While we’re discussing education, the theme of the current
series of posts here on The Archdruid Report, it’s necessary to point
out that there are downsides as well as upsides to take into account. The
savant so saturated in abstractions that he’s hopelessly inept at the business
of everyday life has been a figure of fun in literature for many centuries now,
not least because examples of the type are so easy to find in every age.
That said, certain kinds of education have more tightly
focused downsides. It so happens, for example, that engineers have contributed
rather more to crackpot literature than most other professions. Hollow-earth
theories, ancient-astronaut speculations, treatises arguing that the lost
continent of Atlantis is located nearly anywhere on Earth except where Plato
said it was—well, I could go on; engineers have written a really impressive
share of the gaudier works in such fields. In my misspent youth, I used to
collect such books as a source of imaginative entertainment, and when the
jacket claimed the author was some kind of engineer, I knew I was in for a
treat.
I treated that as an interesting coincidence until I spent a
couple of years working for a microfilming company in Seattle that was owned by
a retired Boeing engineer. He was also a devout fundamentalist Christian and a
young-Earth creationist; he’d written quite a bit of creationist literature,
though I never heard that any of it was published except as densely typed photocopied
handouts—and all of it displayed a very specific logic: given that the Earth
was created by God on October 23, 4004 BCE, at 9:00 in the morning, how can we
explain the things we find on Earth today?
That is to say, he approached it as an engineering problem.
Engineers are trained to figure out what works. Give them a
problem, and they’ll beaver away until they find a solution—that’s their job,
and the engineering profession has been around long enough, and had enough
opportunities to refine its methods of education, that a training in
engineering does a fine job of teaching you how to work from a problem to a
solution. What it doesn’t teach you is how to question the problem. That’s why,
to turn to another example, you get entire books that start from the assumption
that the book of Ezekiel was about a UFO sighting and proceed to work out, in
impressive detail, exactly what the UFO must have looked like, how it was
powered, and so on. “But how do we know it was a UFO sighting in the first place?”
is the one question that never really gets addressed.
It’s occurred to me recently that another specific blindness
seems to be hardwired into another mode of education, one that’s both
prestigious and popular these days: a scientific education—that is to say, a
technical education in the theory and practice of one of the hard
sciences. The downside to such an
education, I’d like to suggest, is that it makes you stupid about politics.
Plenty of examples come to mind, and I’ll be addressing some of the others
shortly, but the one I want to start with is classic in its simplicity, not to
mention its simple-mindedness. This is the recent proposal by astronomer Neil
deGrasse Tyson, which I quote in full:
Earth needs a virtual country: #Rationalia, with a one-line
Constitution: All policy shall be based on the weight of evidence— Neil
deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) June 29, 2016
That might be dismissed as just another example of the
thought-curtailing properties of Twitter’s 140-character limit—if a potter makes
pots, what does Twitter make?—except that Tyson didn’t say, “here’s the
principle behind the constitution, details to follow.” That’s his proposed
constitution in its entirety.
More precisely, that’s his sound bite masquerading as a
constitution. An actual constitution, as anyone knows who has actually read
one, doesn’t just engage in a bit of abstract handwaving about how decisions
are to be made. It sets out in detail who makes the decisions, how the
decision-makers are selected, what checks and balances are meant to keep the
decision-makers from abusing their positions, and so on. If Donald Trump, say,
gave a speech saying, “We need a new scientific method that consists solely of
finding the right answer,” he’d be mocked for not knowing the first thing about
science. A similar response is appropriate here.
That said, Tyson’s proposal embodies another dimension of
cluelessness about politics. Insisting that political decisions ought to be
made exclusively on the basis of evidence sounds great, until you try to apply
it to actual politics. Take that latter step, and what you’ll discover is that
evidence is only tangentially relevant to most political decisions.
Consider the recent British referendum over whether to leave
the European Union. That decision could not have been made on the basis of
evidence, because all sides, as far as I know, agreed on the facts. Those were that Britain had joined the
European Economic Community (as it then was) in 1973, that its membership
involved ceding certain elements of national sovereignty to EU bureaucracies,
and that EU policies benefited certain people in Britain while disadvantaging
others. None of those points were at issue. The points that were at issue were
values on the one hand, and interests on the other.
By values I mean judgments, by individuals and communities,
about what matters and what doesn’t, what’s desirable and what isn’t, what can
be tolerated and what can’t. These can’t be reduced to mere questions of
evidence. A statement such as “the free movement of people across national
borders is good and important” can’t be proved or disproved by any number of
double-blind controlled studies. It’s a value that some people hold and others
don’t, as is the statement “the right of people to self-determination must be
protected from the encroachments of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.” Those
values are in conflict with each other, and it was in large part over such
values that the Brexit election was fought out and decided.
