From Andrew Sullivan's latest …
Has Ezra Klein lost his mind?
The much-anticipated podcast discussion between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein, though frustrating at times, was nonetheless clarifying in one core respect. Klein doesn’t believe you
can discuss the latest scientific arguments about genetics, environment, and IQ without integrating an account of the historical and political context that surrounds them. That means, for Ezra, that any contemporary discussion must defer to the context of the history of white supremacy, and its nefarious abuse of science, and thereby be deemed guilty of racism until proven innocent. What Harris is insisting on, in contrast, is that the science is the science regardless of history, and you can discuss that separately from a discussion of social policy or the past, and that, in scientific debate, the race and gender and identity of the participants are irrelevant, and only the arguments matter.
This is, in fact, a central question being debated right now in our culture — far beyond the race and IQ debate. Much of the left now holds that structural racism/sexism et al. is so overwhelming that it pollutes the exercise of reason itself.
I sit somewhere on the left's spectrum, probably farther to the left than most. Nevertheless I agree with Sullivan — and Harris — on the absurdity of clouding scientific objectivity with "historical and political context." Honestly derived facts are facts, notwithstanding preceding "structural" power differentials. Being honestly derived — i.e., assuming they are — they are also subject to change, of course, as fresh, countervailing evidence emerges. Changes in scientific opinion are often painful, laborious things, as any reading of physicist and science historian Thomas Kuhn's work reveals. But given honesty of the process, changes indeed come in the now-famous form of "paradigm shifts."
My problem with Sullivan's conspectus, however — again, one I mostly agree with — is the impreciseness of his phrase, "Much of the left now holds …"
How much is much? I certainly agree that historical power differentials and their effects on scientific opinion are taught (rather tediously, insofar as their pedagogical repetition is tedious) in college courses and seminars from what can fairly be called a leftist point of view. But do graduated leftists at large walk about burdened by, and hopelessly affixed to, these teachings? No doubt some do, but "some" do not constitute "much," or the equally troublesome "many." In fact I as well as Sullivan have no percentage whatsoever in mind when we throw around words such as much — and in this case, I suspect much isn't much.
As a leftist, I for one see scientific objectivity shorn of past cultural-historical contexts as no part of the left-right debate. Am I in the leftist minority? Or majority? You got me. And I would have Sullivan, were I to press him on it. Nonetheless the general assumption prevails.