Conservatism has had a long reputation as being the force of “anti-science.” According to liberals, this is a definitive trait of the Right, even if history shows that it is merely a descriptor. The difference between the two is made evident when the age makes it possible for someone to both hold to their conservative principles and to be pro-science.

We all know that this has occurred from time to time. The liberal smearmonger has a fallback when countered with the objection that there have been many ages when conservatives have been pro- science: the notation that more than a few conservatives have been friendly with the works of Herbert Spencer and “thus” are “Social Darwinist.”

The same thing happens when any other conservative faction which has been explicitly pro-science is brought up. If you mention Henry Lamb’ s work promoting science against green frenzy, you’re called a “tool of the polluters.” The same mindblank kicks in when bringing up: Peter Huber’s work opposing junk science in the courts; any pro-science initiative that has the Department of Defense tied in; (speaking of which,) Barry Goldwater Sr.’s unapologetic support of the space program, along with almost every conservative Republican that’s Heinleinian in thrust; the libertarians’ continual attempt to liberate the pharmaceutical industry from FDA red tape; and such forth. I’m sure you can match the standard liberal mindblank to any of these living or recently-deceased examples refuting the stereotype of conservatives as foes of science.

Then how did the smear stick? Because there is an effectively “anti-science” element in conservatism – that’s a secondary product of conservatism’s basic humanism.

No wonder the conservative criticisms of science fade in and out according to the winds of the time. The principle behind this ebb and flow is: does science square with the common sense of the average Joe or does it violate that horse sense?

The times when science jibes with plain thinking is when science becomes a calling and conservatism becomes basically pro-science. When the currents of the age incline the findings of science to be seemingly contradictory of plain thinking, then science becomes (perhaps covertly) elitist and conservatism becomes skeptical of the claims of science, and perhaps of even rationality itself.

This, believe it or not, is exactly what the liberals do when the new findings of science don’t go their way: just look at the squabble which accompanied the release of The Bell Curve, to take a recent example. The demarcation point between liberalism’s and conservatism’s reactions to “bad science” is that conservatives become religious – “mystical” - when science seems opposed to them and their goals, and liberals become moralizing.

(In fact, every political movement has an anti- science side of this sort, as a history of any of them shows. This very much includes movements, such as communism, that hold themselves up as the “Science Party”: remember Lysenkoism and the later anti-rationalism of what used to be Lord Bertrand Russell’s pacifist movement?)

The above principle explains the supposedly ineradicable anti-reason bias in conservative Roman Catholicism. Everyone reading this knows, I am sure, that the Roman Catholic Church was branded “anti-Enlightenment” successfully in the eighteenth century. What you probably don’t know is that the justification for such a characterization is nothing more than the Vatican’s ease in assuming that role. This criterion might be good enough to establish truth for a Kantian, but those who hew to a different standard of judging truth need a sounder basis for such a labeling.

Let me, through inference, fill in a few blanks.

Seventeenth century physics was as much of a shaky slapped-together construct as twentieth- century econometrics was. Until Newton came along, there were several competing theories claiming to be definitive physics; one of them was Descartes’. The reason why the Vatican is assumed to be “anti-physics” was because the sponsor of Newtonian physics in France was Voltaire, who was a well-known anti-clerical. This is of course well-known; what is less well- known is that the Vatican never put Newton’s works on the Index of Forbidden Books; the only physicists that ever got treated that way, from the listings I have searched, were Galileo and Copernicus.

So Voltaire, despite his hostility to the Roman Catholic Church as a social institution in France, could not be judged to be an anti- clerical when fighting this battle.

Let’s take another look at the science of the time when the Vatican was held to be “anti- reason,” focusing upon chemistry. Back during Voltaire’s time, it was held that all flammable materials contained a substance called “phlogiston”, which, it was later deduced, was a substance which had to have a weight of less than zero – a negative weight. This was considered the best that chemistry had to offer back then – even if this deduced property of phlogiston seemed to collide with the findings of physics concerning gravity. The most obvious point of doubt was the sun: look at how much phlogiston that ball of fire had to have! Where was the repulsive force which accompanied the negative weight of the phlogiston? Newton’s calculations of the earth’s orbit didn’t assume any phlogiston at all.

Chances are, this was talked around at the time by saying that the sun’s real weight was net of its phlogiston. But it got people wondering about how the weight of the sun was increasing as its fire consumed the phlogiston within.

As far as mathematics was concerned, the most glamorous field was probability, thanks to its association with the gaming table. One of the well-known paradoxes of probability was Chevalier de Méré’s paradox. This is how it worked: Assume a dice game where the roller rolls a single die 4 times. If a six comes up once, he wins. Now assume a similar game where two dice are rolled 24 times. If the roller gets boxcars once in the 24 rolls, he wins. What are the odds of the roller winning for each game?

No, they are not the same. The real odds, as solved by the mathematician Blaise Pascal, are: for the first game, the roller has a 51.7% chance of winning. For the second, the roller has a 49.1% chance of winning. So, if both games feature even odds, the player should stick with the first game and avoid the second.

The math behind this was almost unimaginably complex at the time. When you add the phlogiston theory of chemistry, whose underlying theory was counter-intuitive as hell, and factor in usual human opportunism, and recall or see how the clothes of relativity theory and quantum mechanics were borrowed during the last century (Atlas Shrugged should be enough of a starter source), and you have a picture of good- hearted, if simple, people being gulled all over the place by sophisticated dreamers and con men.

The scientific sort has a standard answer to this: bad science is eventually replaced by good science. Even if “eventually” seems to take a very long time.

Such an attitude really has to be described as somewhat callous.

I have dealt with only one period of history directly, and a more recent one indirectly, but the argument above can be matched to any period of time when conservatism can be successfully described as “anti-scientific.” I might suggest, as an informed opinion, that the above historical excursion, rooted in speculation based upon inference from a more well-known period, provides adequate reason to assume that the prevalence of “mystical conservatives” = a surfeit of “socially apatheic scientists” in one form or another.

With the corresponding afterthought that conservatism as a whole shifts from “anti- science” to “pro-science” when prominent scientists, such as Dixy Lee Ray, tell their colleagues in print that they’re too effete to stomp down on opportunists borrowing their names and using their findings, sloppily, as a pretext for a rip-off of one sort or another. That brought conservatives into the defenders-of- science ranks, starting in the 1970s.