A FEW YEARS AGO, I READ the popular, and fascinating, book Freakonomics. As you may or may not recall, one chapter in that book caused a load of fuss. It was a chapter about the effects of Roe v. Wade on the crime rate.
The inherent danger in that approach is that our political positions become less and less grounded in reality, until they are completely arbitrary.
The authors presented a fairly compelling statistical argument that the drop in crime in the nineties was largely the result of the fact that women had had access to abortions in the early seventies.
Their explanation (not their evidence) was primarily that unwanted children tend to have the kind of childhoods which can lead to crime, and that one result of Roe was that there were fewer unwanted children in the country.
They were predictably pilloried by the right, who saw this as more evidence in favor of choice.
But when I mentioned their results to a liberal friend, he immediately rejected the research out of hand as well.
I asked why.
He replied that it was the kind of thinking which could lead to genocide.
Both fears are easy enough to understand, but in each case the attackers failed to distinguish, in Steven Levitt's words, between
...identifying a relationship between social phenomena and endorsing such a relationship. When a scientist presents evidence that global warming is occurring, it does not mean that he or she favors global warming, but merely that the scientist believes such a phenomenon exists. That is precisely our position with respect to the link between abortion and crime: We are not arguing that such a relationship is good or bad, merely that it appears to exist.
That is, their critics failed to distinguish between language as a tool for sharing knowledge and gaining understanding, on the one hand, and language as a tool for manipulation on the other. Both liberals and conservatives rejected scientific language for political reasons.
The inherent danger in that approach is that our political positions become less and less grounded in reality, until they are completely arbitrary.
It's politically expedient to distort history (whether you're a white male in America, or a member of the communist party in Russia) so the facts are discarded.
It's more convincing to argue that children have a right to pray in school than that teachers have a right to make them pray, so the real issue is never discussed.
That is exactly what happened with Pat Buchanan's racist diatribe. He is so frightened of minorities, so afraid that his group—white men—will be supplanted from their place of power, so on the defensive that all he can do is defend.
He has no time or energy for the niceties of accuracy or reasoning, his entire focus is on the effect of his arguments—both on his audience, but perhaps even more so on himself.
At his center, he must suspect that he is wrong, and this fear forces him to redouble his efforts to convince himself that he is right.
So the manipulative use of language wins out, and because he is deceiving himself as well, he doesn't even notice.
Not that manipulative language—even deception—is always a bad thing.
More next time...
