A reason why academics are often considered liberal

There's a constant complaint going around these days about how academia is all filled with liberals that are spewing their liberal ways and opinions about everything under the sun. This argumentation is a main point of a lot of conservative deconstructivism that is used in the pundit media, even if it is a bit self-serving rather than explanatory. It is pretty easy for a conservative pundit to point at academics and say "liberal" because quite often that is exactly what kind of scholarly work that is being represented. And then the condemnations are that much easier.

But what is really happening here? Are academics pushing forth a liberal "agenda" or is there something else occurring? It might help to actually bring out the meanings behind conservatives and liberals. A generally accepted terminology for the two (if you're not Ann Coulter or Al Franken) is that liberals advocate radical (quick) change to perceived problems while conservatives advocate slow, incremental change, if any, to potential problems. If we look at this, it shouldn't be hard to figure out that a natural academic liberal is going to be interested in changing a problem while a conservative may not have the same interest and may feel the status quo is superior to radical change. It is important to point out that there should be nothing wrong with either approach. Unfortunately, in today's day and age, that respect of both approaches is not only lacking but it's nonexistent.

So, let's examine further the axiom of Karl Popper's "We are not students of some subject matter, but students of problems. And problems may cut right across the borders of any subject matter or discipline." (1963, borrowed from a citation used by Barry Friedman, June 2006) What Popper is stating is that academia tends to be involved in solving problems, not in studying phenomena, or if studying phenomena, it is in the guise of solving a perceived problem. Well, this works pretty well if you're a liberal academic, but probably does not work as well if you are a conservative academic. When a conservative does not perceive a problem, he or she is already distanced from the accepted methodology of academia. You may notice that a lot of conservative pundits recently have been perceiving a problem that they have been studying: The liberal bias of the left. In a bizarre way, the liberal tendency for studying academic problems may have been somewhat responsible for substantiating the necessity to question liberal methodology.

The problem this creates, especially in social science, is that most investigations tend to be investigations of solving problems. This is a liberal tendency, based on the simple definition provided. This is why non-social science fields do not often suffer from this problem. Unless there is an obvious blatant disregard for impartiality, a natural scientist is usually not going to be seeking problems to correct while investigation natural phenomena. However, the problem does occur when a natural scientist begins to attribute social science procedure to investigate natural science situations, such as depleting ozone layers or deforestation complications. The scientist may or may not be correct in such assessments, but when a social science methodology of seeking a social problem is perceived, the results can easily fall back into one of interpretation rather than in direct science investigation. This is why there's a connection problem with critics of evolution. If left to direct scientific practice, there would be no reason why both a scientific and a religious solution could be obtained. But unfortunately, the science is often left behind in the name of religion, and the science becomes muddied by impure definitions of scientific practices, such as the definition of "theory" when dealing with science and when dealing with personal ideas.

So what is the solution? Well, right now, probably nothing. Until our science becomes strong enough in social avenues, we're limited to interpretation of results by how we feel about the issues. There is an avenue of growth in the fields of economic trends that is promising, although it involves the movement of masses of people, which rarely explain why an individual does anything. Game theory falls into this paradigm. We can look at countries and say that a group of ten thousand people will probably do this or that based on what is the most rational choice given. But ask what Joe is going to do if faced in the same situation, and you'd have as much luck hitting it big in Vegas.

Isaac Asimov wrote about a character named Harry Seldon who created a field called Psychohistory, I believe it was called. By breaking down the variables of decisions and processes, Seldon was able to determine the course of human events for thousands of years. However, it was one man who Seldon never could have anticipated that threw the whole mathematical formula into chaos (which Asimov called "The Mole"). It was a brilliant design of what scientists do not understand and cannot understand no matter how beautiful the process is created.

Until then, we are confined by our numbers, our beliefs, and our emotions. And unfortunately, our current process benefits those of a liberalist mindset. Perhaps the solution is not to circumvent this but to understand it, much as Seldon would have done if he'd only realized "The Mole" was a possibility.

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