On the campus of Baylor University in Waco, Texas Thursday, bestselling author and editor-in-chief of The Daily Wire Ben Shapiro explained why the Left, which portrays itself as the great promoter and defender of science, frequently rejects it, discarding scientific evidence whenever it conflicts with progressive ideology.
“Tonight I’m talking about why the Left hates science,” Shapiro began (video below). “Now to a lot of folks on the Left, this sounds ridiculous. After all, it’s right-wingers who are ‘climate deniers,’ ‘science deniers,’ and they believe in that book, the Bible, and they’re all wild and crazy – they don’t believe in anything like the scientific method. But the truth is, right now many of the attacks on science are coming from the political Left.”
Shapiro first zeroed in on the significant difference in the Left and Right’s diverging views of human nature, the former pushing the idea of “infinite human malleability,” which posits that human beings can be altered “from anything to anything,” particularly by government coercion – thus providing “the impetus for top-down governmental control.”
“If you can remove the remediating institutions of society, human beings can be remade from the top down,” Shapiro explained in summary of the Left’s view of an “infinitely malleable” human nature. The problem, Shapiro argued, is that this view is undermined by reality. “Infinite engineering of humankind, unfortunately, tends to be undermined by the facts of human nature,” he stated.
Conservatives view human beings in a more scientific way, Shapiro suggested, believing that we operate in part by a “fixed human nature” and accept the premise that “human beings are happiest when they exercise reason in accordance with that nature.”
While the Left “likes to pretend that it loves science,” Shapiro argued, “much of what it terms science is not in fact science.” As examples, Shapiro pointed to the Left’s embrace of political science and the social sciences, which “often do not meet the rigorous standards of science.”
What the Left actually means by “science,” Shapiro underscored, is “anything that is not religion.”
“That’s because people on the secular Left see religion as an obstacle to progress – all progress,” the bestselling author explained. “They’re not merely concerned with Galileo – who, by the way, was an ardent believer in the Divine. They’re concerned that religion acts as a retrograde check on their ambitions to rewrite society, including the rewriting of fundamental societal truths, like distinctions between the sexes and the value of the family unit.”
This “animus for religion,” said Shapiro, “is why so many on the Left will routinely characterize science-based conservative positions as religious in nature.”
As an example, he pointed to the Left’s criticism of pro-lifers, which focuses mainly on the fact that many pro-lifers’ believe in the Bible as a definitive authoritative source. While it may be true that pro-lifers are often people of faith, that point is simply “a convenient strawman” for the political Left, said Shapiro.
The distinction the Left attempts to impose between religion and science, Shapiro maintained, is ultimately “false,” resting on “an utter misunderstanding of both science and religion.”
Watch Shapiro’s speech below:
Shapiro’s speech at Baylor is part of the Young America’s Foundation’s Fred Allen Lecture Series. Last week, Shapiro visited the campus of Boston University to address the Left’s Claim that “America was built on slavery,” a view Shapiro argued is based on reductive presuppositions that result in a grim and flawed vision of what defines the country. (Watch the speech here.)
A week earlier, Shapiro spoke at Stanford University, focusing on the “dangerous game” being played by the Alt-Right, whose leaders he condemned as espousing racist and anti-Semitic views diametrically opposed to conservatism, and their counterparts on the radical Left, who attempt to brand conservatives as “Alt-Right” despite their glaringly diverging views. (Watch the speech here.)
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