Even before the inevitable encomiums about Antonin Scalia poured in after his death, it was already bruited about that he was a fiercely smart man—even if misguided in his originalism and conservatism. But how smart can a man be if he disses science? Can he be both smart and ignorant?
For surely Scalia wasn’t “ignorant” in the sense of not knowing that science was out there, and that there was a consensus about stuff like, say, evolution.
Remember, if you will, that Scalia, along with William Rehnquist, were the only dissenters in the famous case of Edwards v. Aguillard (1987), in which the Court overturned a lower-court ruling that a Louisiana law—the “Balanced Treatment Act” mandating the teaching of creationism alongside evolution in public schools—was legal. That was the case in which the three-pronged Lemon Test convinced the other seven judges that such a law did not have a secular purpose and that it advanced a particular religion and fostered excessive government entanglement with religion. You can read Scalia and Rehnquist’s dissent here. You’ll see that they denied that the Act had a religious purpose, but maintained that it fostered academic freedom construed as “students’ freedom from indoctrination.” Scalia and Rehnquist lost, but science won.
One of Scalia’s clerks was Bruce Hay, now a professor at Harvard Law School, though he looks about 18 years old. In a February 27 posting on Salon, Hay has severely indicted his former mentor in a piece called “I thought I could reason with Antonin Scalia: a more naive young fool never drew breath.” Hay minces no words:
Antonin Scalia generally detested science. It threatened everything he believed in. He refused to join a recent Supreme Court opinion about DNA testing because it presented the details of textbook molecular biology as fact. He could not join because he did not know such things to be true, he said. (On the other hand, he knew all about the eighteenth century. History books were trustworthy; science books were not.) Scientists should be listened to only if they supported conservative causes, for example dubious studies purporting to demonstrate that same-sex parenting is harmful to children. Scientists were also good if they helped create technologies he liked, such as oil drills and deadly weapons.
His own weapon was the poison-barbed word, and the battleground was what he once labeled the Kulturkampf, the culture war. The enemy took many forms. Women’s rights. Racial justice. Economic equality. Environmental protection. The “homosexual agenda,” as he called it. Intellectuals and universities. The questioning of authority and privilege. Ambiguity. Foreignness. Social change. Climate research. The modern world, in all its beauty and complexity and fragility.
. . . When I applied for a clerkship at the Court, my hero Justice Brennan quickly filled all his positions, so Scalia became my first choice. He offered me a job and I thought I’d won the lottery. I knew we differed politically, but he prized reason and I would help him be reasonable. A more naive young fool never drew breath.
. . . What I took for the pursuit of reason in those chambers was in fact the manufacture of verbal munitions, to be deployed against civilian populations. From the comfort of our leather chairs, we never saw the victims.
In other words, Scalia was a master of confirmation bias.
At this point in his piece, Hay digresses severely, discussing a brilliant transgender woman, Mischa Haider, who left physics after getting her doctorate at Harvard because she was hounded, shamed, and humiliated by others for her change of gender. Such discrimination is detestable, and of course stems largely from ignorance and lack of empathy. But Hay decides to pin it on Scalia and his dislike of science:
[Haider] could not live with herself, she tells me, if she did not devote her talents to helping the many trans women whose lives are decimated by the bigotry and ignorance of those around them. Bigotry and ignorance inflamed by demagogues like Antonin Scalia, whose toxic rhetoric has done so much to incite and legitimate fear of gender nonconformity and elevate it to the level of constitutional principle. She is resolved to become a trans rights activist.
So that is Antonin Scalia’s contribution to physics.
I certainly agree that Scalia did nothing to foster gender equality or transgender acceptance (but did any cases of the latter ever come before him as Justice?). Still, that is an issue separate from his retrograde views of science. Hay’s article thus is two disparate articles: one on Scalia’s anti-science views, and the other on the opprobrium received by transgender people. The connection between the issues is tenuous: only neurons in the brain of a man whom Hay calls “erudite and frighteningly smart”. But how smart could Scalia really have been to be so strongly anti-science—to the point of denying that the Balanced Treatment Act had anything to do with religion? He may have been smart, but he was blinkered by his Catholicism.
