Chris Mooney - The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science--and Reality

Contents

Copyright 2012 by Chris Mooney. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Reality has a well-known liberal bias.

Stephen Colbert

Introduction

Equations to Refute Einstein

We all know that many American conservatives have issues with Charles Darwin, and the theory of evolution. But Albert Einstein, and the theory of relativity?

If youre surprised, allow me to introduce Conservapedia , the right-wing answer to Wikipedia and ground zero for all that is scientifically and factually inaccurate, for political reasons, on the Internet.

Claiming over 285 million page views since its 2006 inception, Conservapedia is the creation of Andrew Schlafly, a lawyer, engineer, homeschooler, and one of six children of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist and anti-abortionist who successfully battled the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. In his mothers heyday, conservative activists were establishing vast mailing lists and newsletters, and rallying the troops. Her son learned that they also had to marshal truth to their side, now achieved not through the mail but the Web.

So when Schafly realized that Wikipedia was using BCE (Before Common Era) rather than BC (Before Christ) to date historical events, hed had enough. He decided to create his own contrary fact repository, declaring, Its impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral. Conservapedia definitely isnt neutral about science. Its 37,000 plus pages of content include items attacking evolution and global warming, wrongly claiming (contrary to psychological consensus) that homosexuality is a choice and tied to mental disorders, and incorrectly asserting (contrary to medical consensus) that abortion causes breast cancer.

The whopper, though, has to be Conservapedia s nearly 6,000 word, equation-filled entry on the theory of relativity. Its accompanied by a long webpage of counterexamples to Einsteins great scientific edifice, which merges insights like E = mc (part of the special theory of relativity) with his later account of gravitation (the general theory of relativity).

Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world, declares Conservapedia. To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for Relativity. The site goes on to catalogue the political aspects of relativity, charging that some liberals have extrapolated the theory to favor their agendas. That includes President Barack Obama, who (it is claimed) helped publish an article applying relativity in the legal sphere while attending Harvard Law School in the late 1980s.

Virtually no one who is taught and believes Relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold, Conservapedia continues. But even thats not the sites most staggering claim. In its list of counterexamples to relativity, Conservapedia provides 36 alleged cases, including the following:

The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:4654, Matthew 15:28, and Matthew 27:51.

If you are an American liberal or progressive and you just read the passage above, you are probably about to split your sidesor punch a wall. Sure enough, once liberal and science-focused bloggers caught wind of Conservapedia s anti-Einstein sallies, Schlafly was quickly called a crackpot, crazy, dishonest, and so on.

These being liberals and scientists, there were also ample factual refutations. Take Conservapedia s bizarre claim that relativity hasnt led to any fruitful technologies. To the contrary, GPS devices rely on an understanding of relativity, as do PET scans and particle accelerators. Relativity works if it didnt, we would have noticed by now, and the theory would never have come to enjoy its current scientific status.

Little changed at Conservapedia after these errors were dismantled, however (though more anti-relativity counterexamples and Bible references were added). For not only does the site embrace a very different firmament of facts about the world than modern science: It also employs a different approach to editing than Wikipedia . Schlafly has said of the founding of Conservapedia that it strengthened my faith. I dont have to live with whats printed in the newspaper. I dont have to take whats put out by Wikipedia. Weve got our own way to express knowledge, and the more that we can clear out the liberal bias that erodes our faith, the better.

You might be thinking that Conservapedia s unabashed denial of relativity is an extreme case, located in the same circle of intellectual hell as claims that HIV doesnt cause AIDS and 9/11 was an inside job. If so, I want to ask you to think again. Structurally, the denial of something so irrefutable, the elaborate rationalization of that denial, and above all the refusal to consider the overwhelming body of counterevidence and modify ones view, is something we find all around us today. Its hard to call it rationaland hard to deny its everywhere.

Every contentious fact- or science-based issue in American politics now plays out just like the conflict between Conservapedia and liberalsand physicistsover relativity. Again and again its a fruitless battle between incompatible truths, with no progress made and no retractions offered by those who are just plain wrongand can be shown to be through simple fact checking mechanisms that all good journalists, not to mention open-minded and critically thinking citizens, can employ.