the war on Science

by Shawn Lawrence Otto

What would you do to end the war on drugs and transition to treating drugs as a public-health problem?

This is likely the most economically important question in this list.

The clash between the science-literate and a science-illiterate society creates unique problems not just for hapless individuals who run afoul of ignorant or racist authorities, but for the mainstream media as well. Budget-strapped and increasingly unable to discern between knowledge and opinion, science-illiterate journalists too often aid the slide into unreason.

Today’s mainstream and alternate media! Both talk show hosts and CNN “journalists” are equally stupid.

that knowledge is now too inaccessible to normal citizens to make good decisions—decisions in their own best interest?

Herein lies the argument that it is society’s *JOB* to educate the population to an entry level of knowledge - and that entry level is not satisfactory with a high school diploma. In 1890 a sixth grade education was satisfactory for entry level. By 1920 it was not adequate, and society began embracing secondary education as “normal” even of not compulsory. Today, even the traditional high school education is inadequate. Unfortunately education has become big business, and money is more important than education.

In an age when most major public-policy challenges revolve around science, fewer than 1 percent of US congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it. The membership of the 114th Congress, which ran from January 2015 to January 2017, included just three scientists: one physicist, one chemist, and one microbiologist. If one counts the eight engineers, it’s a total of eleven out of 535 members, or 2 percent. Similarly low ratios are present in Canada’s parliament, where the combined number is about 4 percent; Australia’s, where it’s 4 percent; and in many of the world’s other major governments. In contrast, how many representatives and senators might one suppose have law degrees—and often avoided college science classes in favor one of the top four prelaw majors: business, English, history, and political science? In the United States, it’s 213, or roughly 40 percent. So it’s little wonder we see more rhetoric than facts in global policymaking.

Imagine, for example, an insistence on the promise of financial return prior to Darwin’s trips on the Beagle or Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. They would never have happened. And yet it is hard to quantify the enormous wealth that has spun off from those economically unsupportable adventures into the unknown.

Scientists might be sons of bitches, but they were American sons of bitches.

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time—when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

The first US Supreme Court case concerning antivaxxers and the power of the states in enacting public-health laws followed a 1902 smallpox outbreak. The board of health in Cambridge, Massachusetts, had mandated that residents be vaccinated against smallpox. Otherwise, they would be fined $5 (over $100 in today’s money). A resident named Henning Jacobson refused, claiming that he and his son had had bad reactions to earlier vaccinations and arguing that the law violated his civil liberties. The city filed criminal charges against him. Jacobson lost, but he appealed the decision to the Supreme Court. In 1905, the court ruled that states could enact compulsory laws to protect public health.

This is the opposite of the protection of diverse viewpoints that was intended by the Founding Fathers, and it has inevitably run up against science on several occasions. The most current and prominent example is the complete rejection of climate science as a manufactured political project of socialists bent on a global takeover and the government-funded scientists who enable them. What Marketplace? But the argument for doing away with the doctrine was based on a faulty assumption: that ideas exist within a social dialogue akin to a marketplace in which journalistic truth has market value—that people want to hear it enough to pay extra, and that media with a variety of viewpoints will compete to deliver the highest-quality journalism for the best price. This is nonsense.

There is no marketplace of ideas; there is, instead, a marketplace of emotions. Given the choice, the majority of people want drama, sex, violence, and comedy—the four horsemen of entertainment. These four elements have motivated plays, paintings, and stories for all of history. But they are not news. They are “but faith, or opinion, but not knowledge.” News, on the other hand, is knowledge.

that is what responsible journalists do: they hold the powerful accountable.

With time, things fade, and the stories we remember are the ones charged with emotion, and that confirm our identity, not necessarily the ones derived from fact.

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride; . . . things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless, in short, are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections color and infect the understanding. —Francis Bacon, 1620

It bears repeating: while scientists may be “authorities” in their fields and able to speak “with authority” on a given topic, what authority they have comes only from the antiauthoritarian exploration of nature. It is not grounded in the scientist, but in the evidence from nature itself. It is the authority of gravity. Ascribing it to the scientist because he warns an apple may fall to Earth is a mistake.

The truth of things, postmodernists argued, was not external to the human mind, something waiting “out there” to be discovered. It was something we constructed with our language.

Following Nietzsche, a number of Austrian, German, and French philosophers—among them Martin Heidegger (who himself became a Nazi in 1933), Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Bruno Latour—together with a few Americans—including Richard Rorty and Austrian-American Paul Feyerabend—began rejecting the idea that reality and facts existed independently of our thinking about them.

postmodernism came to mean that a middle-aged black male will have a different experience, and so a different truth, from a young white male, who will have a different truth from an older Hispanic female. Their individual perspectives determine “what is true for them,” and anything they say on a given subject is their political right—and that right comes only from personal experience as a member of an identity group, and is tempered by the relative implicit power of that group in society. While this may be true in certain realms of politics and social intercourse, it is not true when it comes to objective knowledge from science. Atmospheric CO2 is the same whether the scientist measuring it is a Somali woman or an Argentine man.

This is a fundamental value underlying both science and democracy: the idea that anyone can discover the truth of something for himself or herself because we all have access to nature, the one universal truth.

But what the thinking got wrong was the idea that science is authoritarian rather than antiauthoritarian; the view that science is a culture instead of a process; the confusion of science with the power and politics that surround it; and, because subjectivity has a greater claim to truth in certain realms, the assertion that there is no such thing as objectivity.

“The same type of identity formation and opinion extremity has happened on climate change as on evolution,” Nisbet says. “It’s always stated in binary terms: you’re either a supporter or a climate denier. No in-between. It’s become wrapped up in Democrat versus Republican in terms of political identity, as a result of activists using these issues to promote their own goals and media using the issues to tell the conflict narrative and sell newspapers and radio ads.”

