SCIENCE, CULTURED

A New Day, and a New Tone

Carrying the Spirit of Obama's Vision for America Into the Science Arena

There are probably as many ways of imputing meaning to Barack Obama’s presidential victory as there are pundits around to do so. But I’d like to start this column with an interpretation that isn’t exactly earth-shattering, and for that reason, probably true.

Obama’s election represented a mandate to cast aside an old way of doing politics, one that was divisive and superficial, and that throve on partisan attacks, culture warmongering, and the continual inability to find common ground. At a time of twin wars and economic calamity, Americans were sick of that breed of politics. They wanted change, of a sort that would usher in a new politics of unity, purpose, substance, and compromise. Or as President-elect Obama put it in his victory speech in Chicago:

Let us summon a new spirit of patriotism; of service and responsibility where each of us resolves to pitch in and work harder and look after not only ourselves, but each other. Let us remember that if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers—in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people. Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.

Like so many people, I woke up the morning after the election with new inspiration and optimism, and my mind racing. I fired off a bunch of “let’s do this, let’s do that” emails. If they had any common theme, it was the drive to apply the mood of the moment to the stretch of politics and policy with which I’m most familiar: science.

We’ve been in a post-Sputnik mode of science politics since, well, Sputnik.

It’s an arena in which change, in the Obama sense of the term, has not exactly been a common occurrence. It’s a vast oversimplification, but in essence true: We’ve been in a post-Sputnik mode of science politics since, well, Sputnik. Scientists have most centrally been concerned with conducting research and securing funding (from the government or industry) to do so. The scientific community reaches out to politicians and the public, to be sure, but the goals of this outreach are not on par with the research imperative.

At the same time, divisiveness, and the lack of shared purpose, has been rampant in relation to science issues. There are two divides that chiefly concern me here, and they’re not unrelated. The first is the divide between the pointy-headed experts and everybody else, one where the experts want to lecture, and the citizens go “la la la” most of the time. The second is the divide between science and religion, where the atheists attack believers and claim science exposes a godless universe, and the creationists attack evolution and claim science is just thinly disguised atheism—and the middle gets polarized, or just drowned out completely.

Is it too much to hope that we in the science world, and we who care about it, might seize the momentum in the wake of Obama’s victory and try to heal these rifts? Is it even remotely possible that when Darwin Day rolls around on February 12, 2009—the 200-year anniversary of Darwin’s birth, which just happens to fall in the 150^th anniversary year of the publication of On the Origin of Species—we won’t use the occasion to fan the flames of another battle between the “new atheists” and the creationists? Rather, could we emphasize instead that science-religion conflicts are needlessly divisive and inflammatory and—as with culture war politics generally—not what most people really care about?

I’m hoping religious leaders and scientists will come together this February 12 with a strong statement to this effect. It is long past time that we heard from the vast middle on this issue.

Ask yourself this question: If Barack Obama was president of science, how would he govern? I think it’s obvious that he would emphasize common purpose, that he would seek to defuse tension, and that he would try to bring everyone along.

He would reach out to the entire public, and try to help it appreciate science—not through technical lecturing, but by emphasizing what science can do to improve our lives: create new energy innovations, new medical technologies, new jobs. And he would try to heal the divisive science-religion conflict, emphasizing how the two can and do coexist peacefully in so many minds, scientist’s and religious believer’s alike.

Of course, there is no president of science—it’s up to us to determine the ultimate direction of the nation’s scientific enterprise, and how that enterprise relates to the society in which it occurs. Gandhi said, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” How’s that for a goal?

Chris Mooney is contributing editor to Science Progress and author of several books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co-authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. He and Kirshenbaum blog at “The Intersection.”

Tags: evolution, intelligent design, Media

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