As for Scalia’s lack of empathy for the oppressed, that too goes with being so conservative. Nevertheless, Scalia’s views on both science and gender tell us why Obama needs to replace him immediately with a more enlightened Justice.
h/t: Stephen S.
We have our own confirmation bias against Scalia, but there are tons of evidence validating it.
If there were a hell, Scalia would be fairly close to center stage.
One could almost wish for an afterlife just so people like Scalia get their ultimate comeuppance.
In what does real smartness lie? The capacity to change one’s view of the world in the face of new information and experience. Willingness to acknowledge ignorance and errors?.most of us are a bit like Scalia.And as our personal experience of the world becomes more complex it is also smart to not shift too quickly or easily.I have friends a bit like Scalia, very smart, very able to manipulate ideas but fundamentally stuck. Not willing to cede familiar ground or seemingly safe authority.Getting stuck in ideas and language and using them as competitive weapons.Rather than liberating tools.
Yes, it is likely intelligent individuals have more means to fool, including themselves. [Insert Feynman dictum here.]
… likely more intelligent … [Need moar coffee.]
Coffee won’t help: Don’t fool yourself.
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It does reach a bit but I don’t see it as making two disparate points. IMO Hay was saying that Scalia’s judicial legacy is like a war draft for an unworthy war – it siphons off intellectual talent and personpower that would otherwise be spent on things like science (or medicine etc.), in order to fight legal and social battles that should never have had to be fought. Scalia’s disdainful rejection of science that disagreed with his worldview has negatively contributed to physics by making proto-physicists fight social justice wars (that should not have to be fought) instead of doing physics.
The same could really be said of creationism as a movement. How many person-hours have been spent by laboratory scientists and hard science professors doing ‘social clean-up’, correcting the same old lies that religious retrogrades have been spouting for literally over a century? They fight these battles out of a sense of social obligation to educate students and nonscientist adults, but if they didn’t have to do that, what might they have discovered in that extra lab time?
Anyone who believes that the devil is real is not smart in my opinion. Anyone who cannot tell that all the religious crapola goes against accuracy and simple testable reality, is not smart in my opinion. I put them in the category of idiot-savant, where the ‘savant’ part is pure luck.
Bullseye!!
Yes. I’m tired of hearing about people like Scalia who are so smart, except in practical matters.
Maybe such people should be called intelligent but not smart.
The Devil is real and his creatures included Antonin Scalia…
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Scalia was ignorant. Willfully, belligerently, ignorant.
And I think it is of interest to consider that the man was primarily an authoritarian and an absolutist. Catholicism and the Constitution were just the cloaks he wore.
Cognitive dissonance was what he was really battling his whole life. Of course, science and reason could have assuaged him with that, but, ya know…science.
of that. of that.
assuaging “with that” sounds a little massage parlor. my bad.
Scalia was eaten up with his religion and that came first in his inability to reason. His kind reaches for the bible first to determine the legal case. It is the worst kind of judge you can have. History is full of them. The chief justice during the civil war and before was the lovely Roger Taney. His southern bigotry always came first and Dred Scott was the perfect example of how to turn the world upside down because of it.
I have posited two different dichotomies in knowledge and thought. One is intelligent/stupid and the other is smart/dumb, and the two are not necessarily related. It is possible for intelligent people to be very dumb (Scalia, for example) and for stupid people to be smart (there are plenty of people who are “street smart” whose level of intelligence is rather low). Scalia is obviously someone who was quite intelligent but preferred to be dumb – this, of course, is what we call cognitive dissonance. There is a very good book on the subject titled Mistakes Were Made (but not by me) by Carol Tavris & Eliot Aronson.
