, the most common ways we use to enact these needs tend to exclude each other). I might take minor issue with some of your points: I think that these fundemental needs are not themselves derived from ideology (they come from our ancestral heritage) but that political ideologies and philosophies are derived from them- i.e. political ideologies are attempts by human beings to express their needs in a way that they hope will influence social decisions and government policies. That is why I dont believe that "conservatism" or "liberalism" (or socialism, or anarcho free-market libertarianism for that matter) can ever be completely "defeated" and their influence on public policy eliminated. At some level, they all have to be accepted.

I think that the way forward is to share and adopt a common set of standards, limits beyond which no value system can be accepted within our society. Within those limits, anything goes. These standards or criteria can be adopted from Isaiah Berlin's conception of Pluralism- which itself can become the over-riding "umbrella" philosophy that guides public social discourse.

To over-simplify a good bit, Berlin argues first that we must abandon the idea that there is one and only one correct solution to all of society's problems. I dont want to bore you with all the tedious details, but Berlin spends much time explaining how authoritarian ideologies always seem to assume that there is one and only one standard of social truth (although they obviously disagree with one another as to what this standard of truth is- whether it be Social Justice for All, or the Rational Pursuit of Self-Interest, or the Will of God as found in the Bible, the Torah or the Koran). Authoritarian ideologies always seem to assume that some such solution is "out there" somewhere, and that a sufficiently enlightened, or rational, or authentic search would find it. People with authoritarian values believe that they have found it, and that therefore the rest of us, who disagree with them, are either misguided, or evil, and that some form of force (whether violence or underhanded political tactics) is justified in protecting and promoting their "Truth".

Berlin's pluralism argues that this is not true. There is no one source or standard of true and moral solutions to humanity's problems, and well-meaning people, who put cooperation and unity before being right, should band together and defend this idea. Even if this means using force as a defense against those who do promote their "One Truth".

So the answer to the question of "How do we proceed?" is first, to identify who, in good faith, is willing to concede that multiple points of view are needed in order to promote the good of society and it's individual members. This is how the "Center", for want of a better term, can identify itself. We are not Extremists, or Relativists, but Pluralists.

I need to emphasize, at this point, my belief that there are many Republicans, Conservatives, and Evangelical Christians who are in fact willing to concede this in good faith, while not abandoning their policy positions. These people are ON OUR SIDE, even though we may disagree with them, sometimes passionately. With these people, we pursue the options you suggested, including negotiation, consensus seeking, and careful reflective listening. If we cant agree, we vote, and the majority carries. This is the traditional American way.
With the others, those who are unwilling to accept at least the theoretical validity of pluralism, that multiple value systems are needed by society, that no single source or standard of morality can ever successfully displace all others, then these people must be prevented from ever coming to control our society's governing institutions, peacefully if possible, by force if necessary. We are talking about people who would be willing to impose their views on others by law if they ever had the power to do so. This is the "incendiary" option you spoke of.

Thus, I believe very strongly that we can promote different ideologies, that we can pursue individual independence or communal belonging, control over the environment or respecting our place in the universe, freedom or equality, justice or love, and still co-exist, even cooperate toward common ends, so long as we are also willing to recognize the essential humanity of the opposing point of view.

I have written a whole essay on this, and if you or others care to see it, just let me know.