Once again, Americans are revolting, says the British magazine New Scientist. This time, however, it’s not against the royal crown but against the universal majesty of Reason. In a special investigation, titled “Unscientific America,” the magazine reports that Americans are increasingly prey to a virulent anti-science ideology that is as dangerous as it is dumb.
One might say this is all a bit rich coming from a country that gave the world Andrew Wakefield and the bogus “evidence” that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine caused autism, something which set back one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. One might cavil that it was largely thanks to the British geniuses who fed vegetarian cattle the spinal cords and brain tissue of other animals that we ended up with the terror of mad cow disease — which did more to erode the public credibility of science in Europe than the entire oeuvre of French intellectual disdain for the idea there are such things as scientific facts. And one might even sniff that, while the U.S. leads the world in terms of global scientific citations — a marker for the quality of research being produced by a country — at 30 percent, Britain comes in a very distant second at 8 percent.
Of course, New Scientist is right in one important aspect — science is only dimly understood by the American public. But to what extent is this true of science and public understanding everywhere? Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist, has written beautifully and insightfully about how science is still largely understood by Europeans in terms of magic: You press a button and shazam! Your computer turns on. You take a pill and presto! You feel better. Knowledge of cause and effect simply disappear into the miraculous. The only remedy for this simple-mindedness, he argues, is to focus teenage minds on the nature of the scientific method. And in London last week, the American cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker told an audience that journalists needed to start taking statistics seriously because the failure to understand numbers meant a constant stream of alarming and ultimately baseless news.
But there’s a method to New Scientist’s accusation of American madness, namely marketing: Nothing succeeds with a British audience quite so much as ridiculing Americans for being opposed to science. In other words — you guessed it — the New Scientist investigation is one long hand-wringing complaint about retrograde Republicans, their medieval opposition to HPV vaccines and stem cell research, and their skepticism about evolution and global warming. The only specific example of anti-science ideology from the left appearing in the story is a brief mention of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (“all Democrats,” the magazine tells us) mandating warning signs for cellphone radiation due to fears about brain tumors. Even postmodernism — which I can reliably report is taught in the U.S. by left-leaning academics in literature departments — is blamed for giving Republican anti-science ideology equal time in the news.
It is not that I wish to defend Michele Bachmann or any other anti-science Republican on these issues; my problem with New Scientist is the way it lets Democrats and the left off the hook for abandoning science when it doesn’t suit their political values.
Who exactly pushed anti-vaccination nonsense in the U.S.? Oh, yes, that would be the left, through the Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Salon and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who alleged a massive government-pharma conspiracy. Who has probably done more than any other single person to sponsor medical quackery in America (colonics for bird flu)? That would be queen of the left Arianna Huffington, who was — I hasten to add — educated at Cambridge University in Britain.
Who has endlessly distorted the weight of scientific evidence to warn us of the supposed utter lethality of artificial sweeteners, farmed salmon, formaldehyde, coffee, hair dyes, hot dogs, that new car smell, pesticides, rubber ducks, shampoo, silicone breast implants, soda, Teflon, and vinyl shower curtains? You got it: The left. Who argues that we don’t need to wait for science to prove something’s bad in order to regulate and ban it? The precautionary-minded left.
Finally, who was it that recently warned that Malthus might really have been onto something with the whole population explosion thing? Yes, that paragon of American reasonableness, The New Yorker, which in the face of declining fertility rates and increasing age, couldn’t resist telling a horror story of the world’s population reaching 16 billion if every family has another half child. To which I say, why stop at a half? If you are going to be cartoonishly pessimistic about overpopulation, give every family a whole kid.
The broader point in The New Yorker is the most telling one: invoke the specter of scarcity and doom and powerlessness, but don’t dare mention the possibility that genetically modified crops could improve nutrition for billions of people. Why? Well, you see the left doesn’t really like genetic modification. But to be fair, that’s one bit of anti-science ideology that’s equally at home in Britain.
One might say this is all a bit rich coming from a country that gave the world Andrew Wakefield and the bogus “evidence” that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine caused autism, something which set back one of the greatest triumphs of modern medicine. One might cavil that it was largely thanks to the British geniuses who fed vegetarian cattle the spinal cords and brain tissue of other animals that we ended up with the terror of mad cow disease — which did more to erode the public credibility of science in Europe than the entire oeuvre of French intellectual disdain for the idea there are such things as scientific facts. And one might even sniff that, while the U.S. leads the world in terms of global scientific citations — a marker for the quality of research being produced by a country — at 30 percent, Britain comes in a very distant second at 8 percent.
Of course, New Scientist is right in one important aspect — science is only dimly understood by the American public. But to what extent is this true of science and public understanding everywhere? Umberto Eco, the great Italian novelist, has written beautifully and insightfully about how science is still largely understood by Europeans in terms of magic: You press a button and shazam! Your computer turns on. You take a pill and presto! You feel better. Knowledge of cause and effect simply disappear into the miraculous. The only remedy for this simple-mindedness, he argues, is to focus teenage minds on the nature of the scientific method. And in London last week, the American cognitive scientist Stephen Pinker told an audience that journalists needed to start taking statistics seriously because the failure to understand numbers meant a constant stream of alarming and ultimately baseless news.
But there’s a method to New Scientist’s accusation of American madness, namely marketing: Nothing succeeds with a British audience quite so much as ridiculing Americans for being opposed to science. In other words — you guessed it — the New Scientist investigation is one long hand-wringing complaint about retrograde Republicans, their medieval opposition to HPV vaccines and stem cell research, and their skepticism about evolution and global warming. The only specific example of anti-science ideology from the left appearing in the story is a brief mention of San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors (“all Democrats,” the magazine tells us) mandating warning signs for cellphone radiation due to fears about brain tumors. Even postmodernism — which I can reliably report is taught in the U.S. by left-leaning academics in literature departments — is blamed for giving Republican anti-science ideology equal time in the news.
It is not that I wish to defend Michele Bachmann or any other anti-science Republican on these issues; my problem with New Scientist is the way it lets Democrats and the left off the hook for abandoning science when it doesn’t suit their political values.
Who exactly pushed anti-vaccination nonsense in the U.S.? Oh, yes, that would be the left, through the Huffington Post, Rolling Stone, Salon and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who alleged a massive government-pharma conspiracy. Who has probably done more than any other single person to sponsor medical quackery in America (colonics for bird flu)? That would be queen of the left Arianna Huffington, who was — I hasten to add — educated at Cambridge University in Britain.
Who has endlessly distorted the weight of scientific evidence to warn us of the supposed utter lethality of artificial sweeteners, farmed salmon, formaldehyde, coffee, hair dyes, hot dogs, that new car smell, pesticides, rubber ducks, shampoo, silicone breast implants, soda, Teflon, and vinyl shower curtains? You got it: The left. Who argues that we don’t need to wait for science to prove something’s bad in order to regulate and ban it? The precautionary-minded left.
Finally, who was it that recently warned that Malthus might really have been onto something with the whole population explosion thing? Yes, that paragon of American reasonableness, The New Yorker, which in the face of declining fertility rates and increasing age, couldn’t resist telling a horror story of the world’s population reaching 16 billion if every family has another half child. To which I say, why stop at a half? If you are going to be cartoonishly pessimistic about overpopulation, give every family a whole kid.
The broader point in The New Yorker is the most telling one: invoke the specter of scarcity and doom and powerlessness, but don’t dare mention the possibility that genetically modified crops could improve nutrition for billions of people. Why? Well, you see the left doesn’t really like genetic modification. But to be fair, that’s one bit of anti-science ideology that’s equally at home in Britain.