This doesn’t surprise me one bit. I typically found Scalia to be ethically reprehensible. And smart? I never got that from him. Perhaps he was cunning, like the head thug in a bad neighborhood. But despite hearing the claim that he was very smart so frequently, I’ve never seen or read anything from or about him that demonstrated that.
Many people believe that if a person achieves some higher station, like high level political office, President or Supreme Court Justice that they must be smart. A little experience at life disabused me of that myth long ago.
I agree. He was glib, clever, and cunning. He obviously had a good memory. But he did not question his own ideas, only those of others and then only to compare them to what he believed as the absolute truth. I also understand that he was not just a Catholic, but also a member of Opus Dei.
Scalia usually selected one liberal clerk, so apparently Bruce Hay was that lucky guy. And one other bit of trivia is that Scalia liked to get clerks who graduated from William and Mary law school.
I call people like Scalia:
Smart in school, dumb in life.
Gee, its almost like having nine appointed people determining what proper science is for everybody is probably a bad idea.
Rethuglican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is much like Scalia in his approach. For this reason, he is the most dangerous man in the Rethuglican Party.
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Bruce Hay’s article was annoyingly vague –what WAS the nature of Scalia’s refusal to accept scientific reasoning?
The issue at hand was the 2013 USSC decision on Myriad Genetics’ patenting of the BRCA gene sequences [controlling all tests for these oncogenes, as well as their use in further research], and patent law turns on whether these genes exist in nature, or more precisely, whether the DNA sequences are the same in a living organism and when isolated. My guess is that Scalia tongue was sharper than his wit at that point in his life, and simply went to glazed-eye mode when his clerk[s] started in on the similarities and differences of naturally-occurring and modified DNA…
From the LYT article on the Supreme Court decision: “Long passages of Justice Thomas’s opinion read like a science textbook, prompting Justice Antonin Scalia to issue a brief concurrence. He said the court had reached the right result but had gone astray in “going into fine details of molecular biology.”
‘I am unable to affirm those details on my own knowledge or even my own belief,’ Justice Scalia wrote.”
I seriously doubt that Clarence Thomas understood more about molecular genetics than Scalia at that point, but he evidently trusted his clerks’ summaries more than Scalia did.
should be: NYT [June 13, 2013 “Justices, 9-0, Bar Patenting Human Genes”]
Sorry!
Jeffrey Toobin’s analysis of Scalia should be read by all. It is a devastating take down of an extraordinary hypocrite who wreaked tremendous damage on this country. I applaud Toobin for resisting the faux praise that so many progressives heaped on Scalia after his death.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/antonin-scalia-looking-backward
Toobin is usually a straight shooter. He talks in reality.
I haven’t examined Scalia’s dissent in detail, but I doubt that it contains any points that couldn’t also be applied to teaching atheism alongside theism. I wonder what his response would have been if such a case had come before the court.
It was the Scots, early masters of skeptical thinking, who came up with the phrase “jiggery-pokery”. (The Brits came up with “argle-bargle”.) Scalia used these words derogatorily, but they seem to describe some of his own stuff.
How folks like him can disconnect the use of technology such as electricity from an acceptance of science more broadly remains a conundrum.
I’m going to start trusting my gut instinct about people after this. This write-up conforms with my suspicions about Scalia. I bet I’m right about Trump too.
Blame is perhaps inappropriate, but I think we should (to the extent that we hold people responsible for ignorance) hold someone more responsible when they have access to the greatest libraries and any number of universities, online sources and more, which could cure ignorance (in part and in principle).
Very good. I don’t always read Coyne, and I missed this. Thanks.
On Thursday, March 3, 2016, Why Evolution Is True wrote:
> whyevolutionistrue posted: “Even before the inevitable encomiums about > Antonin Scalia poured in after his death, it was already bruited about that > he was a fiercely smart man—even if misguided in his originalism and > conservatism. But how smart can a man be if he disses science? Can ” >
Coyne?