Chris C. Mooney > Quotes

“AMONG TODAY’S CONSERVATIVE “Luntzspeak” practitioners, few have the lingo down better than the honorable James Inhofe, senator from Oklahoma. Recall from the previous chapter Luntz’s advice for tor from Oklahoma. Recall from the previous chapter Luntz’s advice for dealing with the issue of global warming, which includes the following precepts: (1) emphasize your commitment to “sound science”; (2) seize the remaining “window of opportunity” to challenge and dispute the scientific consensus; and (3) find experts “sympathetic to your view” and make them “part of your message.” It’s a cunning strategy, provided that you are not ashamed of following in the footsteps of the tobacco industry, and Inhofe doesn’t appear to have much shame.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican War on Science

“The history of another country, one Americans don’t much like comparing themselves with, illustrates the grave dangers of yoking political ideology to dubious science. In the 1930s under Joseph Stalin, the quack “scientist” Trofim Lysenko, who promoted himself through party newspapers rather than rigorous experiments, rose to prominence and took control of Soviet biological, medical, and agricultural research for several decades. Lysenko used his power to prosecute an ideologically driven crusade against the theory of genetics, which he denounced as a bourgeois affront to socialism. In short, his political presuppositions led him to embrace bogus scientific claims. In the purges that followed, many of Lysenko’s scientist critics lost their jobs and suffered imprisonment and even execution. By 1948 Lysenko had convinced Stalin to ban the study of genetics. Soviet science suffered immeasurable damage from the machinations of Lysenko and his henchmen, and the term “Lysenkoism” has since come to signify the suppression of, or refusal to acknowledge, science for ideological reasons. In a democracy like our own, Lysenkoism is unlikely to take such a menacing, totalitarian form. Nevertheless, the threat we face from conservative abuse of science—to informed policymaking, to democratic discourse, and to knowledge itself—is palpably real. And as the modern Right and the Bush administration flex their muscles and continue to battle against reliable, mainstream conclusions and sources of information, this threat is growing.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican War on Science

“Reagan brewed a political concoction—equal parts big business and religious conservatism—that proved highly toxic to the role of science in government.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican War on Science

“[N]o matter how much the fact-checkers strive to remain "bipartisan," it is pretty hard to argue that the distribution of falsehoods today is politically equal or symmetrical.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“Just because psychology seems relevant to explaining why the left and the right have diverged over reality doesn't mean that nothing else is, or that I am reducing conservatives to just their psychology (or reducing psychology to cognitive neuroscience, or cognitive neuroscience to genes, and so on). [...]
Complex phenomena like human political behavior always have many causes, not one. This book fully recognizes that and does not embrace a position that could fairly be called determinism. Human brains are flexible and change daily; people have choices, and those choices alter who they are.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“Politicians are notorious for their cynical use of scientific information; in the U.S. Congress, where only 8 percent of elected officials hold a science or medical Ph.D., scientific studies are regularly used as an excuse for doing nothing. Calling for “more research” is an excellent way of punting. At the same time, politicians are notorious for digging up scientific “facts” that appear to support what they already wanted to do anyway.”
― Chris C. Mooney, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

“[T]he change that conservatives seek is not progressive; rather it is in the direction of restoring something they perceive as prior and better [...]. Often, it is an imaginary past that has been romanticized, and the desire is to restore what never even was. So you can certainly have conservative revolutionaries; they're just favoring an earlier status quo, and not necessarily even one that ever existed. It need only be the case that they think it did, and they long for it, and this drives their policy prescriptions and agendas.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“Precisely because of their training and ability - their power at selectively constructing arguments - the politically or intellectually sophisticated are better able to justify themselves, and also to convince themselves that they're right.
Thus, we would expect to see liberal and conservative experts constantly arguing with each other, each sounding reasonable and articulate - and each becoming more convinced they're right the more they argue and the more they research the issues.
[P]artisans on either side wind up with lots of handy arguments to carry into their own belief-affirming and confidence-bolstering intellectual battles.
The result is polarization over the nature of reality itself.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“[H]uman reason, standing on its own, isn't really a very good tool for getting at truth, and may not have even been designed (by evolution) for this purpose.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“[M]ost people are afraid to think about the possibility that their most cherished beliefs might have a psychological basis, rather than simply a basis in fact.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“we need a nation in which science has far more prominence in politics and the media, far more relevance to the life of every American, far more intersections with other walks of life, and ultimately, far more influence where it truly matters—namely, in setting the agenda for the future as far out as we can possibly glimpse it.”
― Chris C. Mooney, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

“In Skitka’s study, liberals and conservatives were asked about a scenario in which four different groups of people had contracted AIDS in a variety ways. Three of the groups were blameless: they had gotten the disease from a blood transfusion, or a long-term partner who had cheated on them, gotten AIDS, and then passed it on, et cetera. One group, though, had contracted AIDS through practicing unsafe sex while fully aware of the risks. In other words, the members of this group seemed fully responsible for their own fates. The liberals and conservatives then had to decide who should receive government subsidized drug treatment. The conservatives thought that people who were culpable in contracting AIDS shouldn’t get the same care as those who were blameless. So did the liberals—on first impulse, anyway. But they tended to change their minds once they were allowed to think about it. Their sense of fairness, equality, and of caring for others shone through—and then, unlike conservatives, they appeared to reason that everybody should be treated the same way in government policy, regardless of their personal responsibility for their plight.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality

“[W]hen we think we're reasoning we may instead be rationalizing. [...] We may think we're being scientists, but we're actually being lawyers. Our "reasoning" is a means to a predetermined end - winning our case[.]”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality

“In The Demon-Haunted World (1996), the final book published before his death, Carl Sagan worried openly that the forces of darkness were beating out those of scientific enlightenment: I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time . . . when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
― Chris C. Mooney, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

“the politician”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality

“we need a nation in which science has far more prominence in politics and the media, far more relevance to the life of every American, far more intersections with other walks of life, and ultimately, far more influence where it truly matters—namely, in setting the agenda for the future as far out as we can possibly glimpse it. That would be a scientific America, and its citizens would be as scientifically literate as anyone could reasonably hope for.”
― Chris C. Mooney, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future

“[W]hile liberals aren't always right, conservatives are vastly more wrong today about science and the facts in general.”
― Chris C. Mooney, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality