In this week’s National Journal Paul Starobin has an extremely thoughtful cover story on the politicization of science. He appropriately finds that the pathological politicization of science occurs on both the left and the right, but astutely also recognizes that the scientific establishment itself bears some responsibility for today’s hyper-politicization of science:

. . . the modern professional research scientist is not, by any stretch, a blameless figure — in this tale, that scientist emerges as an increasingly partisan and self-interested figure, dependent on government grants and largely an inhabitant of Blue America.

Starobin does a nice job characterizing how science is used as a tool of politics from the political Left and Right. He registers complaints similar to those that we have expressed about those who would politicize the politicization of science by labeling it only a problem of the Right, or at least, only a problem worth worrying about from the Right. Starobin expresses plenty of concern across the political spectrum, which will likely inevitably mean that his analysis will be dismissed by most partisan observers. But this is good news as the side he aligns with is that of science and democracy. Of the scientific community, Starobin has some strong medicine to offer, and I pull the following excerpt at length:

It is tempting, in this tale, to take pity on the scientist. Assailed from all sides, he — yes, most top scientists are still men — may appear to be just as much a casualty as the Enlightenment mind-set itself.

Alas, it is not that simple. Inevitably the scientist has been dragged, or has catapulted himself, into the values and political combat that surround science and has emerged, in certain respects, as just another (diminished) partisan.

This is plainly the case in the matter of the Religious Right’s mugging of evolution. Darwin, anticipating just such a beating, had a ready response in the true spirit of science, which was that there was nothing in his scientific observations, nor could there be in any scientific gathering of evidence, that proved or disproved the existence of God. But that sort of agnostic caution seems to have lapsed as an example for today’s scientists.

Among neo-Darwinian biologists on both sides of the Atlantic, a kind of counter-militancy has gathered force. Prominent evolutionists such as Richard Dawkins of Britain are proudly proclaiming their atheistic beliefs — even suggesting that anyone who believes in God is a fool. “Of course it’s satisfying, if you can believe it,” Dawkins has said about faith in God. “But who wants to believe a lie?”

But it is Dawkins who looks dim for seeking to claim more from science than science can, by definition, provide. “He is an evangelical atheist” and “he is killing us,” Alan I. Leshner, the CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in an interview.

If modern scientists were the classical liberals that they like to say they still are, then they presumably would not be clustered on one side of the partisan divide. In fact, they display a deep-blue orientation. A Pew Research Center survey last year found that 87 percent of “scientists/engineers” (representing a random sampling of members of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering) disapproved of the way Bush was handling his job as president. In the fall of 1997, by contrast, 78 percent of scientists/engineers approved of Bill Clinton’s performance.

What gives? The answer, in part, is that scientists have a long-standing tendency to believe that some societal problems — global warming is a current example — demand collective solutions of the sort that laissez-faire Republicans tend to be reluctant to support. In the 1930s, scientists widely embraced FDR’s New Deal, and a number of researchers, blind to Stalin’s crimes, were in fact Communist sympathizers or party members.

Today’s Lab-Coat Liberal, as opposed to a Jefferson-style classical liberal, is also a product of the 1960s. Leading research scientists, as National Academy members generally are, inhabit an academic environment that was radicalized by the Vietnam War protest movement and civil-rights struggles. Although most scientists balk at the New Left’s fixation on identity politics, science academia, even as it subsists on government grants, tends to take an anti-establishment posture that embraces a false view of science’s own purity.

“Through its actions in Vietnam our government has shaken our confidence in its ability to make wise and humane decisions,” the Cambridge, Mass.-based Union of Concerned Scientists declared in its founding document in 1968. Never mind that elite research scientists — members of a secretive government-connected team dubbed “The Jasons” — advised the Pentagon on certain Vietnam war-fighting strategies.

This mind-set, pitting the purportedly apolitical concerns of scientists against the connivers who wield political power in Washington, endures. In a recent Web posting on the prospect of a confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, the Union of Concerned Scientists declared that Iran “does not represent a direct or imminent threat to the United States.” That is a policy judgment, not a scientific conclusion, and it is a dubious one at that, given the clear signs that Iran, a backer of Shiite militias in neighboring Iraq and of Hezbollah in Lebanon, is complicating the mission of U.S. forces in the Middle East.

The Bush administration as a whole, not just its military policies, is in the Cambridge outfit’s gun sights. Citing climate change, childhood lead poisoning, reproductive health, drug abuse, and other issues, the group declared in 2004: “When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions.” Signatories included Edward Wilson, the Harvard entomologist once taken to task by the New Left.

In an interview, Cornell physicist Kurt Gottfried, chairman of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a drafter of that founding declaration, denied that the group, or scientists generally, had a pronounced partisan disposition. “I do not believe that 77 percent or 87 percent of scientists vote Democratic normally,” he said. But the available data, as scientists like to say, suggest otherwise. In 15 years of polling, scientists “have always stood out as among the most Democratic of the elites,” Michael Dimock, associate director of the Pew Research Center, said in an interview.

Thus the science community, even if at times a reluctant warrior, is itself contributing to the polarization that afflicts America’s political culture. Viewed by the Founders as part of the glue that binds American democracy, the scientist is in danger of becoming a force for its increasing fragmentation.

The last sentence is exactly the dynamic I was referring to when I criticized scientists at RealClimate last week for serving as agents of divisiveness in political debates.

Starobin, like many of us, loses momentum when talking about what might be done to address the pathological politicization of science. But from where I sit, that means there might be a good audience for The Honest Broker ;-) Jokes aside, Starobin has written an extremely thoughtful article. It will certainly appear on my fall syllabus.