By interests I mean the relative distribution of costs and
benefits. Any political decision, about any but the most trivial subject,
brings benefits and has costs, and far more often than not the people who get
the benefits and the people who carry the costs are not the same. EU membership
for Britain was a case in point. By and large, the affluent got the majority of
the benefits—they were the ones who could send their children to German
universities and count on border-free travel to holidays in Spain—and the
working poor carried the majority of the costs—they were the ones who had to
compete for jobs against a rising tide of immigrants, while the number of
available jobs declined due to EU policies that encouraged offshoring of
industry to lower-wage countries.
What made the Brexit referendum fascinating, at least to me,
was the way that so many of the pro-EU affluent tried to insist that the choice
was purely about values, and that any talk about the interests of the working
poor was driven purely by racism and xenophobia—that is to say, values. As I’ve noted here in numerous posts, the
affluent classes in the industrial world have spent the last four decades or so
throwing the working poor under the bus and then rolling the wheels back and
forth over them, while insisting at the top of their lungs that they’re doing
nothing of the kind.
Wage earners, and the millions who would be happy to earn a
wage if they could find work, know better.
Here in America, for example, most people outside the echo chambers of
the affluent remember perfectly well that forty years ago, a family with one
working class income could afford a house, a car, and the other amenities of
life, while today, a family with one working class income is probably living on
the street. Shouting down open discussion of interests by insisting that all
political decisions have to do solely with values has been a common strategy on
the part of the affluent; the outcome of the Brexit referendum is one of
several signs that this strategy is near the end of its shelf life.
In the real world—the world where politics has to
function—interests come first. Whether you or I are benefited or harmed,
enriched or impoverished by some set of government policies is the bedrock of
political reality. Evidence plays a role: yes, this policy will benefit these
people; no, these other people won’t share in those benefits—those are
questions of fact, but settling them doesn’t settle the broader question.
Values also play a role, but there are always competing values affecting any
political decision worth the name; the pursuit of liberty conflicts with the
pursuit of equality, justice and mercy pull in different directions, and so on.
To make a political decision, you sort through the evidence
to find the facts that are most relevant to the issue—and “relevant,” please
note, is a value judgement, not a simple matter of fact. Using the relevant
evidence as a framework, you weigh competing values against one another—this
also involves a value judgment—and then you weigh competing interests against
one another, and look for a compromise on which most of the contending parties
can more or less agree. If no such compromise can be found, in a democratic
society, you put it to a vote and do what the majority says. That’s how
politics is done; we might even call it the political method.
That’s not how science is done, though. The scientific
method is a way of finding out which statements about nature are false and
discarding them, under the not unreasonable assumption that you’ll be left with
a set of statements about nature that are as close as possible to the truth.
That process rules out compromise. If you’re Lavoisier and you’re trying to
figure out how combustion works, you don’t say, hey, here’s the oxygenation
theory and there’s the phlogiston theory, let’s agree that half of combustion
happens one way and the other half the other; you work out an experiment that
will disprove one of them, and accept its verdict. What’s inadmissible in
science, though, is the heart of competent politics.
In science, furthermore, interests are entirely irrelevant
in theory. (In practice—well, we’ll get to that in a bit.) Decisions about values are transferred from
the individual scientist to the scientific community via such practices as peer
review, which make and enforce value judgments about what counts as good,
relevant, and important research in each field. The point of these habits is to
give scientists as much room as possible to focus purely on the evidence, so
that facts can be known as facts, without interference from values or
interests. It’s precisely the habits of mind that exclude values and interests
from questions of fact in scientific research that make modern science one of
the great intellectual achievements of human history, on a par with the
invention of logic by the ancient Greeks.
One of the great intellectual crises of the ancient world,
in turn, was the discovery that logic was not the solution to every human
problem. A similar crisis hangs over the modern world, as claims that science
can solve all human problems prove increasingly hard to defend, and the shrill
insistence by figures such as Tyson that it just ain’t so should be read as
evidence for the imminence of real trouble. Tyson himself has demonstrated
clearly enough that a first-rate grasp of astronomy does not prevent the kind
of elementary mistake that gets you an F in Political Science 101. He’s hardly
alone in displaying the limits of a scientific education; Richard Dawkins is a
thoroughly brilliant biologist, but whenever he opens his mouth about religion,
he makes the kind of crass generalizations and jawdropping non sequiturs that
college sophomores used to find embarrassingly crude.
None of this is helped by the habit, increasingly common in
the scientific community, of demanding that questions having to do with values
and interests should be decided, not on the evidence, but purely on the social
prestige of science. I’m thinking here of the furious open letter signed by a
bunch of Nobel laureates, assailing Greenpeace for opposing the testing and
sale of genetically engineered rice. It’s a complicated issue, as we’ll see in
a moment, but you won’t find that reflected in the open letter. Its argument is
simple: we’re scientists, you’re not, and therefore you should shut up and do
as we say.
