Political Science
For those of you who aren’t aware, Donald Trump just issued a gag order on government scientists, and that should horrify you. Scientists and other employees at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, which, if you didn’t know, is the USDA’s main source of research and information, was recently ordered to “stop releasing any public-facing documents until further notice”; that includes photos, fact sheets, news releases, or social media content. The ban was rescinded a day later due to public outrage, but it didn’t end there.
The National Park Service recently got into trouble after tweeting photos referencing the small crowd at Trump’s inauguration. Trump, of course, threw a tantrum. That in itself was not particularly surprising or harmful, but then the Interior headquarters ordered all agency bureaus to “immediately cease use of government Twitter accounts.” That’s the part that should freak you out.
Most of us have had many a sleepless night pouring over our textbooks desperately trying to figure how the hell photosynthesis works or how to fix a trebuchet or even how to balance an equation. Science has caused many of us grief, but we can all agree that science is vital to our society. Science helps improve our standard of living; it has taught us how to cure diseases, explore the universe, delve deep into our atomic structure and understand what truly makes us human. Science not only allows room for error, but embraces it as the most surefire way of testing our knowledge in the interest of progress. Mistakes, then, are not failures; they’re simply nudges in the right direction. Everything we have today is due to science, and that is why the politicization and censorship of facts is so detrimental to society. This is why you should be outraged.
In my previous post, I questioned why something as well-supported, thoroughly researched, and pressing as the issue of global warming is still treated as a topic up for debate. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, wonderfully summarized how ridiculous the situation is: “It’s not like the floods are only going to hit Democrats and not Republicans or that droughts are going to impact liberal farmers and not conservative ones. In the end, we all will suffer together and in the end, we’ll all have to solve this together.”
When you politicize something as inherently neutral as science, it is detrimental to ourselves and those around us. So no, global warming is not a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese government. No, Democrats are not trying to get rid of jobs in industrial fields. The only thing that environmentalists are trying to do is prevent us from destroying ourselves. Pitting political parties against one another serves no purpose other than to further one’s own political agenda. It benefits a few, but harms all. Furthermore, the censorship of science is essentially the suppression of knowledge. For someone who thrives off of the idea of making America “great” again (as if it ever was), Trump should know that censorship is oppression and hauntingly similar to what took place in the Soviet Union.
It is a combination of politicization and censorship that has led to the level of scientific illiteracy we see today. For a country that prides itself so much on being an intellectual center, how is it that we are so influenced by the petty whims of an immature president? Why do we seem to think that politicians know more about science than academics who have spent their whole lives devoted to that subject? In the next post, I will discuss why we as a nation don’t seem to know any better than to believe whatever political parties tell us. Trump’s attack on science will most likely not end anytime soon, but until then, we can at least attempt to understand the root of the matter.
