Science, Apparently, is for Sissies

Although I often like the articles I find on Slate, I don't often go there. But the other night I just happened to stumble across an article that mentioned this one on Slate. The big takeaway here for me was this:

"A Pew Research Center Poll from July 2009 showed that only around 6 percent of U.S. scientists are Republicans; 55 percent are Democrats, 32 percent are independent, and the rest "don't know" their affiliation."


I think that's nothing short of stunning. The article doesn't do much to explain this, though it does point out the divide between the parties when it comes to Global Warming or, what I think it should be called, Climate Destabilization.
 
The Republican party as a whole mocks higher learning as "elite" and highly educated people as "eggheads"--people who have their noses in books and never look up to see what's really going on. The way it's sold to the Joe Lunchbucket base is book-smart vs. street-smart, theory vs. reality. Guess which one is better.
 
The result of this is a Conservative war on science that has lasted for ten years, but has really been part of their platform for much longer. A common refrain you'll hear coming from the Right is that you don't need a _____ degree to know . . .  Or that some things are just common sense. This is usually code for "Pay no attention to the data behind the curtain, things really are as simple as they seem." Science, facts, and studies are just there to confuse you and mislead the good, hard-working American people.
 
It's hard to blame them, really. Science is rarely on the side of big business, which is the life's blood of the Right. Science blows the whistle on pollution, which is costly to fix. Science represents progress in some pretty scary and morally ambiguous ways, and that's the last thing Republicans want. Messing with life means messing with God.
 
I'm not sure anyone will ever have an answer for why so few Republicans go into science, but I really do think that it's culturally threatening and often counter to their tenets of anti-(higher) education, blind faith, and a fear of progress.
 
-Doug