Let’s take this apart a step at a time. To begin with, the
decision to allow or prohibit the testing and sale of genetically engineered
rice is inherently political rather than
scientific. Scientific research, as noted above, deals with facts as facts,
without reference to values or interests. “If you do X, then Y will
happen”—that’s a scientific statement, and if it’s backed by adequate research
and replicable testing, it’s useful as a way of framing decisions. The
decisions, though, will inevitably be made on the basis of values and
interests. “Y is a good thing, therefore you should do X” is a value judgment;
“Y will cost me and benefit you, therefore you’re going to have to give me
something to get me to agree to X” is a statement of interest—and any political
decision that claims to ignore values and interests is either incompetent or
dishonest.
There are, as it happens, serious questions of value and
interest surrounding the genetically engineered rice under discussion. It’s been
modified so that it produces vitamin A, which other strains of rice don’t have,
and thus will help prevent certain kinds of blindness—that’s one side of the
conflict of values. On the other side, most seed rice in the Third World is
saved from the previous year’s crop, not purchased from seed suppliers, and the
marketing of the GMO rice thus represents yet another means for a big
multinational corporation to pump money out of the pockets of some of the
poorest people on earth to enrich stockholders in the industrial world. There
are many other ways to get vitamin A to people in the Third World, but you
won’t find those being discussed by Nobel laureates—nor, of course, are any of
the open letter’s signatories leading a campaign to raise enough money to buy
the patent for the GMO rice and donate it to the United Nations, let’s say, so
poor Third World farmers can benefit from the rice without having to spend
money they don’t have in order to pay for it.
These are the issues that have been raised by Greenpeace
among others. To respond to that with a straightforward display of the logical
fallacy called argumentum ad auctoritatem—“I’m an authority in the
field, therefore whatever I say is true”—is bad reasoning, but far more
significantly, it’s inept politics. You can only get away with that trick a
certain number of times, unless what you say actually does turn out to be true,
and institutional science these days has had way too many misses to be able to
lean so hard on its prestige. I’ve noted in previous posts here the way that institutional science has blinded
itself to the view from outside its walls, ignoring the growing impact of the
vagaries of scientific opinion in fields such as human nutrition, the
straightforward transformation of research into marketing in the medical and
pharmaceutical industry, and the ever-widening chasm between the promises of
safety and efficacy brandished by scientists and the increasingly unsafe and
ineffective drugs, technologies, and policy decisions that burden the lives of
ordinary people.
There are plenty of problems with that, but the most
important of them is political. People make political decisions on the basis of
their values and their perceived interests, within a frame provided by accepted
facts. When the people whose job it is to present and interpret the facts start
to behave in ways that bring their own impartiality into question, the
“accepted facts” stop being accepted—and when scientists make a habit of
insisting that the values and interests of most people don’t matter when those
conflict, let’s say, with the interests of big multinational corporations that
employ lots of scientists, it’s only a matter of time before whatever
scientists say is dismissed out of hand as simply an attempt to advance their
interests at the expense of others.
That, I’m convinced, is one of the major forces behind the
widening failure of climate change activism, and environmental activism in
general, to find any foothold among the general public. These days, when a
scientist like Tyson gets up on a podium to make a statement, a very large
percentage of the listeners don’t respond to his words by thinking, “Wow, I
didn’t know that.” They respond by thinking, “I wonder who’s paying him to say
that?” That would be bad enough if it was completely unjustified, but in many
fields of science—especially, as noted earlier, medicine and pharmacology—it’s
become a necessary caveat, as failures to replicate mount up, blatant
manipulation of research data comes to light, and more and more products that
were touted as safe and effective by the best scientific authorities turn out
to be anything but.
Factor that spreading crisis of legitimacy into the history
of climate change activism and it’s not hard to see the intersection. Fifteen
years ago, the movement to stop anthropogenic climate change was a juggernaut;
today it’s a dead letter, given lip service or ignored completely in national
politics, and reduced to a theater of the abusrd by heavily
publicized international agreements that commit no one to actually
reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Much of the rhetoric of climate change
activism fell into the same politically incompetent language already sketched
out—“We’re scientists, you’re not, so shut up and do as you’re told”—and the
mere fact that they were right, and that anthropogenic climate change is
visibly spinning out of control around us right now, doesn’t change the fact
that such language alienated far more people than it attracted, and thus helped
guarantee the failure of the movement.
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In other news, I'm pleased to report that the print edition of The Archdruid Report is now open for subscribers. Stone Circle Press, appropriately enough, will be publishing the Report monthly as a zine. Their sales website, still very basic as yet, is here.
