Peter Dykstra for Environmental HealthNews
America
is a war-weary nation. I’m not talking about Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or ISIS.
We’ve fought wars on cancer, drugs, crime, Christmas, Christians, marriage,
family values, coal, poverty, prosperity, and gun owners.
Shawn Otto’s new book presents another
war, one where the aggressors wage a battle well worth losing. The War On Science is
not only a compelling assessment of the battlefield, but a very useful run
through the military history that got us to the current conflagration.
Otto, whose varied résumé includes work
as a science writer and advocate, screenwriter/producer of a major Hollywood
release, and polite hellraiser, doesn’t wait long to return fire in this
particular war.
Three of the first seven pages of the book are consumed by a
carpetbombing of pressing science/policy questions, 54 by my count, identifying
the high-value targets in the war on science.
Pharmaceuticals and vaccines,
climate and global security, the Internet, journalism and robotics are all
queries in this three-page Shock-and-Awe geek mic drop.
I was relieved that climate denial,
currently the most high profile theater for the war on science, does not
dominate the book. Instead, Otto effectively replicates the techniques of two
of my favorite books of the past decade.
Merchants
of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes
and Erik Conway explained the evolution of contemporary anti-science attitudes
by tracing the PR-based defense of pesticides, tobacco, chlorofluorocarbons,
and other environmental menaces over the decades.
By following the explanatory path of
these two great books, Otto reveals much about the dynamics of climate denial
by explaining its precedents and parallel phenomena.
He divides The War on Science into
three crucial fronts.
First,
anti-science attitudes are a product of identity politics, prosecuted not just
by conservative demagogues but also by some journalists, scientists and science
advocates.
Second
is the convergence of ideology and religion—somehow, for many devout people,
the answer to the question “What would Jesus do?” is that Jesus would turn his
back on fighting pollution or clean energy, and would oppose lifesaving medical
breakthroughs.
The
third front is the most apparent and easily understood: Commercial
self-interest.
Understanding this three-front war is an
important tool in understanding climate denial. Many advocates of climate
action dismiss climate deniers by simply rationalizing that they’re either
industry-funded moles or simpletons. They’re not necessarily either one. Or
maybe they’re both. The bottom line is that none of this is simple.
Otto looks at the current frenzy over
vaccines and their imaginary link to autism through the same historical lens.
Did you know that there were public outcries against vaccines 140 years
ago?
Today’s anti-vaxxers are significant in
understanding anti-science in two big ways: First, they’re not ideologically
monolithic. Climate denial and similar phenomena are often presumed to be
wholly owned by the political right. But anti-vax sentiment is often (but not
always) strongest in heavily liberal communities like Marin County, California,
and Eugene, Oregon.
Secondly, the most impassioned
anti-vaxxers have a perpetual capacity to ignore obvious and adverse
information, something that drives both climate denial and currently, the Trump
campaign.
Andrew
Wakefield was a British physician whose paper linking autism to the
measles/mumps/rubella vaccine ignited the movement. When the paper was
investigated, discredited, retracted and Wakefield’s license to practice
medicine revoked due to fraud, it moved me to become a tiny bit suspicious of
the whole thing.
But
in true anti-science tradition, the anti-vax movement viewed the multiple disgraces
as a War On Wakefield, an affirmation that scientists, the medical
establishment, Big Pharma, government and the media were all enmeshed in a
giant conspiracy to hide the truth.
I don’t begrudge the fact that Otto devotes the last section of the book to solutions for this deep mess. He rattles off a list of pragmatic, mostly doable notions, a few of which are already underway, like scientists fighting back against harassment or journalists exposing decades of fraud in climate-denying propaganda.
Others are intriguing, like establishing a “Progressive Chamber of Commerce” to negate the influence of the existing U.S. Chamber, whose clout sustains many anti-science efforts.
But almost inadvertently, Otto’s
diligence in the rest of the book undermines any notion that ending the war on
science will be easy. If you don’t
believe me, ask Galileo, or John Scopes, or Rachel Carson, or Mike Mann. This
stuff is a lamentable part of human nature, an ingrained part of current
politics, and literally an element in the business plans of many corporations.
The task is made even more daunting by
the downward pressure of multiple negative forces: The de-fanging of the news
media, the successful and lucrative marketing of fear as a political weapon,
the near-total division of science and environmental issues as partisan
beliefs, and the drag of popular culture, where scientists have always gotten
the short end.
Otto points out that some scientists,
charismatic and fluent in communicating to a general audience, have become
minor rockstars: Edwin Hubble or Carl Sagan, for example. But the prevailing
pop culture images of scientists are unflattering:
The
evil genius of Dr. Frankenstein, the buck-toothed oblivion of Jerry Lewis’s Nutty Professor,
the green-blooded half-human, humorlessness of Mister Spock, and the
uber-nerdiness of the cast of the Big Bang Theory.
I
often wonder if these pop culture stereotypes changed history in a major way:
George W. Bush, the guy who many Americans said they’d rather drink a beer
with, narrowly defeated (or not) Al Gore, the science-savvy guy who many of
those same Americans probably wanted to stuff in a high school locker.
I have two favorite symbols of the power
and durability of denial: A half-century after Vietnam, one can still see
bedraggled vets near Washington’s Vietnam Memorial, fully convinced that their
buddies are still being held in tiger cages in Hanoi.
And
in my community in Georgia, some of my neighbors won’t get around to turning
the corner on climate denial any time soon: They’re still wrestling with denial
over Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. These are deeply-held beliefs, not
reasoned conclusions. They die hard. Or perhaps live forever.
Its unreasonable optimism
notwithstanding, The War on Science will
have a place on my shelf of essential books on both 21st century science and
politics. Shawn Otto may not have written the secret weapon to singlehandedly
end the war, but he has done a great service by helping us understand it.
(Next: A review of The
Madhouse Effect,
by Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles.)
