Arrival and Departure

Folks like my Loyal Reader who know me of old may doubt that the school I send my kids to is really as much of a hippie alternative school as I like to make it out to be. Really, now, would a church-going former college republican let a bunch of hippies get their dirty fingers on his kids? Oh, yeah? Well, check out this official message we got from the school about avoiding the flu. After telling kids to wash their hands and don't touch their mouth, it goes on to say:

Clean your nostrils at least once every day with warm water. Not everybody might be good at Jela Neti or Sutra Neti (very good Yoga asanas to clean nasal cavities), but blowing the nose hard once a day and swabbing both nostrils with cotton buds dipped in warm salt water is very effective in bringing down viral population.

Ummm. Okay. I'll be sure to work on that. Yeah.

One of my co-authors is worried about how we should define religion. I'm more sanguine about it--to me, religion is like pornography, I know it when I see it. This news from Britain, though, makes me wonder.

In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".

The decision regards Tim Nicholson, former head of sustainability at property firm Grainger plc, who claims he was made redundant in July 2008 due to his "philosophical belief about climate change and the environment".

John Bowers QC, representing Grainger, had argued that adherence to climate change theory was "a scientific view rather than a philosophical one", because "philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof."

The easy response would be to roll my eyes and agree that this case demonstrates exactly what Global Warming skeptics have been saying all along. Plenty of people do believe in Global Warming in the same sense as I believe in God, regardless of the science. But that wouldn't be fair to Nicholson, who argues that

Belief in man-made climate change is not a new religion, it is a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values and is underlined by the overwhelming scientific evidence."

This changes the question from "is GW a religion?" to "what is distinctive about religion that makes us assign it special protections?" Western societies have spent bloody centuries working through the idea that individual's beliefs about their eternal souls need autonomy from state decisions. Nicholson argues that if an individual's beliefs are supported by "overwhelming scientific evidence" then those beliefs deserve autonomy from state decisions too.

On the surface, this seems guilty of a common fallacy among my students--the idea that a scientific consensus about physical facts unambiguously implies a single policy response. As I see it, the flaw in Nicholson's argument is the assumption that because he believes in a set of facts (for the sake of argument, let's grant that GW is a scientific fact), he personally should have the right to decide policy responses, not the democratically elected government. The problem with this technocratic belief is that there are always a variety of ways for society to react to problems. Even setting aside the inevitable uncertainty about future policy impacts, all government policies have winners and losers, just like all choices have tradeoffs. The role of government is to make decisions about who should win, who should lose, and (hopefully) how to alleviate the losers' pain.

I think there's another danger here. We can protect religious beliefs because they are weak--modern democratic discourse frowns on individuals who say the government should do something because "I believe it." Scientific evidence, on the other hand, already has a special place in modern discourse, as witnessed by the proliferation of "research says..." articles in the news. Giving scientifically-derived beliefs special protection under the law gives them even more leverage to drive out other types of reasoning. This isn't an argument against science, it's an argument against people who assume that knowledge of the physical world has easily understood implications for how social actors should react. Those of us who study politics know that the implications are never clear, and unpleasant and unintended consequences are always an issue.