Centerfield: Misrepresenting liberalism: How the IDers got it (and still get it) wrong

August 31, 2005

Misrepresenting liberalism: How the IDers got it (and still get it) wrong

Understandably, much of our focus is on the devastation in Louisiana and along the Gulf Coast, not to mention on today's horrific tragedy in Baghdad. Needless to say, our thoughts are with those who are suffering and with those who are doing incredible work trying to help them.

But I wanted to post a follow-up piece to my recent post on intelligent design. I was happy to see such an excellent discussion ensue in the comments section, and perhaps there will be more to say here. As I've mentioned before, I learn a great deal from all of you, and, whether you like what I have to say or not, I thank you all for responding. I apologize in advance is this seems like ID overkill!

This post is a defence of liberalism -- and that may irritate some of you, I know -- but I want to be clear that the liberalism I defend, the liberalism I take to be at the core of my own political philosophy, is more the robust, classical liberalism of the American Founding than the illiberal left-liberalism that has emerged in recent decades.

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In response to one of my recent posts on intelligent design at The Reaction (see the follow-up here), Annie of AmbivaBlog, one of the most thoughtful centrists out there, wrote this:

It isn't genuine relativism. It's a ploy to call "diversity" liberals' bluff and hoist them by their own petard. The religious people behind Intelligent Design believe that God is the Designer. They've simply come up with an argument they think liberals can't refute without exposing their own dogmatism and hypocrisy.

She's right, and I need to clarify my argument: The proponents of intelligent design, including political proponents of the teaching of intelligent design alongside evolution in the schools, are not relativists. Some of them may be, for all I know, but most seem to be absolutists in the sense that they are what we would generally call believers. That is, they believe that God (their God, or at least their version of God, a god) is the Creator, the prime mover behind all life, indeed, behind the universe more generally. Where relativists hold that there is no absolute truth, just a multiplicity of truths determined by power and perspective, creationists, whether open about their beliefs or hiding behind the political convenience of intelligent design, believe that there is but one ultimate and overarching truth.

The proponents of intelligent design may not be relativists, but they have adopted the rhetoric of relativism. They know that creationism isn't likely to offer much of a challenge to the teaching of evolution, but speaking the language of diversity, that is, adopting the language of liberalism, or more specifically of the new liberalism that eschews moral absolutes, including the moral absolutes of classical liberalism, and embraces relativism in some form, may force their opponents into an uncomfortable choice: either they accept intelligent design as an equal alternative to evolution or they deny its validity as an equal alternative to evolution and thereby turn hypocritically against their own philosophical foundations.

In short, if Annie is right, they expect their opponents, including the proponents of evolution, to cave. But this strategy, such as it is in any way strategic, betrays a serious misunderstanding of their opponents, and that misunderstanding results from a simplistic understanding of liberalism long fostered by its right-wing critics. Forget for a moment that American conservatism is essentially a distillation of classical liberalism, neo-liberalism, mixed with various illiberal strains of modern and pre-modern thought. Forget that America is the liberal nation par excellence (however imbued with certain strains of conservatism). Conservatives have largely succeeded in vilifying liberals and liberalism in the public imagination. If you're a liberal, you're somehow un-American, well out of the mainstream of American life and belief. But they've done this by reducing liberalism -- the political philosophy of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness -- down to relativism, that is, to moral bankruptcy, to an absence of what are generally referred to as values. In reality, liberals may defend the natural rights of the individual, as those rights were set down by Locke, America's philosopher, and his early-modern liberal contemporaries, but conservatives want you to believe that they represent a profound threat to all things American.

To be sure, some of today's liberals are relativists, more or less. But liberalism is the philosophy of a rival absolute truth to creationism, an absolute truth discovered in nature through reason and/or experience. It is not relativism. Relativism, which denies even the primacy of reason and the certainty of experience, is illiberal, just as much so as any illiberal ideology of the right. In short, conservatives have attempted to reduce liberalism down to an element of postmodernism, where nothing is true except the absence of truth, and this is where the proponents of intelligent design have hoped to catch their opponents in that bind.

Some conservatives have intentionally distorted liberalism, equating it with illiberal relativism, and the proponents of intelligent design have picked up on that misrepresentation, predicting that their opponents wouldn't have much to say in response to their challenge. Liberals have generally failed to counter the larger conservative offensive, but they are now fighting back. If liberalism is relativism, then there really isn't much to fight for, including evolution. But it isn't.

