Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [40]
My aim here, however, is not to critique climate change policy per se. What I want to try to understand is why one of the centerpieces of the progressive liberal agenda in the United States over the past decade or more presents itself as a sort of irony-free “Modest Proposal” — an effort to address a real problem in a way that is fundamentally antipathetic to the precepts of modern American political liberalism.
2.
I take for my definition of American political liberalism the somewhat inchoate family of ideas that understands government action as appropriately aimed at enhancing economic and social equity, that is skeptical the marketplace can sufficiently advance social equity and justice on its own, and is optimistic about the potential for social progress as a result of government action. In total, I would therefore take it as a fundamental premise of American liberalism that policies pursued through the erosion of economic and social equity are repugnant and anathema.
How then did liberalism become associated with — and, to some extent, obsessed with — policies whose most obvious direct effects would be to undermine economic and social equity? Here I focus on two related causes. The first is the tyrannical role that scientific rationality has come to play in the liberal imagination and agenda. Second is the alienation of the liberal agenda from technological approaches to social problems.
The value of science as an embodiment of rational thought and action has been central to the American cultural identity since the nation’s inception. Yet to the nation’s founders, this value was abstract: a knowledge of science helped to cultivate general habits of rational thought that were deemed necessary for the wise governance of democratic society.4 Today we think about science much more concretely, not simply as a habit of mind, but as a source of facts and knowledge that can bring problems to light and tell us how to go about solving them.
This more practical view of science in society did not, however, gain much relevance until the early 20th century, when the technical complexity of the world increasingly seemed to demand specialized expertise for its management, and when developments in social and biological sciences seemed to offer important insights for guiding human action. As Walter Lippmann observed in 1922, the “theory of universal competence” was no longer up to the task of providing the necessary wisdom for governing the “Great Society [that] had grown furiously and to colossal dimensions by the application of technical knowledge…. It could not be governed, men began to discover, by men who thought deductively about rights and wrongs.” Now it required “experts who were trained, or had trained themselves, to make parts of this Great Society intelligible to those who manage it.”5
For any ideological perspective that saw government as at least partly in the business of actively making society better, science in this diagnostic and advisory mode became a powerful ally. And thus science, enlisted as a tool for defining and advancing political agendas, has had a particular and natural allure for modern American liberalism dating back to its early 20th century variants.
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If liberals have erred — morally as well as politically — in placing too much reliance on science as a political polestar, their even greater error, again both moral and political, has been their gradual alienation since World War II from the promise of technological change to effectively addressing social problems. These two tendencies, as we shall see, are closely related.
There are, of course, plenty of good reasons to be worried about technology and suspicious of the utopian claims of technology promoters. During