SNICKERSNEE
THE RETREAT FROM REASON AND SCIENCE
by Lorna Salzman
What does Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli have in common with John Papworth, a mild-mannered Anglican priest/social theorist?
Politically and ethically, they form the extreme ends of the anti-science spectrum by elevating their personal doubts on climate change from private opinion to factual truth. They both manifest "arguments from personal incredulity", unsupported by evidence or logic. While Papworth, a gentle, well-intentioned soul of impeccable personal ethics, dismisses the notion that human actions can disturb the solar system (he has nothing to say about Earth's biosphere, of course, which is what counts), Cuccinelli, abusing his power, has taken out his sabre to defame and dismember a distinguished climate change scientist for, heaven forbid, doing good science.
They are not alone in their addiction to illogic and irrationality. At one end of the spectrum are the corporate flaks from Exxon, the Creation Institute, and the neo-conservative think tanks, all of whose mission is to defend capitalism and the free market. At the other end are the counter-culturists, the conspiracy theorists and the anti-corporate New Agers, many progressives among them, who blindly accept the medical advice of Indian gurus and shun Big Pharma. For them, taking proven antibiotics or getting immunization against contagious disease is anathema; far better, some of them say, to ingest poison ivy or arsenic or oregano to ward off H1N1 or strep infections (I am not making this up).
Susan Jacoby has written of "The Age of American Unreason", but this condition is not limited to the USA, as Papworth' comments prove. Here is one of his quotes:
I was alerted to this division some years ago by two actively supportive members of our Fourth World team who happen to be graduate scientists. They were, quite separately, highly sceptical of the whole case and seemed to believe it was largely based on guesswork based in turn on inaccurate computerised models. I am not a scientist, but even on common sense grounds, given the enormity of the forces at work in the solar system, it seems improbable that any amount of human activity, however destructive, could operate to seriously affect them. This is quite separate from the contingent problem of proving that that activity was the determinative factor. As a non-scientist I decided to adopt a policy of wait and see. I have seen and heard nothing since to persuade me otherwise.
Science is rapidly being left in the lurch, and you know the problem is serious when even social progressives revert to medieval thought processes. But these processes are far more primitive; irrationality is likely an innate human tendency. It dates back to our earliest ancestors, when scientific explanations (which would only appear much later) for natural phenomena were lacking. The causes of these phenomena were therefore attributed to unseen unknowable entities:gods, goddesses, spirits.
Actually, belief in these was able to provide, in the absence of an ecological understanding, a moral component that would prove adaptive for human survival. Thus, nonadaptive practices (those that produce sickness, suffering, ill health, starvation, or deformed infants) were declared taboo.Natural selection for those who chose adaptive practices then enabled them to reproduce more successfully than those who chose to eat poisonous plants or mate with their siblings. Today, we are discarding all post-Enlightenment science and embracing the gods and goddesses. Unfortunately they aren't around to hear or respond to our prayers.
Why irrationality is now superseding rationality is a subject worthy of discussion. But one thing is clear: if it prevails too widely and too long, the consequences can only be negative. The dismissal of science as a method of explaining Nature and how the world works is a counter-adaptive and counter-evolutionary choice. Those on the left who still think that science is a "social construct" and that it is not needed to promote social progress are as uninformed and irrational as those who deny the evidence for climate change.