In The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon's fictional account of a land in full possession of modern science (or vice versa), Salomon's House is the research institution that controls nature through practically applied experimentation and that supplies a grateful and happy population with the benefits of that control. TIME magazine gives us a couple of examples of how our modern, dispersed Salomon's House has been supplying those benefits. The politics of it, however, requires a bit more unveiling.
Researchers have developed a kind of corn-based plastic ("The Promise and Pitfalls of Bioplastic," May 3, 2010). Your descendants won't find it in landfills a thousand years for now because it turns into corn mush forty days after you bury it.
Regular, petroleum-based plastic doesn't biodegrade. But this year's crop of Earth Day-inspired ads shows plant-based plastics doing just that: an empty SunChips bag fading into the soil, a Paper Mate pen dissolving underground.... Bioplastics could be really good for the environment — the manufacturing process produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than that for petroleum-based plastics, and these biomaterials don't contain an allegedly hormone-disrupting chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), that some regular plastics do. ...
Of the two promising new varieties of bioplastic, one type — dubbed polylactic acid, or PLA — is clear in color and costs manufacturers about 20% more to use than petroleum-based plastic. The other — called polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA — biodegrades more easily but is more than double the price of regular plastic. Both bioplastics are made of fermented corn sugar, and both come with a major benefit: if disposed of properly, they won't stick around in landfills for thousands of years.
Making a plastic pen from corn is an impressive feat, but the human factor is not as easy to engineer. The environmental advantage depends on people composting their SunChips bag. We don't have much opportunity for that here in the Empire State Building. Even at home, few people have a composting crib. Unless municipalities send around a composting truck to empty out specially colored cans from the foot of people's driveways on designated days of the week, that SunChips bag is going in the regular kitchen trash. So to take fullest advantage of this technological advance, we need a further advance in the administrative state, the socially all-seeing eye that is the other side of Salomon's House.
The conquest of nature necessarily points us, and without pausing for a breath, to the conquest of human nature. If the one is problematic, the other is treacherous at the very least.
The very next story in the print edition of TIME reported on a Tulane University study published in Pediatrics that supposedly proves scientifically beyond any reasonable doubt that spanking children inclines them to violence in their later years ("The Long-term Effects of Spanking"). As this confirms every liberal instinct, the story has been picked up and proclaimed by major news outlets as though they were announcing VE Day (Newsweek, New York Times, CNN). But studying human beings where it involves moral issues is a lot trickier than studying the composition and industrial applications of corn.
The study, led by community-health-sciences professor Catherine Taylor, makes an effort to account for factors that may distort the findings: “a host of issues affecting the mother, such as depression, alcohol and drug use, spousal abuse and even whether she considered abortion while pregnant with the child." Nonetheless, the study compares the behavior of five-year-old children who were spanked from the age of three at least twice a month with children who were not. From what TIME reports, Taylor does not study children at the ages of, say, ten, fourteen, and eighteen who had been spanked throughout the age range when spanking is appropriate. Age 5 is hardly “the long run” for observing the fruit of discipline. Furthermore, she does not distinguish between wise and unwise spanking, i.e., spanking accompanied by age appropriate instruction, and other variables.
CBS gave a more thoughtful report on a 2002 study ("Spanking May Cause Long-Term Harm," June 26, 2002). It included this exposure to the other side of the issue.
Robert Larzelere, a psychology professor at the Nebraska Medical Center, was one of the three experts critiquing Gershoff's findings. He noted that while she found links between spanking and negative behaviors, she did not assert categorically that spanking caused those behaviors. Larzelere, in an interview, said he remains convinced that mild, non-abusive spanking can be an effective reinforcement of nonphysical disciplinary methods, particularly in dealing with defiant 2- to 6-year-olds. He shared concerns about spanking that is too severe or too frequent.
Lloyd de Vries, the CBS reporter, added that Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty who authored the 2002 study, "cautioned that her findings do not imply that all children who are spanked turn out to be aggressive or delinquent. But she contended that corporal punishment, on its own, does not teach children right from wrong and may not deter them from misbehaving when their parents are absent." Obviously.
Here, scientific research is said to have proven that certain methods of nurturing are significantly more likely to produce people of a certain desirable sort (it's not yet an exact science), and other methods are more likely to produce violent, anti-social behavior. Yet the human factor in the process of studying matters of this sort still distorts the conclusions that researchers draw. This must account for the striking discrepancy between common sense and these grand scientific pronouncements. Everyone has observed the difference between the unspanked or cruelly spanked little wretches kicking up a fit in WalMart and the well-behaved, wisely paddled young homeschoolers in the same setting.
Then there's the politics. You know that once "the science is settled," the next step is public policy, i.e., European-style laws that make spanking a criminal offense and grounds for placing your children in government-regulated foster care. Science removes a question from the political realm of judgment to the objective realm of administration. It gets us, as President Obama has said, beyond left and right, Democratic and Republican, and the old disputes of the culture wars into the post-partisan happyland.
But politicians often appeal to science to justify a power grab under the guise of just doing what they're told by the high priests of general revelation whose word is, of course, beyond question. Here are some New York politicians (no surprise there) doing just that ("Zapping NY's Economy," New York Post, April 12, 2010).
At the onset of the Easter weekend -- i.e., when they thought no one would notice -- the eco-apparatchiks at the state Department of Environmental Conservation denied Westchester's Indian Point nuclear power plant a key permit it needs to operate past 2013. DEC decreed that it was using too much water from the Hudson River to cool its two reactors, to the detriment of fish eggs and stuff.
Fish eggs? Forgive us, but we don't care about fish eggs. We care about people -- and jobs. Fact is, Indian Point produces nearly one-third of the electricity consumed in New York City and Westchester. Without it, the entire metro-area economy goes belly-up. And without DEC approval, Indian Point's two reactors can't secure federal operating license renewals when their current ones expire in 2013 and 2015.
[Governor David] Paterson's response? The DEC decision came from "a non-political process" run by "scientists," a spokesman said. "The [executive chamber] isn't going to weigh in on science decisions by agencies." Not even when the "science decisions" imperil the state's economy? Really, doesn't Paterson understand that his job requires "weighing in on" -- indeed, directing -- the decisions taken by the executive branch?
Of course he understands that. And he weighs in and directs only when it's politically useful to do so. Other than that, there's no one here but us enlightened respecters of science.
In Bacon's New Atlantis, the relationship between Salomon's House and the "king" or "state," which are mentioned but never seen, is a murky one. Bacon leaves it that way because as technology enhances human power over the universe, political authority will be sure to use it to enhance its power over all things human, but will veil that power. When the pronouncement of scientific researchers puts a matter beyond discussion, beyond public deliberation, it leaves open the manipulation of such pronouncements for political advantage, either by politicians themselves or by politically motivated scientists.
As we have discovered in the global warming controversy, whenever people try to get quickly past public discussion to public policy with the conversation-stopping phrase "the science is settled," you can be sure that there is more than dispassionate science at issue.
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