More Chris Mooney Weirdness
Posted on May 13th, 2008 by blue collar scientistI have to admit that I don’t understand Chris Mooney or the Framists at all anymore.
Michael Gerson has written an op-ed in the Washington Post, denying that there has been a Republican war on science. This, obviously, is partially a response to Chris Mooney’s book, The Republican War on Science. So you’d expect Mooney to have something to say.
That expectation has been fulfilled. Mooney’s reaction? Have a look - first he briefly enumerates the ways in which the op-ed is a straw man and doesn’t actually have anything to do with the subject of his book, and then he concludes with:
In short, Gerson’s oped is a joke. No need for debunking, just laughing.
Ok, Chris. I’m totally behind you in this. Laugh at the guy - that’s the kind of response he deserves.
What I don’t get is why we can’t laugh at antiscience extremists who deny evolution (but still take medicine when they get sick), when their arguments have nothing to do with evolutionary theory, when they brazenly lie to make their points, when what they say attacks a straw man. I don’t get why those silly people need to be treated with special condescension, gentle kindness, and a widespread pulling of the punches, while Gerson, who is just like them, should be laughed at.
I guess when you are a big-time communications expert, when you tour the country giving allegedly highly successful lectures to packed audiences, when you have such stature that you get to tell people like Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers to go shut the **** up, you get to decide for yourself how the rules of the game are applied.
Or could it be that when an antiscience boob like Gerson attacks something that Mooney actually cares about, even Mooney sees the value and effectiveness of ridicule?
Tags: Chris Mooney, communications, frame, framing, framist, Michael Gerson, republican war on science, war on science
May 13th, 2008 at 6:11 am
Let’s be fair about this. It wasn’t Mr. Mooney who suggested that Dawkins, et all shut up. It was His pal, Prof. Nisbet. Mr. Mooney has since stated that he is not in accord with Prof. Nisbets’ suggestion.
May 13th, 2008 at 3:09 pm
SLC, thanks for bringing this up to date. Do you have a link that establishes Mooney’s revised opinion?
I say “revised” because, although I know perfectly well it was Nisbet who made the statement, for a week or two afterwards Mooney was his staunch defender. After I’d had quite enough of that, I quit reading his blog, so it is certainly possible he’s clarified or changed his opinion. I couldn’t find anything by quickly scanning through a few weeks of entries, but if someone posts a link, I’ll revise the post.
May 14th, 2008 at 2:26 am
I agree that Mooney seemed to very strongly defend Nisbet, to the point of repeatedly asserting that Nisbet’s key points were true and that PZ and Dawkins were harmful to science communication. It gave the appearance that Mooney had irrevocably hitched his wagon to Nisbet’s train (shall we call it the Templeton Prize Express?), and it would surprise me to find that Mooney suddenly disagrees with Nisbet over such a short time.
Whatever the case, if you’ve been following BCS’ treatment of framing, the central point is this: The framists offer no constructive or consistent advice to science communicators. That’s what we see here.
I’d say BCS is doing as much as Mooney is to communicate science, given BCS’ school activities; I’d say he has a damn good technical education about communications, and having seen him work, I’d say he does an outstanding job communicating science to sometimes-hostile audiences. But that doesn’t matter to the framists; to them, everyone else is just doing it wrong, and they lord their supposed expert status over everyone else so they can attack people doing good work. But they never give useful advice, and don’t seem to say anything consistent about how to do the job that BCS is doing very well. It’s all just “doing it that way is wrong,” seemingly never do we hear “here’s an effective way to communicate this point: …..
That point remains. Mooney has said don’t ridicule ridiculous people; here he says ridicule them. Science communicators would be better off if he did more thinking and less talking for a while.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:08 am
I was not able to find the post in question. However, I distinctly recall that Mr. Mooney definitely stated that he did not agree with Prof. Nisbets’ statement that Dawkins and Myers should shut up.
May 14th, 2008 at 9:01 am
Does it bother anybody that the Framists seem to have the ear of large pro-science organizations, as witnessed for example by the AAAS panel, “Communicating Science in a Religious America”? My immediate reaction to that was much the same as P-Zed’s; might Framism be a corrupting influence, I worried, reducing the regard a scientific organization holds for the truth? Or, is it all just the natural activities of “communication experts”, who spend their time organizing panels and giving speeches while their critics — biologists, physicists, educators — are busy doing their own work, their noses to their own grindstones?
Ironically, it was Randy Olson who made the snarky remark,
Is this where the Framists’ antics will naturally lead — panel discussions of people sitting around agreeing with each other, NAS books which take the same conciliatory tone they already do, and no real change?