Politics and Facts

When I told Emily that I was writing my previous post on sex ed, she said, "Well, so much for not talking about politics." I made a similar off-hand remark here, as well.

And to some extent, of course, she's right. Teaching sex ed in schools, and to what extent, has definitely become a political issue. But it shouldn't be.

Actually, that's not quite right, either. Here's what I'm trying to get at.

As a country, we've reached a point where basic facts are up for debate, based on your politics. And that's just not healthy. It's insane, actually, in a very real sense.

The world obviously does not change based on your beliefs. We cannot, as a country, function if the people in charge of running the country can't even acknowledge a basic set of facts. It just can't work. (I originally said "agree on" here instead of "acknowledge", but that implies that the facts are negotiable. They are not.)

Whether it's climate change, vaccinations, the economy, evolution, or sex ed, there are basic facts underlying the arguments (I refuse to dignify most of those topics with the term "debate"). Climate change is happening. Vaccinations are safe and effective. Austerity during a recession is empirically self-defeating. Evolution is a real thing. Sex ed... has facts too. (Sorry, I was trying to maintain the parallel construction, but it didn't really work out.) And so on.

As I see it, the job of politics is to decide what we
dowith those facts, not to decide on whether those facts are actually facts or not. We
haveto be able to acknowledge these facts, or everything else is meaningless. How can you debate a proper course of action if you can't even agree on your starting point?

So in the case of sex ed, for example, here's where I see the line. Pushing abstinence-only sex ed because you think it works is anti-factual. That's not politics, that's operating in a different reality. Giving inaccurate information to kids (which really does happen)? Not politics.

The politics comes after we all acknowledge the basic set of facts. What do we do with them? Do we teach them to kids in school or not? Either one is a valid political decision, although you know which one I think is the better decision, both as parents and as a society. I feel like that ought to figure into the political calculus. But either way, it has to start from a basic set of common facts that we can use to make a decision.

Same with creationism, as another example. Teaching it as an alternative explanation for how things came to be because you don't "believe" in evolution? That's not politics, that's anti-science. Acknowledging that evolution is real, but electing to teach creationism anyways? Well, that's cynical as heck, but it's a political decision. Teaching it along with other creation myths? Works for me. Leave it out entirely? Also works for me.

This factual disconnect seems to be underlying a lot of the "political" disagreements you see these days. We as a polity have to decide, every day, what we want to be, in a self-determining sense. And the political process is used to put those decisions into place and enforce them. (Social contracts are probably another post down the road; I'm just trying to skirt around the edges here.)

But how can we make any sort of informed decisions about who and what we want to be, if we can't even agree on what the current state of reality is? We can't, and that's why so many current "political" disagreements (see the list above for starters) seem so intractable: We have groups literally operating from different versions of reality, and deriving positions from there.

Again, insanity.

So how do we fix this? Two things immediately come to mind:

- Knock it off with the anti-science. Seriously, just stop.

Not only is it difficult to run a country when people are actively and openly disparaging science (as we've already discussed), it's difficult to run a technologically advanced civilization which is dependent on, y'know, science.

- Learn to admit when we're wrong, and adapt to new data. A large part of our issues are because people simply won't admit when they've been proven wrong, and adapt their position accordingly.

So, you know, nothing big. Should be able to fix that in a week or two, no problem.

It's worth remembering that agreeing on the facts doesn't necessarily mean that we all have to agree on the policies that deal with those facts. Just as there's more than one way to skin a cat, there's also more than one direction to go with a given set of facts.

It does mean, however, that the policies need to be backed up by the actual facts, though. And that's something we currently struggle with. Like whoa.

Okay, enough of the heavy, preachy posts. The next couple will be lighter, I promise!