Science is not democratic. Science is not emotional. Gravity doesn’t care if everyone votes against it. Power won’t make itself perpetual for a while if Congress passes a stimulus. Poison ivy won’t stop that itch if you ask it nicely. The virus killing that child won’t stop no matter how hard and how tearfully his mother begs.
Truth is a difficult notion because no matter how “certain” the word sounds, our conception of it is supremely relative. Putting aside any “emotional” or “spiritual” truth, however, empirical truth—what science measures—cannot be swayed by human feeling or belief.
The world turns. Reality is. All science does is measure it. This seems obvious. But if it is, why does everyone try to change or ignore the science, believing that it will impact empirical truth?
Our society’s scientific plight seems to be a recent phenomenon. Many Americans laugh in the face of decades of climate change research. Nuclear skeptics still buy into some updated notion of the China Syndrome, according to which nuclear waste from a meltdown might burn a hole all the way to China. Evolution is widely thought to have “missing pieces,” despite the debate concluding nearly a century ago. And the media likes to shine on popular psychology, often to the detriment of clinical psychiatry.
We have virtually tossed out the careful, systematic study of the world that helped lead humankind away from superstition and into the modern era. It seems like just one generation ago that our scientists and engineers were the ones we looked up to—when they were the subject of a speech by President Kennedy and were our greatest bulwark against Communism. Now, Americans look up to Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck.
But if we look deeper, we might find a startling and terrifying truth. It may have only been during the fight against Communism that Americans put real stock in their experts. In the late nineteenth century, it didn’t matter what anthropologists said or documented—America ignored its poor until Jacob Riis published How the Other Half Lives. The public was largely ignorant of the meat packing industry’s disgusting conditions before Sinclair’s novel The Jungle. More recently, in the 1960s, we ignored DDT as a potential threat until Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring. What these cases all have in common was that they triggered a massive public reaction, one fueled by emotional resonance. The power of these statements was not in their meticulous documentation—it was in their appeal to primal gut reaction over logical data analysis.
Today, we have a vast apparatus of universities, research institutes, and public intellectuals. But no matter how much we invest in them, we can effectively relegate them to being a vestige of the Cold War era considering how they factor into the American consciousness.
Non-experts happily invent data or challenge scientific studies by merely claiming that it doesn’t “feel right” to them. Even in the public health sphere, we see phenomena like Jenny McCarthy—former Playboy Playmate and B-film actor—now being regarded as more trustworthy on a “cure” for autism than researchers and doctors who have studied the condition for most of their professional lives. When McCarthy calls for parents to avoid vaccinating their children because the standard package of vaccinations “causes autism,” thousands of parents listen—making her responsible for single-handedly reviving long-dead diseases like measles and mumps. When challenged with over twenty studies that disprove a link between autism and vaccination, she once claimed that her son is her science.
To the American public, it seems wrong and “undemocratic” to deny someone that argument. Cold numbers can’t replace warm, nice-sounding words, and the “tyranny of facts” almost seems to be something from an authoritarian nightmare. And so, we listen to those who spout on about science, about public policy, and about everything else that they have no knowledge of—and trust them more than those who we pay to be experts.
Maybe it isn’t so surprising that we only trusted our scientists in an era when we accepted many other authoritarian measures in order to battle totalitarianism.
This underlying culture is not something that Alexis de Toqueville, observer of 18th century America and now darling of the health care debate, wrote about. It isn’t something that we rhapsodize about when exalting American freedom.
But it is real, and part of the reason why we so fervently deny the reality that is climate change. It is part of the reason why we still don’t have nuclear plants while the rest of the world goes on. And it is a large part of why more and more of our brightest minds now go to Silicon Valley start-ups, mega-corporations, and Wall-Street instead of dreaming to be NASA scientists, civil engineers, or medical researchers.
Intellectual firepower only matters when you can use it to reach your goal—now money—without giving a damn about what others might think about your idea.
It is a dangerous trend for a country that arose largely because its spiritual originators in Europe were able to shake off irrationalism and religion, forces that acted as intellectual shackles on the people. A tyranny of facts overcame a tyranny of men.
As we watch our society wrestle with bigger and bigger problems, ignoring what the scientific process tells us, one has to wonder whether we will again fall under the spell of irrationalism, tightly controlled and disseminated by a self-interested elite holding onto power.
The more I watch Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and a host of other anti-rational, anti-fact public figures gain prominence, I cringe.
The more I see others who should know better emulate them in order to get results, like the Democratic Party has begun to do, the more I despair for this country.