I do not mean to equate liberalism and science. The two are clearly distinct. And it may be true, as one of my other readers put it, that political liberals may believe in intelligent design (although I would suggest in response that such liberals, including certain supporters of the Democratic Party, may actually be philosophically or theologically conservative). But I would argue that science is very much akin to liberalism. Like liberalism, science sought to liberate humanity from the errors of superstition by placing reason above, or at least in contradistinction to, faith. Is it any wonder that many of the early-modern liberals were scientists? Indeed, far from rejecting truth altogether, liberals hold that truth may be uncovered through the scientific method and that, in short, truth must be empirically demonstrable. Evolution is a theory, not a belief, but much of it is empirically true, which is to say, true to us who live empirically. Creationism is a belief based on biblical revelation, not a scientific theory and certainly not empirically demonstrable. And intelligent design is just silly.

Regardless, terms like "liberal" and "conservative" are just labels. What's important is that science, however liberal in a philosophic sense, is not about to give in to such silliness. And now that the proponents of intelligent design are making a name for their silliness, science is finally fighting back. Not by employing the postmodern left's rhetoric of relativism, which wouldn't get it anywhere, but by defending the truth of evolution and empirical truth more generally. As Tufts Professor Daniel Dennett -- author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea and, once upon a time, of a letter to the editor of The Tufts Daily criticizing one of my columns on education and multiculturalism -- put it recently in a brilliant piece in the Times, "contemporary biology has demonstrated beyond all reasonable doubt... that natural selection -- the process in which reproducing entities must compete for finite resources and thereby engage in a tournament of blind trial and error from which improvements automatically emerge -- has the power to generate breathtakingly ingenious designs," a sound, scientific refutation of the central claim of intelligent design, that evolution cannot explain the profound complexity of life.

Ah, but it can.

Admittedly (and positively), "genuine scientific controversies about evolution... abound," but intelligent design has failed to offer anything in the way of an alternative to evolution:

To date, the proponents of intelligent design have not produced anything like that. No experiments with results that challenge any mainstream biological understanding. No observations from the fossil record or genomics or biogeography or comparative anatomy that undermine standard evolutionary thinking.
Instead, the proponents of intelligent design use a ploy that works something like this. First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach.

Note that the trick is content-free. You can use it on any topic. "Smith's work in geology supports my argument that the earth is flat," you say, misrepresenting Smith's work. When Smith responds with a denunciation of your misuse of her work, you respond, saying something like: "See what a controversy we have here? Professor Smith and I are locked in a titanic scientific debate. We should teach the controversy in the classrooms." And here is the delicious part: you can often exploit the very technicality of the issues to your own advantage, counting on most of us to miss the point in all the difficult details.

And:

In short, no science. Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, "You haven't explained everything yet," is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn't explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn't yet tried to explain anything.
To formulate a competing hypothesis, you have to get down in the trenches and offer details that have testable implications. So far, intelligent design proponents have conveniently sidestepped that requirement, claiming that they have no specifics in mind about who or what the intelligent designer might be.

Yes, intelligent design is content-free. It has no place in America's, or anywhere else's, classrooms -- science, philosophy, religion, or otherwise.

But let me be clear: I am not a scientific absolutist. I acknowledge that there may be more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in our materialistic philosophies. But let those alternatives to science, to empiricism, be taught in non-science classes. Let them be taught as metaphysics, not physics. That way we can avoid the pitfalls of relativism while still allowing for the possibility that there is more to life than what science says there is.

Posted by Michael J.W. Stickings at August 31, 2005 05:29 PM

Comments

I didn't participate in the last thread. But I do believe in what could be called ID, but what I call "intelligent evolution." First, the evidence that the Earth is billions of years old, and various life forms have existed over that time, is overwhelming. By contrast, the Biblical timeline is belied even by Near East archaeology which shows human civilizations older than the age of the Earth according to Biblical literalists.

However, I do doubt that purely random variation and natural selection can account for the evolutionary record. While the Declaration of Independence is not law, not being the Constitution, it does mention "divine Providence." My model of the universe does include divine providence acting in human history, and presumably, in evolutionary history before the appearance of humans. This does not mean that natural law if violated, but that there may be degrees of freedom within natural law which allows for teleology. Thus, my objection is in some sense questioning whether the variation which leads to evolution is truly random.

