Carrie McLaren of Stay Free magazine had a self-described “rant” about Blink, the new book by science writer Malcolm Gladwell. I’ll give Carrie’s comments below, but my interest here isn’t so much in Gladwell’s book (which seems really cool) or Carrie’s specific comments (which are very thought-provoking, and she also points to this clarifying discussion by Gladwell and James Surowecki in Slate magazine).
Political ideology and attitudes toward technology
Right now, though, I’m more interested in what these exchanges reveal about the intersections of political ideology and attitudes toward technology. Historically, I think of technology as being on the side of liberals or leftists (as compared with conservatives who would want to stick with the old ways). Technology = “the Enlightenment” = leftism, desire for change, etc. Even into the 20th century, I’d see this connection, with big Soviet steel factories and New Deal dams. But then, in the 1960s and 1970s?, it seems to me there was a flip, in which technology is associated with atomic bombs, nuclear power, and other things that are more popular on the right than on the left. The environmentalist left has been more skepical about technological solutions. In another area of scientific debate, right-leaning scientists have embraced sociobiology and related ideas of bringing genetics into social policy.
But…perhaps recently things have switched back? In battles over the teaching of evolution, it is the liberals who are defending the scientific method and conservatives who are holding back, wanting to respect local culture rather than scientific universals. Similarly with carbon dioxide and climate change.
But, again, I’m not trying here to argue the merits of any of these issues but rather to ask whether it is almost a visceral thing, at any point in time, with one’s political allegiances being associated with a view of science.
Is Gladwell’s argument inherently anti-rational? Is anti-rationality conservative?
This is what I saw in Carrie’s posting on Gladwell. She was irritated by his use of scientific studies to support a sort of irrationalism–a favoring of quick judgments instead of more reasoned analyses. From this perspective, Gladwell’s apparent advocacy of unconscious decisions is a form of conservatism. (His position seems more nuanced to me, at least as evidenced in the Slate interview–where he suggests sending police out individually instead of in pairs so they won’t be emboldened to overreact–but perhaps Carrie’s take on it is correct in the sense that she is addressing the larger message of the book as it is perceived by the general public, rather than any specific attitudes of Gladwell.)
Rationality and ideology
As a larger issue, in the social sciences of recent decades, I think of belief in rationality and “rational choice modeling” as conservative, both in the sense that many of the researchers in this area are politically conservative and in the sense that rationality is somehow associated with “cold-hearted” or conservative attitudes on cost-benefit analyses. But at the same time, quantitative empirical work has been associated with left-leaning views–think of Brown v. Board of Education, or studies of income and health disparities. There’s a tension here, because in the social sciences, the people who can understand the technical details of empirical statistical work are the ones who can understand rational choice modeling (and vice versa). So I see all this stuff and keep getting bounced back and forth.
(I’m sure lots has been written about this–these ideas are related to a lot of stuff that Albert Hirschman has written on–and I’d appreciate relevant references, of course. Especially to empirical studies on the topic.) Continue reading →