I won't try to speak for all conservatives, but for me the issue is that I am increasingly suspicious of scientists. Why should I have grown suspicious of some of them? Well:
Mr. Lieberman, a professor of human evolutionary biology, was among those who publicly defended New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to ban the sale of sugared soft drinks in cups larger than 16 ounces. ...
“We have evolved,” the professor concluded his piece, “to need coercion.”
Ah, we have the New Scientific Man.
I object to the color of science being used to justify what proponents can't argue for on policy grounds. The left declares something as "science" which rules out all disagreement on their proposed actions.
As I've said many times before, even if science can establish that global temperatures have increased over a long enough period to be meaningful and even if science can establish we caused the significant temperatures to rise and even if science can establish that overall rising temperatures are bad rather than neutral or good, the solutions that governments and people should pursue to correct that actual, man-caused problem is still a matter for debate rather than simply being a matter of science that is settled.
Remember, communists liked to pretend that their brand of government was science-based, resting on the New Soviet Man. And this thinking, translated into policies, had an effect on people:
The lack of individual responsibility is a product of decades of living under limited freedom. People get used to oppression. This has always happened with totalitarian regimes. I remember, I was greatly surprised to meet people with a similar mentality in East Germany, a country that has always been very different from Russia. This happened during the unification of the East and West Germany. I saw fright in the eyes of the East Germans, the same reaction as I see here in Russia – people do not know what to do. There is a psychological term for this – the acquired helplessness syndrome. The syndrome is usually manifested in social pessimism and lack of self-confidence. The acquired helplessness syndrome is the main feature of Soviet mentality and unfortunately it is prevalent among senior citizens.
If we're lucky, would-be autocrats have evolved to need helpless subjects because they are incapable of running our lives without our cooperation.
Are scientists really content to let a vanguard of the proletariate turn their entire profession into one identified as just another liberal interest group that has concluded that only coercion can get people to follow their lead? Does science survive such scientists?