Where I feel that scientists get a little theological themselves is when they assume that natural selection must account for it, because there is no alternative within their paradigm. A little bit of humility or even saying, "we don't know" would be pallative.

Posted by: rickheller at August 31, 2005 06:42 PM

By the way, I consider Dennett one of the worst offenders in terms of pushing a reductionist theology. His book, Conciousness Explained would be better titled "Consciousness Explained Away." He overargues, and presumes an authority he does not have.

If the ID hypothesis were actually taught in schools, I don't think it would be so bad. What I'm concerned about is that it would be abused by some teachers so inclined to present actual young Earth creationism in the classroom.

Posted by: rickheller at August 31, 2005 06:52 PM

I very much agree with you Rick, but I think the problem with teaching it in schools is that ID proponents often advocate it as an alternative to evolution as opposed to something that could complement it. I would be very much in favor of telling kids that evolution need not rule out any form of "divine guidance" but I think they need to understand that evolution by natural selection is very well established and accepted by the vast majority of scientists. I think that any more detailed discussion ought to be postponed till college.

I think the ID movement is so schizophrenic and tangled up in scary alliances, with as you mention young-earth creationists, that we really ought to keep it away from schools at this early stage.

I sort of view the ID that goes on now as sort of confused speculations that might eventually lead to something more substantial, sort of maybe the first theoretical musings that could lead to a new theory that might subsume the old one, like quantum mechanics subsumes netwonian mechanics.

It also bothers me when people make this arbitrary division between science and religion. After all, I'm sure virtual particles and quantum foam would seem pretty nebulous and insubstantial, even spiritual, to previous thinkers.

Posted by: Adam at August 31, 2005 09:15 PM

BTW, I really was impressed by the quality of this post, particularly the defense of liberalism.

I know you mentioned that you felt some of your readers here might not like it, perhaps due to your experience here with the "quagmire" situation. I was one who quibbled with your use of the term "quagmire" not because of its accuracy but because of its connotations and assocations with the "Bush is Satan" crowd.

But we probably have more in common than you think. I'm left-leaning on social issues, but I'm too optimistic and idealistic to be anti-war. I just hope Bush hasn't screwed up as much as many say he has.

Posted by: Adam at August 31, 2005 09:31 PM

What Annie's insight highlights for me is that conservatives have discovered a way to exploit the fact that modern liberalism (as manifested by those who self-identify as liberal) is every bit as tribal as conservatism certainly is.

The constellation of beliefs that each group holds and policies that each supports is determined not by some underlying philosophical outlook, but by the inconsistent views of the members of each tribe. There are a series of strands of insight, some of which cohere and some of which don't. But these strands do not comprise a unfied whole in any sense other than a tribal sense.

I am not anti-multiculturalism. A very wise philosophy professor of mine, Larry Blum, was able to cast a treatise on it that I thought was very realistic, sensible, and defensible. I'd call it classically liberal, but in the John Stuart Mill sense, not in the "synonym for libertarian' sense. But in its worst, most bastardized, unconsidered form, multiculturalism amounts to little more that an embracing of postmodern relativism. That's a huge problem for liberals as the self-identifying tribe is currently constituted.

For a classical liberal who is not afraid to pass judgements on merit after ample consideration, it's not a problem at all, unless the liberal tribe wants me in it.

As far as science and ID goes, here's something I think we would all be well served to consider. Science is a church. It's the church of faith in reason, as manifested by the scientific method. And scientific consensus is the ruling force there just as much as the Vatican is in the Catholic church. That's the one non-negotiable element, scientific method. A commitment to certify only that which can be verified. This is VERY MUCH based on faith. Faith in reason. Neither reason nor scientific method admits of relatism in its postmodern sense that all is ultimately unknowable and therefore equal. That's antithetical to science.

Posted by: bk at September 1, 2005 09:45 AM

"However, I do doubt that purely random variation and natural selection can account for the evolutionary record. "

Rick,

What is your basis for this conclusion other than your own beliefs? Have you studied the evolutionary record? Do you doubt that subastomic particles can be in different places at once? Are there other scientific principles that you doubt?

I don't mean to be sarcastic but it strikes me as bizarre to attack evolution as science because it doesn't square with your perceptions of the universe.

As for ID and schools, I don't see why you need to tell kids that evolution doesn't rule out divine intervention. They can learn that in church. You don't need to proselytize evolution, just each the science. It is not the school's place to protect religion. I seriously doubt that the United States faces a threat that our schools will turn out hordes or raving atheists.

