Who Really Is “Anti-Science”?
http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/04/who-really-is-%e2%80%9canti-science%e2%80%9d/
In any national election we can depend on the usual liberal ad hominem
attacks on Republicans and their candidates. One chestnut already
appearing is the charge that Republicans comprise the “anti-science
party,” as even a Republican, presidential primary candidate Jon
Huntsman, fretted recently. Huntsman’s angst arose over doubts
expressed by some other candidates, particularly Texas governor Rick
Perry, that human-caused climate change is an established scientific
fact, as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman believes: “The
scientific consensus about man-made global warming — which includes 97
percent to 98 percent of researchers in the field, according to the
National Academy of Sciences — is getting stronger, not weaker, as the
evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.”
Well, apparently not all the evidence. Just recently, experiments
conducted at the CERN particle accelerator in Geneva by Jasper Kirkby
(who is following up on over a decade of research by Danish physicist
Henrik Svenskmark) suggest that variations in cosmic rays influenced
by the sun contribute to increases or decreases in cloud formation,
which in turn affect temperature changes. Kirkby had earlier
speculated that confirming Svensmark’s research could “probably be
able to account for somewhere between a half and the whole” of
20th-century warming. In other words, rather than accepting premature
claims of “consensus” on climate change, some scientists are doing
what they should do: adopt George Orwell’s attitude toward saints, and
assume that all hypotheses and theories are guilty until proven
innocent.
This genuinely scientific sensibility was recently described by
physicist Michio Kaku writing in the Wall Street Journal about another
consensus-smashing experiment, this one suggesting that Einstein’s
cosmic speed limit, the speed of light, might not be as absolute as
once thought. Writes Kaku, “No theory is carved in stone. Science is
merciless when it comes to testing all theories over and over, at any
time, in any place. Unlike religion or politics, science is ultimately
decided by experiments, done repeatedly in every form. There are no
sacred cows. In science, 100 authorities count for nothing. Experiment
counts for everything.” This doesn’t sound much like the attitude of
those self-styled defenders of reason and science Al Gore? or Paul
Krugman, who keep telling us that human-created climate change is an
incontrovertible fact established by scientific “consensus,” and so
anyone who entertains doubt about the theory is akin to a holocaust
denier.
Non-scientists like Krugman and Gore are prey to such arguments from
authority in part because of our culture-wide mistaken attitudes about
what it is scientists do. Many of us assume that research scientists
are cool rationalists objectively gathering evidence that conclusively
establishes the truth of a theory. But science doesn’t work that way,
as philosopher Mary Midgley? points out. Science is not “something so
pure and impersonal that it ought to be thought of in complete
abstraction from all the motives that might lead people to practice
it.” In addition to the usual human motives such as money, ideological
prejudice, and fame, such a view leaves out “the importance of
world-pictures. Facts are not gathered in a vacuum, but to fill gaps
in a world-picture which already exists. And the shape of this
world-picture––determining the matters allowed for it, the principles
of selection, the possible range of emphases––depends deeply on the
motives for forming it in the first place.”
These “world-pictures,” Midgley goes on, necessarily involve
“symbolism,” which thus “is not just a nuisance to be got rid of. It
is essential. Facts will never appear to us as brute and meaningless;
they will always organize themselves into some sort of story, some
drama. These dramas can be indeed be dangerous” for they can “distort
our theories.” The way to guard against this distortion that arises
from our “preferences,” Midgley suggests, is to practice the same sort
of stern skepticism about them that Kaku recommends for all scientific
theories. This means “criticizing them carefully” and “expressing them
plainly” rather than hiding behind assertions of impartiality,
objectivity, or arguments from the authority of some professional
“consensus.”
The idea that disastrous climate change is caused by human activity
illustrates the truth of Midgley’s observations, for it depends not
just on the evidence (some of which itself is questionable), but on a
“world-picture” and a “story” that often determines how the evidence
is interpreted. That story is one of the oldest we know, the myth of
the Golden Age, that time when humans lived without suffering, crime,
or work because a benevolent earth provided like a mother everything
humans need. Yet this paradise was lost with the advent of agriculture
and cities, which brought in their wake oppressive rulers and laws,
private property and greed for gain, cramped dirty cities, crime and
punishment, trade and war––the Iron Age in which we unfortunates now
live. The villain in this ancient melodrama is technologies like
agriculture, metallurgy, and shipbuilding, all of which broke the
harmony humans once enjoyed with the natural world, and thus alienated
them from their true nature.
The rise of industrialism, widespread urbanization, and ever more
sophisticated technologies and inventions has kept alive the Golden
Age myth. In 1930 Sigmund Freud gave voice to this received wisdom
when he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “What we call our
civilization is largely responsible for our misery . . . and we should
be much happier if we gave it up and returned to primitive
conditions.” These days, much of modern environmentalism indulges this
ancient anxiety about the costs of civilization. Al Gore, the Elmer
Gantry of the global warming gospel, preached the myth throughout his
book Earth in the Balance, where he decried our “technological hubris”
for its “increasingly aggressive encroachment into the natural world”
and the resultant “froth and frenzy of industrial civilization.” In
these new versions of the Golden Age, the apocalyptic scenarios
claiming to show the effects of global warming provide a dramatic
illustration of the wages of “technological hubris” and capitalist
greed. Just as the Iron Age of myth would end when humanity became so
corrupt that a disgusted Zeus destroys them, so too the climate change
alarmists predict the end of our own civilization unless we begin to
rein in our destructive, unnatural life-style of selfish greed and
wasteful consumption.
Other ideologies, of course, contribute to the acceptance of the
climate change narrative. Leftover Marxists, socialists,
big-government liberals, and other haters of free-market capitalism
have found in global warming hysteria a useful stalking horse for
collectivist or dirigiste economics. That’s why at every
anti-globalization rally you will see the hammer-and-sickle flying
next to the Greenpeace banners. But for most people, the Golden Age
narrative, dressed up in the quantitative robes of scientific
research, provides what political philosopher Chantal Delsol calls a
“black-market religion”: a story of good and evil, sin and redemption,
devils and saints that gives meaning to their lives and makes them one
of the righteous elect. Unfortunately, too many scientists who should
know better let this story distort their work and short-circuit,
through professional shunning and gate-keeping, the “merciless”
testing of theories Kaku speaks of.
So when it comes to climate change, who really is “anti-science”–– the
skeptics demanding more empirical proof before accepting as fact an as
yet unproven theory that could generate public policies costing
trillions of dollars and weakening our economy; or the true believers
shrilly insisting on the basis of a presumed “consensus” that the
question is settled, and that anyone who disagrees is “vile” (Krugman)
or “evil” (Al Gore), a dangerous heretic to be scorned and demonized?
--
"We can't drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our
homes on 72 degrees at all times ... and then just expect that other
countries are going to say OK." -- Barack Obama
The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority but to
escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius
"...the whole world, including the United States, including all that
we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark
Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights
of perverted science." -- Sir Winston Churchill
Joseph R. Darancette
dar...@NOSPAMcharter.net