On the right, the antiscience tends to focus on denying known science on issues that often have to do with regulating personal or corporate behavior, such as climate disruption, smoking, evolution, HPV vaccines, abstinence-only sex education, gun control, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer, and other issues that stem from industrial and religious vested interests. The probusiness conservatives and libertarians don’t want regulation, while the social conservatives oppose evolution and want to regulate sex, creating an unusual compromise with many contradictions. On the left, the antiscience tends to extend worries about health and the environment into areas that are not supported by the evidence, claiming nevertheless that, as in Silent Spring, there are hidden dangers to our environment, our health, or our spirits. Examples include the ideas that cell phones cause brain cancer; that Wi-Fi and other electromagnetic fields cause cancer, birth defects, or allergies; that vaccines cause autism; that genetically modified crops are unsafe to eat; and that fluoride in water is unsafe to drink. The progressives want to regulate business but don’t want to regulate sex. On both sides, generally speaking, conservatives want to protect consolidated power and progressives want to oppose it.

But that takes work, money, training, and a belief that there is objective knowledge in the first place.

I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party’s line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities. . . . There is a natural aversion to more government regulation. But that should be included in the debate about how to respond to climate change, not as an excuse to deny the problem’s existence. The current practice of disparaging the science and the scientists only clouds our understanding and delays a solution. . . . We shouldn’t stand by while the reputations of scientists are dragged through the mud in order to win a political argument. And no member of any party should look the other way when the basic operating parameters of scientific inquiry—the need to question, express doubt, replicate research and encourage curiosity—are exploited for the sake of political expediency. My fellow Republicans should understand that wholesale, ideologically based or special-interest-driven rejection of science is bad policy. And that in the long run, it’s also bad politics.

The only way to have real success in science, the field I’m familiar with, is to describe the evidence very carefully without regard to the way you feel it should be. If you have a theory, you must try to explain what’s good and what’s bad about it equally. In science, you learn a kind of standard integrity and honesty. In other fields, such as business, it’s different. For example, almost every advertisement you see is obviously designed, in some way or another, to fool the customer: The print that they don’t want you to read is small; the statements are written in an obscure way. It is obvious to anybody that the product is not being presented in a scientific and balanced way. Therefore, in the selling business, there’s a lack of integrity. —Richard Feynman, 1988

Most of the points of conflict in the war on science are going to pivot on the growing battle between the rights of the individual and the responsibilities of the collective on a finite planet.

But technology also allows individuals to expose this authoritarianism and fight back against it in its various guises.

Find explicit mechanisms for this.

democracy is not truly democratic unless it’s secular. Simply holding a vote in a religiously conservative society will return religious authoritarianism to power,

moral direction has also been lost by a class of Western leaders unknowingly steeped in postmodernism and Descartes subjectivism.

We need a new set of political and ethical approaches for the twenty-first century. Among these essential new tools are science debates, which focus policy attention on knowledge-based discussion of the world’s most pressing problems.

The dilemma suggests that politicians are paralyzed by a fundamental conflict between the environment and the economy that arises from the deeply held but mistaken belief that freedom and regulation are incompatible.

it wasn’t freedom in a commons, but freedom in a bounded commons, that brought ruin.

Freedom from tyranny proceeds from laws and regulations.

Friedman thought that overcoming neighborhood effects “widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention” was one of the key roles of government.

“The best definition we have found for civilization,” he wrote, “is that a civilized man does what is best for all, while the savage does what is best for himself. Civilization is but a huge mutual insurance company against human selfishness.”

governments—whose purpose is to administer the commons and maximize freedom—

We live in a democracy, and there’s more than logic that enters into political decision making. Most areas that cause contention are where the science is not complete and there are considerable values involved and the values are really what’s in dispute, and the attacks on science are a proxy for the value discussion.

Chemberlin says she understands facts as things to be interpreted, not ignored, by Scripture. “It’s fairly arrogant to think that we know all the ins and outs of Scripture,” she says. “So to hang on to a worldview and not allow science to engage that worldview keeps us from opening up to that.”

I often ask parishioners, “How many creation stories are there?” They usually say “Two,” and I say, “Name them,” and they tell me the first two stories in Genesis. But there are more than two: there’s also a creation story in Proverbs; there’s a creation story in Job; there’s a creation story in Corinthians; there’s a creation story in the Gospel of John. All of them are different stories. If we’re just understanding them on a factual level, they conflict. So we have to do some kind of interpretations of those facts—how do we understand them in a broader way—to understand all those Scripture stories. And I think that’s very much the same kind of process we have to bring to understanding conflicts between Scripture and science. With all that science throws at us, it’s very exciting to have that invitation in front of us.

Newspapers and media outlets need to take a long look at the ethical problems created by the belief that there is no such thing as objectivity, to more clearly define the roles of objectivity and subjectivity in reporting, and to develop changes to their ethical guidelines that establish when and how subjective and objective reporting are appropriate and when they are not.

Similar to science, the job of a journalist is to report on political issues not in a bipartisan or multipartisan way, but in a nonpartisan way, which means reporting the facts that are supported by the evidence and letting the political chips fall where they may.

Journalists have a wealth of stories at their fingertips once they reject the notion that truth is subjective and start asking for evidence and digging into details.

Science is about much more than just solving challenges, as important as they are. It is about who we are as human beings, about our ability to love, to wonder, to imagine, to heal, to care for one another, to create a better future, to dream of things unseen. To figure out the world and our place in it, and to capture the great beauty of the world in representations others can apprehend. They may use the language of math instead of paint or music, but they are artful representations just the same.