Posted by: Marc at September 1, 2005 09:47 AM

Thank you for the kind words, Adam. I've written quite a few posts here, most of them quite long, and the "quagmire" controversy was but a small blip. (And, shortly thereafter, Hagel came out and more or less said the same thing.)

Rick,

However much I appreciated Dennett's attack on ID, I do agree with you about his reductionism. To me, he's a lot like Richard Dawkins, Oxford professor, friend of my parents, and the author of such absolutist tracts as River Out of Eden and The Selfish Gene. Both Dennett and Dawkins have made valuable contributions to science, but their inability to see anything beyond science, that is, beyond materialism -- indeed, their hostility to metaphysics generally -- is simplistic and narrow-minded. I side with them more than with, say, the creationists, but both sides are extreme. When I was at Tufts, I objected to Dennett's reductionist naturalism and more generally to the analytic philosophy that rejects metaphysics altogether. He has simply closed himself off to the possibilities of metaphysics (not to mention religion in its traditional sense), yet, as one of my readers at The Reaction mentioned, he continues to draw metaphysical conclusions from his empiricism (he's a devout atheist).

Posted by: Michael Stickings at September 1, 2005 12:20 PM

Marc,

I definitely don't think that ID ought be taught in schools, but given the highly controversial position of evolution (within the public's mind), it seems somewhat foolhardy to ignore public opinion entirely. Besides, if we want kids to learn and accept evolution, it would be sensible to put some of their fears at ease.

Just briefly state that some believe religion and evolution are compatible while others don't. But then say we're going to focus on what scientists believe to be correct. It's kind of a pre-emptive manuever. It is my understanding that biology teachers in some parts of the country frequently have to deal with creationist/ID challenges from their students. It's a way of sidestepping the whole issue to get on with the teaching.

You can't really dispute that evolution is what most scientists accept. So my idea is NOT to protect religious students, but rather to aid teachers by reducing the hostility in some of their students.

I don't presume to speak for Rick, but I think what he's trying to say is something like this: some scientists claim that it is impossible that anything but natural selection could be at work in life's history. But Rick's saying that that is really a philosophical claim based on their materialist metaphysics. The appropriate scientific claim would be that natural selection has been an astonishingly productive mechanism for explaining evolution. But it would be an error to claim that it is impossible that anything else is at work.

For instace, a lot of anti-evolutionists complain about evolution not being repeatable. While I accept evolution, we really won't understand it completely until we have studied evolution on other planets. Right now we just have an n of 1 because the only life we know of is right here.

Posted by: Adam at September 1, 2005 01:29 PM

The appropriate scientific claim would be that natural selection has been an astonishingly productive mechanism for explaining evolution. But it would be an error to claim that it is impossible that anything else is at work.

Sometime people use the word impossible to stand for something like "scientifically unreasonable or unproductive to examine or entertain because we can't imagine reasonable evidence to either confirm or refute."

Strictly speaking, it is not impossible that an all-powerful deity created all of us, our memories, and everthing we've ever perceived just seconds ago, complete with memories and everything we think we "know." It's also not impossible that, you are or maybe I am just a brain suspended in a fluid with wires attached, and that everything we think is real is being perceived due to the input of the evil scientist who now owns our brain.

But even if these things are possible, are they notions worth examining scientifically? Probably not. Metaphysically or philosophically, yes. But not scientifically.

Posted by: bk at September 1, 2005 02:17 PM

Brian,

You're right that pretty much anything is possible and that impossible could be used as a form of shorthand, but I think in this particular case, it's important to choose one's words carefully if for nothing else than good PR if not scientific humility. Albert Michelson, of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, stated near the end of the 19th century that physical law had pretty much been well-established and that he could only imagine minor corrections. Obviously, modern physics proved him decisively wrong.

Also, it is my understanding that the history of philosophy is punctuated by certain disciplines leaving philosophy once there are appropriate methods that can render those questions tractable. As when natural philosophy became science. And you see it today with scientists beginning to examine consciousness, which was once a domain previously reserved to philosophers. My point is that what may seem to us as a metaphysical question might actually become an empirical one at a later date.

