Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, August 07, 2010

Nevertheless, Chris Mooney Is Not Loony

I want to add that I have been a reader and a fan of Chris Mooney's work for years -- and I have often directed people to writings of his, on this blog and in my teaching.

I have read three of his books, The Republican War on Science, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens our Future and I learned quite a lot from all of them and recommend them all.

My disapproval of Mooney's paean to "geo-engineering" is far from a conspiracy theory about stealthy villains among whom I would number Mooney with eeeevil futurologists, but more like the proposal of a correlation between a kind of discourse and its institutional promotion by those who benefit from it materially.

I would point to the emergence and funding of academic economics Departments and discourse in America as the ideological promulgation of "laissez faire" by Gilded Age incumbent-elites in response to the popular writings of Henry George, and then the later anti-Keynesian "freshwater" institutionalization of discredited market (neo-liberal and libertarian) economics by big business Republicanism in the aftermath of the New Deal as analogous historical cases to the present ongoing effort to invest hyperbolic futurological discourses with academic respectability in the face of the threats of p2p-formations and planetary politics to corporate-militarist incumbent-elites in the present.

To the extent that I am right to locate Mooney in the American Democratic center-left and in pro-scientific, pro-critical thinking, pro-access-to-knowledge politics, he is far more an ally of mine than an opponent.

I for one would hesitate to affiliate with the oddball futurological site in which his piece was published -- take a look at its leaders, with their celebrations of Alan Greenspan and Stewart Brand and corporate CEOs and "innovation!" and all their glib pseudo-intellectual neoligistic jazz-riffs on "techonomists" and their "new philosophy of progress" (futurologists love to pretend that flinging self-congratulatory vacuities around and barking about The Next Big Thing is somehow the same thing as doing philosophy rather than just a kind of manic mulch of advertising hype and aggressive self-promotional and New Age psychology) -- but it is also easy to see how one might drift into these strange social milieux and come to mistake charlatans for reasonable people simply through endless exposure to them all the time.

It's hard to live in the Bay Area as a geek concerned about technoscience questions -- as I am -- without being confronted by lots of earnest appealing oddballs deeply invested in futurological foolishness. That doesn't make it right, though, or any less dangerous.

For the reasons why I say so, I recommend this and this and this and this.

3 comments:

Athena Andreadis said...

I have zero respect for Mooney. He's part of the "framing" crowd, along with Nisbet, who think that scientists should be silent and let journalists or "futurists" talk to laypeople on their behalf. He also tried to discredit "aggressive atheists" (whatever they might be) by blatantly dishonest methods on his blog. As far as I can make out, he is out to become a celebrity. All else is a very distant second.

Dale Carrico said...

I'm not sure about the dishonest anti-atheism you mention, that doesn't seem like something I would be particularly pleased about, especially given my own honest atheism, but, as I said, I did read and enjoy his books -- The Republican War on Science was especially timely and welcome when it arrived. As a rhetorician I respect at least some of what gets described as framing -- though I have a real measure of irritation with framing-impresario George Lakoff, who seems forever to be pretending Aristotle didn't beat him to his best insights by millennia. But when you say Mooney wants scientists to be silent are you exaggerating for effect? I mean, is he really just claiming that the skills that enable scientific discovery are often different from the skills to communicate the significance of those discoveries to citizens, which is obviously true -- not all scientists write as clearly as you do, for instance -- or is he really saying science should leave the deliberation to journalists and futurists as you say? I mean, if he really says the latter, I am a bit flabbergasted by such a foolish proposal. Looks like I need to spend an afternoon with the Google and do some reading up...

Athena Andreadis said...

While you're reading up, be sure to check the facts of the "Tom Johnson" affair, in which Mooney elevated a comment about "rude atheists screaming at religious people in a conference" to a post without bothering to establish the bona fides of the source. The source proved to have fabricated the entire thing and wrought such havoc in that part of the bloggosphere that his actions triggered a formal investigation in his university when the lies finally caught up with him.

Mooney stonewalled to the very last, and finally published a very tepid acknowledgement of the whole thing after dragging his feet interminably and insisting that he had, too, "checked the source" (no independent verification, only "Johnson's" say-so) and also that "it could have been true, just this one instance wasn't". Which shows you that he failed even basic journalistic standards, because that particular post happened to jibe with his dislike of "militant" atheists (who also panned his latest book, which contains a whole chapter attacking them by name).