The New Dark Ages

To describe religions as mind viruses is sometimes interpreted as contemptuous or even hostile. It is both.
Richard Dawkins, “The Infected Mind”
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love
The Wall Street Journal ran a story today on the increasing mobilization of the scientific community against the Bush administration. In Scientists Take To the Streets Against Bush (free link), reporter Antonio Regalado writes:

In a big shift for the normally docile scientific community, some leading researchers are mounting a political campaign to unseat President Bush this fall, accusing the administration of twisting scientific facts to fit its policies on issues such as global warming, sex education and stem-cell research.

Today the Associated Press reported that “A [U.S. House of Representatives] committee gave abortion opponents a victory Wednesday, voting to making it easier for hospitals, health insurers and others to refuse to provide or cover abortions.”
The reason why the Bush administration, and social conservatives in general, can pursue an anti-science agenda is that Americans are increasingly unfamiliar with, and scornful of, real science. I’m beginning to wonder whether, as a country, we’ve turned our back on the values of the Enlightenment. I was hesitant to use the phrase “dark ages” in the title, because it’s frankly alarmist, but I really am concerned that a new dark ages is where we’re headed.

Taking the Science Out of Fiction
There’s an ongoing discussion in ‘s and ‘s blogs on the relative merits of science fiction and fantasy. Since I started reading speculative fiction in the early 1970s there has been a huge growth in the publication of fantasy stories and novels, and a decline in the publication of hard science fiction—fiction in which the science is integral to the plot of the story. A lot of factors have contributed to this trend, and it hasn’t been all bad: the rise of fantasy has coincided with the rise of character-driven fiction and a dramatic increase in the number of women writing speculative fiction. The field would be a poorer place without Ursula LeGuin, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Pat Murphy, and of course Kij Johnson. (Yes, I know it’s a miserably abridged list, and I’m mixing generations a bit. Mea culpa.) But there’s also a dark side to the Fantasy Revolution: there are fewer writers well grounded in the sciences (myself included), and fewer readers who are interested in hard science fiction. I think the lack of aptitude and interest in hard science fiction is a symptom of the general retreat from scientific literacy in America.
Yes, I Know: The sky is falling!
Well, it is. Take, for example, the subject of reproductive rights. For most of human history, life began at birth. It was a convenient and not wholly arbitrary way to differentiate a person from a fetus, or a mass of cells. Now a fetus can survive outside the womb, with extensive and costly technological intervention, approximately 24 weeks after conception. The scientific knowledge that makes fetal survival possible only two-thirds of the way through a pregnancy has ironically given new ammunition to religious fundamentalists who want to set the threshold of personhood at conception.
It is no longer possible to have a public discourse about abortion based on the scientific facts; every discussion must take into account the religious sensibilities of the least educated, most volatile members of the body politic. This deference to ignorance has made its way into law: federal funding for new lines of embryonic stem cells is prohibited; the civil rights of women take a back seat to the rights of a fetus she may be carrying; and causing a pregnant woman to miscarry now carries a murder or manslaughter charge in some states. At the same time, people who are opposed to abortion on religious grounds are also, by and large, opposed to contraception and sex education that would reduce the need for abortion. There is also a significant overlap between opponents of abortion and birth control, and opponents of gay unions, the teaching of evolution, and unexpurgated fiction. The would-be mullahs have won, to the extent that their Bronze Age prejudices have infected public policy and the law thirty-five years after humans landed on the Moon.
The Good Old Days
What drives these reactionary souls? Are they just mean, narrow-minded people? Well, yes, too many of them are. But I think the social conservatives who’d like to turn back the clock on abortion, civil rights and education are also influenced by some of the same yearnings that animate the fiction of feminist, multicultural fantasy writers whose work the conservatives often condemn. The Twenty-First Century is a scary fucking place. Sure we have relatively cheap personal computers, unimaginable access to information and entertainment from our homes twenty-four hours a day, cheap food, and phones that fit in our pockets. But we also have AIDS, the possibility of nuclear and biological terrorism, a growing chasm between the haves and have-nots, the breakdown of family and social bonds (I’m writing this in my office, alone, on a Thursday night, rather than discussing it with friends, face-to-face), the promotion of casual cruelty as entertainment via ubiquitous reality television programming, and the constant nagging anxiety of living in the most materialistic culture in the history of the planet.
Jesus, no wonder people want to turn the clock back to simpler times, whether in real life or through fantasy. It doesn’t matter that the nostalgia for simpler times is heroin cut with rat poison (polio, famine, high infant mortality, frequent violent death, tainted water and backbreaking labor), the anxiety that produces nostalgia is real.
We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us
We are embroiled in a culture war, but I’m not sure it’s the Red State-Blue State conflict we take it to be. I think the war may be between the values of the Enlightenment—optimism in the pursuit of knowledge and the perfectibility of the human race—and the surrender to technological barbarism, to use Wouk’s pungent phrase. And I think that war isn’t fought in the ballot box, but in our own hearts.

REFERENCES
BOOKS
Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time, by Michael Shermer
Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud, by Robert L Park
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science, by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, by Richard Dawkins
WEBSITES
The Talk.Origins Archive: Exploring the Creation/Evolution Controversy
The National Center for Science Education
Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP)
Bad Astronomy
Stages of Human Development
abortabortion
FICTION (Shameless Plug, Actually)
Miscarriage of Justice, by Robert J. Howe