An exploration of the GOP's relationship with science.

Much has been made over the last few years about how the GOP got from Regan's "love of ideas" to the current "war on science" stance among many in the Republican base. These articles generally assume that the cause is the rise of the Evangelical Right, personified by Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the 700 Club, as part of a cunning political strategy put together by Karl Rove and his predecessors. If the Evolution Wars were the only issue, then I would agree. The real problem, however, is a deeper shift in the role of science in society.

For many years, advances in the understanding of science led directly to a more prosperous world. Chemistry provides new processes enabling new products. Physics, with some help from the chemists, provides new and interesting ways to capture, store, and release energy for purposes as diverse as lighting, communication and transportation. Aerodynamics helped us conquer the skies and reach into space. Biology led us to new cures for old diseases. Any hard science that existed in 1900 can proudly boast at least one of its discoveries advancing the prosperity of man and the profitability of a manufacturer.

However, in the last forty years or so, the rise of fields such as human ecology have shown us that the marvels enabled by science have steeper costs than we knew. By the 1980's, it became popular to sing about "losing faith" in science and progress, and popular fiction portrayed scientists as persecuted heroes. Science is no longer a solid friend of suburban prosperity, and political groups that rally their support in the suburbs have tended to embrace religion instead of "progress" as their justification. In a recent poll, such politicians explicitly acknowledged that while they believe scientists, the ones who presumably know what's going, believed in anthropogenic climate change, they did not.

The upshot is that the party of personal responsibility and suburban prosperity finds itself confronted by research showing that we are collectively responsible for our well-being and that suburbs are particularly harmful. In that environment, it makes absolutely no sense for a political body to fund or support people who tell their constituents that their policies are fundamentally unsound. One might as well ask Microsoft to fund development of Open Office. However, with the GOP now in opposition nationally, now is perhaps the time for a reapproachment. The party currently in power is having something of a scientific love-in, but you can ask health insurers, military contractors or high energy physicists what happens when one party likes you too much.

When the current administration and Congress' love affair with learning ends, and it will, here's what my colleagues and I ought to be doing to make sure we've got friends on both sides of the aisle:

(1) Be willing to adopt the language of morality. Rick Warren is a good guy and a smart one, and we would do well to copy his style when discussing climate change and other difficult topics.

(2) Never stop making the point that "science" is nothing more (or less) then that which we have not disproven yet. Acknowledge the inherent deism of the assumptions used, and don't allow enthusiastic reapproachers to try and fill gaps in our knowledge with a deity, that hasn't worked out well for anyone. Acknowledge those gaps, and emphasize that what we do is not mystical, but explicity and completely human. My spouse studies theology, and to date we haven't found any inherent conflict between our fields, just like Galileo.

(3) Speak in positive terms about progress towards a Jeffersonian ideal of small farming communities. Don't use "Jeffersonian" unless you're sure the audience has some reverence for this particular founding father, but "small town America" is their support base. This is the part of the country where there's a lot of wind to be harvested and sun for biofuels and direct solar conversion, so the science advocate can be both prophet of doom and "progress".

I'm off to get me a camel hair robe and find a hive frequented by locusts.