The Republican Brain Read Online Free PDF Page B

Attitudes, “Misperceptions, the Media, and the Iraq War,” October 2003. Available online at http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Iraq/IraqMedia_Oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf .
    6 37 percent of authoritarians Marc J. Hetherington and Jonathan D. Weiler, Authoritarianism and Polarization in America Politics , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 45.
    6 stimulus bill didn’t create many jobs Project on International Policy Attitudes, “Misinformation and the 2010 Election,” December 2010. Available online at http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf .
    6 trip to India FactCheck.org , “Trip to Mumbai,” November 3, 2010. Available online at http://factcheck.org/2010/11/ask-factcheck-trip-to-mumbai . See also Snopes.com , http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/india.asp .
    6 Congress banned incandescent light bulbs PolitiFact, “Banned light bulbs? Is the government saying no to incandescents?” May 24, 2011, available online at http://www.PolitiFact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/may/24/government-banning-incandescent-light-bulbs .
    6 only 18 percent of Republicans and Tea Party members Public Religion Research Institute/Religion News Survey, “Climate Change and Evolution in the 2012 Elections.” Available online at http://publicreligion.org/research/2011/09/climate-change-evolution-2012/ .

Part One
    Politics, Facts, and Brains

Prelude
    Liberal Fresco on a Prison Wall
    Seven years ago I published a book called The Republican War on Science . It was all about how the political right was wrong, and attacking reality on issues where the evidence was incontrovertible—climate change, evolution, stem cells, contraception, the health risks of abortion, and on and on and on.
    The book certainly got noticed. It made the New York Times bestseller list. It generated volumes of discussion, and even an entire book dedicated to discussing its arguments.
    Changing minds on the other side of the aisle, though? Not so much.
    I don’t think I fully realized, at the time, that I was following a script written long before. I was dreaming a dream of how it ought to work when false claims are aired, espoused, or defended for any reason, political or otherwise.
    The dream was that the power of human reason would eventually stamp out lies, prejudices, and falsehoods, delivering a truly enlightened society. It would be a society in which ideologically driven misinformation would gradually decline or disappear, vanquished and chased from the public sphere by rational arguments (like mine). It would be a society in which everybody could agree on the core facts about the world, especially those that matter to public policy and the future.
    It was only years later that I learned about the man who, perhaps more movingly than any other, had shouted this liberal, scientific vision from the rooftops. His name was the Marquis de Condorcet, and he was the single greatest champion of human reason during a time when human passion proved far more powerful: The French Revolution.
    I want to begin these pages with his story, because nothing better demonstrates how moving—and yet also how tragically flawed—such a vision turned out to be.

    Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Cariat, the Marquis de Condorcet, was born in 1743 into the French penny aristocracy. His family held a title, but not any wealth. His father, a soldier, died just after he was born. His mother, devoutly religious, dressed him like a girl; soon he was off to study under the Jesuits, whose dogmatism he righteously hated.
    No wonder he would turn from it all, rebel, and pursue a life of science and reason.
    Moving to Paris, Condorcet blasted to the top of French science with an early study on integral calculus. He would eventually become permanent secretary of the French Académie des Sciences, and a round denouncer of religion and superstition in all its forms—a flagrant atheist of the sort