Red Queen Politics

by digby

There’s a lot of discussion today about Michael Chertoff’s “gut feeling” that we are going to have a terrorist attack this summer and rightly so. This is particularly true in light of this article I talked about the other day. It’s one thing for Uncle Dick to manipulate lame Duck Junior into thinking he made his own decisions with his gut, it’s quite another for people like the Homeland Security Czar to be fear-mongering with his at this late date. “Gut feeling” can sometimes be a heuristic device for making complicated assessments of other people based on a complex set of subliminal observations, but when it comes to assessing something like terrorist threats, it’s pretty much complete horseshit:

Gut instinct isn’t science
If it were, the world really would be flat, wouldn’t it?

HERE’S A PARADOX: Science is our best way of deciphering the complexities of the natural world. It is useful, consistent and, despite the claims of fundamentalists — religious or postmodern — true. Yet the insights of science are often counterintuitive, frequently lacking what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness.”

[…]

But such gut thinking poses another set of dangers to science. All too often, it bumps into scientific truth, and when it does, it tends to win — at least in the short term. Ironically, much of the time, scientific findings don’t seem immediately logical; if they were, we probably wouldn’t need its laborious “method” of theory building and empirical hypothesis testing for confirmation. We’d simply know.

After all, the sun moves through our sky, but it is the Earth that is going around the sun. Our planet is round, even though it sure feels flat under our feet as we walk. The microbial theory of disease only prevailed because Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch and other scientists finally marshaled enough irrefutable evidence to overwhelm the alternative perspective: that things too small to be seen with the naked eye couldn’t possibly exist or have any effect on us.

[…]

The good news is that over time, actual truth wins out. Only scientifically illiterate troglodytes deny the microbial theory of disease, or the reality of atoms, or of evolution. Still, scientists face a constant struggle, a kind of Red Queen dilemma. Recall the scene in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass,” in which Alice and the Queen run vigorously but get nowhere. The Queen explains, “Here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

Science, bless its innovative soul, constantly reveals new realities. Many of them — global warming, nuclear weapons, overpopulation, threats to biodiversity — are pregnant with immense risk. Others, like genomics or stem cell research, offer great opportunity. But nearly all are freighted with a lack of truthiness.

And so our intellectual race with the Red Queen continues. Evolution did not equip Homo sapiens with ready access to insights that transcend our personal experience. But somehow, we’d better get over our stubborn bias toward “thinking” with our gut, which is to say, not thinking at all. And that’s the truth.

We’ve had an awful lot of Red Queen politics these last few years haven’t we? Just about everyone had a strong gut feeling that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. They know in their gut that those prisoners down in Gitmo are all guilty and that Scooter couldn’t have possibly broken the law. Their gut was screaming that Iraq would be a cakewalk and all the sectarian strife that was predicted was just plain wrong. Their gut still tells them today that bin Laden will surrender if we just kick enough ass and show we can’t be pushed around.

I think it’s terribly important for a successful politician to have excellent political instincts and I appreciate what they bring to the party. But thinking is done with the brain not the gut and we desperately need some leaders who think. All this reliance on gut feeling has given the whole planet a massive case of indigestion.

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