What can we learn from Climategate — i.e., the scandal in which hacked e-mails revealed apparent attempts by official climate scientists to manufacture a consensus on global warming by fudgung with the data and punishing dissidents?
Here’s one big idea: Power corrupts.
The power to credential truth is a heady power indeed, especially. In our society, increasingly, that power lies in science alone. And so science is increasingly misused to attempt to create the kind of working public morality that every society needs.
In the process, modern liberalism risks turning science into a kind of religion, where disagreement is heresy. You can see the process at work in the hacked Climategate e-mails.
Clive Crook writes in The Atlantic Monthly blog: “The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”
Read MoreNo Agenda News - Your daily source for the news that matters.
