The New Know-nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature

by Morton Hunt (Editor)

In recent years, political, religious, and other special-interest groups have waged war on behavioral and social research projects that threaten their interests and values. They have hounded researchers out of universities, cut off their funding through congressional and state legislative pressure, and harassed them with public demonstrations and picketing, all in the hope of forcing them to abandon their research. Formerly such unwanted involvement came from activists on the left. Now it comes from all across the political spectrum, as anti-science attitudes and techniques have diffused throughout society. In addition, conservative and religious forces lobby Congress and state legislatures against funding for major research projects of which they disapprove. This phenomenon represents a grave threat to both scientific freedom and the well-being of modern society.Morton Hunt gives us the first serious overview of this threat to behavioral and social science research. He illustrates precisely how scientific research has been subjected to political attack. The New Know-Nothings illustrates this phenomenon using in-depth case histories and background discussions of the conflicting social forces involved. It considers the prevalence of each form of opposition of research has been subjected to political attack. The New Know-Nothings illustrates this phenomenon using in-depth case histories and background discussions of the conflicting social forces involved. It considers the prevalence of each form of opposition to research, using interviews with expert observers in the sciences and government. Hunt reviews the nature-nurture debate, biological contributions to gender differences, conservative opposition to sex research in the schools, the debate over the controlled drinking approach to alcoholism, animal rights versus scientists' rights to use animals in research, the controversy over day care, anthropological research needs versus the Native American repatriation of remains, and other cases. He argues that beyond the specific projects targeted, the most important thing threatened is the social valation of scientific freedom. The belief that it is permissible and laudable to obstruct research is neo-Luddite, obscurantist, and anti-intellectual.This comprehensive, nonpartisan study is possibly the only book-length treatment of this important subject. It treats attacks on science from both the left and the right and is timely, lively, and accessible in style. It will be of interest to behavioral scientists and scientists in general, readers interested in the sciences and in social issues, and government policymakers.

Genres: Science, Psychology, Politics, History, Sociology, Nonfiction, Cultural

416 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 1998

About the author

Date of Birth: 1920

Morton Hunt is an award winning science writer who has writen for The New Yorker,The New York Times Magazine and Harper's among many other publications. He is the author of "The Natural History of Love", and "The Universe Within". He lives in Gladwyne, PA.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book gives an excellent history of politically and religiously motived attacks on the social and behavioral sciences up through the late 1990s. The material is almost 20 years old, so it badly needs an update, but as the author died in 2016 that will have to come from someone else. Everyone connected with science, either as a practitioner or a consumer of the benefits of science (which includes everyone who can read my review on a computing device, or even just read) should be aware of how fragile the source of all human progress is.

More directly, in story after story in the book, we read about rather naive scientists who embarked on what they saw as promising lines of research with no idea of the pre-scientific orthodoxies they were about to enrage. In some cases, the scientists in question unwittingly did things to make themselves larger targets - for example, by relying on in-person scientific conferences which are easy for protesters to disrupt. 20 years ago the World Wide Web was still in its infancy, but today there is no longer any real need for physical gatherings to exchange research results.

Many books about science denialism tend to focus on the anti-science activities of particular interest groups: the political left (for example, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker), the political right (The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality), commercial interests (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming), or religious fundamentalists (Going Ape: Florida's Battles Over Evolution in the Classroom). In The New Know-Nothings, author Morton Hunt takes on the opponents of the social sciences from across the political and religious spectra.

Because he focuses on the social sciences, he misses the generalized attacks on the physical and environmental sciences (especially climate science denial), but much of the latter has picked up momentum in the years after this book appeared. Culminating, of course, in the election of Donald Trump, an explicit climate science denier.

As in all such books, the forces of anti-science come off badly. One is struck by the sheer dishonesty of anti-science fanatics in their battles against emerging truth. Instead of trying to counter data or theories they dislike with more accurate data and theories, they resort to censorship by any means that works: defunding researchers through political lobbying, shouting down scientists who are giving lectures, vandalizing research laboratories, smearing the scientists' reputations, threatening violence and sometimes committing actual violence against the scientists' persons.

When Galileo became the first human to point a telescope at the night sky in the early 1600s, he saw things that put him on a collision course with the Roman Catholic Inquisition. 400 years later, progress in science and technology continue to open up new areas to scientific inquiry, but as with the Americas when the first Europeans arrived, some of these areas newly opened to science are already occupied by people who don't want to be pushed off their turf. There might not be any area of pre-scientific belief (that is, beliefs that developed before science was able to chime in) that science will not eventually find itself in conflict with. Just as the world's hundreds of pre-scientific creation myths all turned out to be wrong, so too will many if not most (or even all?) pre-scientific orthodoxies require some adjustment after science becomes able to poke its nose in there.

Given that anti-scientists of every persuasion continue to use similar tactics, scientists and people with an interest in science should study this history, much as military cadets study the great military battles of the past.

[Tommy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Many cases of anti-racists, feminists, religious groups and various other special interests calling to shut down scientific inquiry that might problematize their preconceived beliefs... maybe a little to indifferent to the real potential of governmental use of research for behavioural control and whitewashes some of these characters.

[Alicia Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is from the 90s, so the research topics are dated while the argument for free and open research is not. Hunt looks at numerous research controversies and how political, etc., beliefs put the research at risk. Four stars because the research topics are balanced. Minus a point because, as an overview, Hunt can't delve into specific projects very well.

Take the Bell Curve, which was huge in the 90s. Hunt focuses on the charges of racism made against the authors, which is fair in the sense that this is mostly all anyone ever talks about regarding this book. Yet he fails to really mention that the authors' sampling was a big reason for the complaints. (They took various standardized tests and used math tricks to substitute these scores for IQ, which is completely at odds with both IQ testing and the general principles of assessment.) And maybe it's just my pet peeve, but my issue with that book was that it was premised on the question of gee, jobs in the future will require college degrees, so what are we gonna do with the dummies who can't complete college degrees? Everyone was so focused on the "who these dummies are" aspect (not that it wasn't important) that no one much spoke of the fact that it was a book about what to do with an imagined useless surplus population!

Politicians in this country rely on an uneducated electorate. It makes getting votes, while not being held accountable for one's actions, fairly easy. Politicians can get into office because people can be led to believe that, for example, abortions involve bashing in the brains of babies halfway through the birth canal. With a population this ignorant, it's not difficult to convince people that all social and scientific research is bunk. "OMG why are they looking at mating patterns of fruit flies with my tax dollars" leads to "new Alzheimer's drug treatment" but it's hard to see this if you don't comprehend science past the third-grade level.

I don't want this to turn into a 68968946547-word essay, so I'll just say that I wish Hunt delved deeper and didn't equate all protests and critiques as equally ignorant. I wish he'd given more and better examples of "people were against LMN research yet it led to OPQ cure." I wish he didn't equate all protest with death threats. I wish he'd described the sort of political atmosphere and low basic knowledge of science which allow attacks against research to so effortlessly be made. I wish it were a better book but even as it is, it's worth reading.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 1 out of 5]

I agree with some of it and sympathize with more than I agree with. But, unfortunately, the arguments are so poorly presented, the logic so outdated and the temperament so boneheaded that I found myself yelling out loud at the book on several occasions.