As French Finance Min­is­ter Chris­tine Lagarde tells the Nation­al Assem­bly and the French peo­ple “Enough think­ing, already,” and call­ing on them to work hard­er, not smarter, we find the Amer­i­can anti-intel­lec­tu­al par­ty warm­ing up. Mitt Rom­ney told a crowd:

Sen­a­tor Oba­ma is wrong if he thinks sci­ence-based sex edu­ca­tion has any place in kindergarten.

Rick Perl­stein com­ments:

He’s refer­ring to a quote from Oba­ma: “ ‘But it’s the right thing to do, to pro­vide age-appro­pri­ate sex edu­ca­tion, sci­ence-based sex edu­ca­tion in schools.’ ” But note how Rom­ney is care­ful to repeat the phrase “sci­ence-based.” I sus­pect he’s see­ing polit­i­cal advan­tage in fact that Barack frames sci­ence as an inher­ent­ly a good thing. It lets him, Rom­ney, move pan­der­ing to con­ser­v­a­tives to the next, and most hor­ri­fy­ing, lev­el: fram­ing sci­ence as inher­ent­ly a bad thing.

Not claim­ing “sound sci­ence” as the alter­na­tive to “junk science”–the pre­vi­ous stage of the big con. Just “sci­ence.”

As in: sci­ence = bad.

My first incli­na­tion was to change that to “sci­ence == bad,” a pro­gram­mer’s joke about the dif­fer­ence between test­ing for equal­i­ty (which uses “==”) and set­ting a val­ue (“=”). Then it occurred to me that Perl­stein’s point is that Rom­ney is not just ask­ing peo­ple to eval­u­ate whether sci­ence is bad, he is try­ing to assign his val­ues. If any­thing, he bad­ly wants peo­ple to avoid test­ing that equiv­a­lence, since peo­ple tend to like sci­ence, or at least the tech­nolo­gies it produces. 

Perl­stein does err in skip­ping a gen­er­a­tion of the anti-sci­ence meme. It start­ed out with tobac­co com­pa­nies claim­ing that there was no “sound sci­ence” tying can­cer to their prod­uct, an art­ful phras­ing that let them and their ide­o­log­i­cal allies in oth­er pol­lut­ing indus­tries rede­fine “sound sci­ence” to mean “sci­ence we agree with.” 

More recent­ly, the sci­ence fic­tion author Michael Crich­ton has launched an attack on the sci­ence behind glob­al warm­ing, claim­ing that “con­sen­sus sci­ence” is a bad thing (“I regard con­sen­sus sci­ence as an extreme­ly per­ni­cious devel­op­ment … When­ev­er you hear the con­sen­sus of sci­en­tists agrees on some­thing or oth­er, reach for your wal­let, because you’re being had.”) Not sur­pris­ing­ly, cre­ation­ists have jumped on that par­tic­u­lar bandwagon.

It’s dif­fi­cult to pre­cise­ly iden­ti­fy why con­sen­sus per se should be objec­tion­able. What should we pre­fer to con­sen­sus? In a world where peo­ple can still be found who claim the earth is flat, we sure­ly can’t demand una­nim­i­ty. Mere majori­ties are unsat­is­fy­ing, since every diver­gent view­point pass­es through some peri­od of minor­i­ty sta­tus. Con­sen­sus means super­ma­jor­i­ty sup­port, and results from the inter­play of ideas. Once it exists, we would be fools to assume that most rel­e­vant experts are wrong. They might be, but as a heuris­tic for non­ex­perts, it’s bet­ter than the alternatives.