I think the difficulty that people have in perceiving this is the western division of things into spirit and matter, wherein spirit is, by its very nature, undetectable. According to a Hindu or a Buddhist metaphysic matter and spirit are more on a continuum, with spirit being just more rarefied than matter. With current ignorance about dark energy and dark matter and acceptance of nebulous particles like neutrinos and photons, it is not inconceivable that this more fine matter might have some correspondence to a Hindu metaphysic. And if one peruses current debates about consciousness you will see a renewed openness to more exotic and even mystical theories.

So my point is that "something more going on" with life is more than just possible, it is not entirely implausible, even from an empirical standpoint. Of course, each person will rank the possibility of "more going on" according to their prejudices from strictly possible in theory but likely just mumbo-jumbo, to likely.

Again, I think the current state of ID is a confused mixture of politics and speculation, but I leave open the possibility that another scientific theory might come along and subsume neo-Darwininsm just as quantum theory reduces to Newtonian mechanics for macroscopic objects.

But in school, just tell 'em that evolution and religion need not be contradictory if only as a wise pre-emptive manuever.

Posted by: Adam at September 1, 2005 03:23 PM

Adam,

I don't have a problem with what you are suggesting. It probably makes sense to divorce evolution from religion in this way. And, as I stated, it would be foolish to say we KNOW ID is wrong. It's clear that epistemologically, it impossible to totally rule out a religious (ie, divine being) rather than a scientific (ie, natural) explanation of life in the same way that we can't know for sure whether or not reincarnation exists.

But this discussion arises in the context of a movement to teach Intelligent Design as an alternative to evolution as as SCIENTIFIC theory. All I'm saying is that if you are going to teach science, teach science. Evolution is THE scientific theory that is currently accepted as explaining the development (not necessarily the origins of) life on earth. Could it be wrong? Sure, in the same way that previous theories have been proven wrong. But Intelligent Design is something else than a scientific theory.

Saying something is POSSIBLE is different than saying it is likely. You mention dark matter and how it is possible that it corresponds to Hindu metaphysic. Yes, it is possible, but the history of science suggests that it is far more likely that there is a natural explanation. Many things that were once mysterious and seemingly metaphysical have now been explained naturally.

Posted by: Marc at September 2, 2005 09:34 AM

First off, let me just say that we are in total agreement that ID should NOT be taught in schools and should not be until, if ever, it has widely accepted empirical validitation.

Let me now tackle the supernatural vs. natural question you raised.

I understand your basic point that once we believed in rain gods and now we don't, and I agree that science has relegated a lot of superstition to the trashcan of human thought, but my concern is that you're using this to rule out all theories which might appear metaphysical in nature. As such, I am not defending ID per se, but some distant relative that may be accepted in the future.

See Marc, you're begging the question. If you define anything discoverable by science as natural, then by definition we will never discover anything supernatural. But if you define supernatural as meaning something really weird which conflicts with our current understanding of natural law, then really the question of whether science will ever discover something supernatural is merely equivalent to the question of whether science has discovered most of the important laws, and just needs to fill in the details.

Newton's theory of gravitation was considered "mystical nonsense" at the time because it invoked action-at-a-distance. And I'm sure to the medieval mind, cell phones would be mystical nonsense. My point is that the things countenanced by modern physics would be considered "mystical nonsense" by an earlier generation.

All I'm leaving open is the possibility that we may yet have another revolution in science and that this revolution may occur in the life sciences. And that these theories may include ideas and theoretical posits that to this generation would be considered "supernatural."

That was my point about Hindu metaphysics. Western metaphysics often defines spirit as something totally immeasurable: if that's the case, certainly you'll never detect it. In other systems, what is spiritual and what is material are merely terms of degree. If right now we can infer the presence of elementary particles that we can neither hear, see, smell, touch or taste, why could we not detect still further insubstantial entitities? And if the difference between spiritual and material are merely terms of degree, it seems reasonable to think that maybe we already have encountered some of the things Hindu metaphysicians have discussed. See for instance, the Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra.

To me, there are not two realities: one which we can measure and one which we never will. Rather, there is one reality, and over the long haul we will eventually be able to measure or least detect the influences of it all.

The point that natural science has not yet encountered anything supernatural is belied by the really exotic stuff we have encountered. And besides, science is so very young. Just because we haven't discovered anything really crazy in a few centuries of exploration doesn't mean we never will. At this point, it might even make more sense to predict even weirder things given science's recent history.

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Centerfield

A Weblog of Centrist Voices in American Politics

August 31, 2005

Misrepresenting liberalism: How the IDers got it (and still get it) wrong