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All Things Being Equal, Science Can Fail Us

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By MICHAEL GERSON Washington Post Writer's Group

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 12, 2008

WASHINGTON - There are few things in American politics more irrationally ideological, more fanatically faith-based than the accusation that Republicans are conducting a "war on science."

According to Hillary Clinton, the Bush administration has declared "open season on open inquiry." "When I am president," she promises, "scientific integrity will not be the exception, it will be the rule."

The exceptions, in this case, are pretty exceptional: Elias Zerhouni, who has reformed the National Institutes of Health with widely praised efficiency; Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who helped set in motion large-scale AIDS treatment in Africa; Francis Collins of the National Human Genome Research Institute, who led the effort to map the human genome. The "war on science" recently has allowed some extraordinary achievements.

For the most part, these accusations are a political ploy - actually an attempt to shut down political debate. Any practical concern about the content of government sex-education curricula is labeled "anti-science." Any ethical question about the destruction of human embryos to harvest their cells is dismissed as "theological" and thus illegitimate.

Liberal views are "objective" while traditional moral convictions are "biased." Public scrutiny of scientific practices is "politicizing" important decisions.

These arguments are seriously made, but they are not to be taken seriously. Does anyone really believe in a science without moral and legal limits? In harvesting organs from prisoners? In systematically getting rid of the disabled?

This last question, alas, does not answer itself. In America, the lives of about nine of 10 Down syndrome children are ended before birth.

All of which highlights a real conflict, a war within liberalism between the idea of unrestricted science in the cause of health and the principle that all men are created equal - between humanitarianism and egalitarianism.

In his insightful article in the latest issue of The New Atlantis, "Science and the Left," Yuval Levin argues that a belief in the power of science is central to the development of liberalism - based on the assertion that objective facts and rational planning can replace tradition and religious authority in the organization of society. Levin summarizes the liberal promise this way: "The past was rooted in error and prejudice while the future would have at its disposal a new oracle of genuine truth."

But the oracle of science is silent on certain essential topics. "Science, simply put," says Levin, "cannot account for human equality, and does not offer reasons to believe we are all equal. Science measures our material and animal qualities, and it finds them to be patently unequal."

Science can easily become the power of some over the lives of others. And in their talk of a Republican war on science, liberals may be blinding themselves to a very different kind of modern war in which their own ideals are deeply implicated: a war on equality.

Michael Gerson's column is distributed by Washington Post Writers Group.

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