Ideology Triumphant

"All philosophers who find Some favorite system to their mind. In every point to make it fit, Will force all nature to submit."

Thomas Love Peacock

Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the Information Age, when arcane facts can be accessed merely by pushing a computer button, is the colossal ignorance pervading contemporary politics. In the early years of the 21st century America's polarized politics reminds us that historical progress does not proceed in a smooth, continuous trajectory. It stumbles through the centuries on an erratic course, with prominent peaks and valleys. As an extreme example, Europe's Dark Ages thrust European civilization back into Bronze-Age ignorance after the tremendous advances of the Graeco-Roman era. It took about 12 centuries to elevate British law back to the fourth-century stage of Roman law that had governed the colony's more civilized parts. (As a noteworthy example of its reactionary culture, Dark-Age Britain abandoned Roman law's innocent-until-proven-guilty principle, introduced by the Stoic emperor Antonius Pius in the second century C.E.)

On what we can hope is a smaller scale, we are experiencing a political Dark Age in the stupefying polarization of contemporary American politics. Displaying ignorance far beyond the call of ideological duty, economically illiterate Tea Party fanatics were willing to risk a federal debt default in October, 2013. Some even argued that a government default might benefit our economy. Economists overwhelmingly reject this preposterous notion, arguing that a U.S. government default, undermining the world's dominant currency, would be an unalleviated catastrophe.

Associated with this willful, aggressive ignorance is the normalization of extreme rhetoric. Ferocious opposition to health-alcare reform has driven conservatives into mindless hyperbole that would merit hostile ridicule in a rational society. According to Senator Rand Paul, a leading candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, belief in "the right to health care" is "basically saying you believe in slavery." Paul's rhetoric drew Tea Party cheers. And in the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, a subcommittee chairman claims that Evolution and Big-Bang cosmological theory are "straight from the pit of hell." That, too, drew no audible protest from his Republican colleagues.

Equally outlandish rhetorically, and paranoid besides, was venture capitalist Ron Perkin's assertion that American progressives' condemnation of bankers paralleled Nazi Germany's extermination of 6 million Jews. In 2010, Blackstone chief Stephen Schwartzman denounced President Obama's proposal to close a tax loophole that enables billionaire hedge-fund managers to pay a top tax rate roughly half their secretaries' top rate. This proposed loophole-closing "was like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939," according to Schwartzman.

At its roots, political polarization marks the retrogressive triumph of ideological over scientific reasoning. Scientific reasoning has never been popular in politics. But as evidenced by their unanimous rejection of climatological science, even of biological science by some, the 2012 Republican presidential contenders fell to new depths of unscientific politics.

This chapter's epigraph by Thomas Love Peacock serves as an accurate definition of ideological reasoning. Ideology merely assumes the truth of some overpowering idea, adducing all the facts in its favor, but ignoring contradictory facts. Scientific reasoning accounts for all relevant facts. If a tested hypothesis is logically incompatible with any significant fact, it is rejected. On the contrary, ideological beliefs ignore all relevant facts that contradict their politically biased hypotheses. A notorious example is the durable, 30-year-old Arthur-Laffer myth that tax cuts always promote increased economic growth. Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson demolished that myth soon after it was publicized.

Ideological reasoning is obviously at its worst in the Third World. In South Africa, a recent president, Thebo Mbeki, clung for years to a stubborn denial that the HIV virus causes AIDs. Instead, President Mbeki banned scientifically proven antiretroviral drugs and subsidized worthless tribal "cures" based on primitive superstition. The causal link between HIV and AIDs was solidly established more than 30 years ago. But Mbeki still rejected it, as recently as 2008. During his tenure nearly one-fifth of South African adults were AIDs-infected, dying at a rate exceeding 900 daily. According to Harvard researchers, Mbeki's folly caused 365,000 unnecessary AIDs-caused deaths through his rejection of proven medical science.

Along with their superstitious rejection of science, South Afrikaners also found a scapegoat. Western drug companies and governments allegedly marketed toxic antiretroviral drugs, deliberately killing Africans. In 2000 Mbeki hinted at CIA involvement in propagating the allegedly false belief linking HIV with AIDs. Ignorance was compounded by paranoia.

Americans are spared this particular anti-scientific belief. But South Africa's anti-scientific outlook was less a retrogression than a persistence of traditional superstition, whereas anti-scientific attitudes in the U.S. represent retrogression.

Anti-scientific superstition has always had a congenial home in the former Confederacy. Battles rage over the teaching of Evolution throughout the Bible Belt and even in midwestern Kansas, where the state's highest ranking education administrator proudly proclaims his belief in a 6,000-year-old earth.

Anti-scientific attitudes are evident in the nation-wide battle over vaccines. A phony report written by a "researcher" with huge conflicts of interest is jeopardizing the eradication of several potentially serious childhood diseases. Those who profit from antiscientific denial often fight on long after their pet theses have been forensically annihilated. As established anti-scientific deniers, they often have a profit motive to persist in denial.

Ideological Fuhrer

Like South Africa's HIV-causes-AIDs deniers, Rush Limbaugh is our most notorious global-warming denier. His underwhelming qualifications for challenging human-caused global warming include his record as a college dropout, a former disk jockey, and for a quarter century, an extravagantly paid (reputedly $60 million a year) professional demagogue duping millions of simple-minded, self-styled dittoheads with a litany of lies, misinformation, and logical fallacies. Limbaugh resembles South African HIV-causes-AIDs deniers in charging scientists with a gigantic conspiracy designed to destroy the U.S. economy. It's a precise parallel with South African AIDs deniers who...