When I was a child, there were whole classes of people who possessed an almost-Drudical power and eminence: parents, doctors, the clergy, teachers, scientists, civic leaders. Part of their power rested in the fact that everything about their lives was a mystery. The idea that my 4th grade teacher, for example, might have a life outside of the classroom, or that Mr. Justice So-and-So might vacation on Cape Cod with his spouse, quite simply never entered my mind. And even though one would occasionally hear the phrase, "Just remember, we all put our trousers on one leg at a time," no one ever seemed really to believe it.
Today, by contrast, the young know almost everything about their parents' lives, the clergy are all-too-often in the news for various indiscretions, doctors are just another cog in the machine of the medical-bureaucratic system, teachers are more and more likely to "share" stories of their off-duty experiences with their students. Even the world's royal families have not been able to preserve the shroud of mystery that had kept their power unassailable for centuries. The exact disposition of the trousers of many of these is rarely left to the imagination.
And, all too often, our authorities have let us down. This, of course, is nothing new. With the centenary of the 1914-1918 War, the image of the British generals leading hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths at the Somme, Ypres, Verdun, the Marne is before us. The generals planned it, the clergy blessed it, the king told us that every death was noble, the press refused to report it, the politicians funded it; and after 1918, when the men in the trenches began to tell their stories, the underpinnings of the whole structures of authority started to crumble.
In his wonderful book No Sense of Place (Oxford University Press, 1986), Joshua Meyrowitz talks about this process, and about about the role of the media in pulling off the "invisibility cloak" that had allowed authority to maintain its mystique, and hence its power over us. Meyrowitz, professor of communications at the University of New Hampshire, argues that mass media have broken down the established concepts of roles, hierarchies, and identities by showing us the intimate details of the lives of authority figures, and by closing the social distance between us and them. (The number of people who said they would vote for George W. Bush because "he seemed like a guy I could sit down and have a beer with." is just one example of this.)
All of this has been brought to mind in the past week or so by the furore surrounding the vaccination of children for measles. In the past, physicians and scientists simply told us that we should be vaccinated -- for polio, for measles, for rubella and whooping cough -- and we happily complied, largely without hesitation. Many of us had seen the terrors of polio, my mother had had whooping cough as a child, her father had had smallpox. We had as a part our common memory the devastation of infectious disease, and the high-priests of science had finally conjured up our salvation from it. We were grateful. We lined up for injections. It didn't matter that we didn't understand how they worked or why they worked. The "experts," the "authorities" told us that they would work, and we believed them.
But the world has turned, and the words of one anti-vaccination mother are shared by many: "You just have to follow your own heart when it comes to medical decision-making.” In other words, we may not understand science, but we know what we like. Or perhaps because we don't understand science, and don't trust the authority of scientists, we are left with "what we like" as the ground of our decision-making. Part of our retreat from scientific authority is that, as the chemist-poet Carl Djerassi (who died at the end of January at the age of 92) says: "The talk is heavy and the words are long." And so in matters related to science, whether the science of infectious disease, or climate change, or Ebola, or the risk of the earth being hit by a meteorite, we are left to the panderers of alarm (and the anecdotes of the alarmists) to tell us what to think and believe.
Perhaps part of it is that we have begun to feel with real intensity the disjuncture between the waning authority of those who engage in scientific pursuit on the one hand, the their immense power over our lives on the other. Carl Djerassi provides a good example. Most people, it is safe to say, had never heard of him, although among his peers he was honored and respected, not least for his work over such a wide range of scientific disciplines: from marine biology to artificial intelligence, from the structure of steroids to pest control.
But Djerassi's most lasting impact on the lives of ordinary human beings was through his groundbreaking work on oral contraceptives, which gave women control of fertility and family planning, and re-ordered the balance of power between men and women. Our lives and the life of our planet has been immeasurably and irrevocably changed by the work of this one man working in his lab on things that can only be described by "heavy talk" and "long words." (Anyone with allergies or hay fever should also be grateful to Djerassi, whose work led to the development of the first commercially-available antihistamines.)
I despair the generalized scientific illiteracy of my fellow citizens. But it is not very surprising: there is simply too much to know, and things move too fast, and even the simplest explanations, precisely because they are simple, get it wrong. The "authorities" can't explain it to us, and even if they could the underpinnings of their authority are unsound, and our trust is weakened. The group to which we belong, whether we are a "crunchy Mom," an evangelical Christian, a vegan, or a GMO activist, has far more power to interpret the world of science than those who are actually doing the work, "the experts." Our group latches on to anecdotes about MMR vaccines and autism, or outlier studies about "the myth of climate change," or the Biblical view of the age of the earth, and we know what to think. It has become simple.
Do I have a solution to all of this? Do I even have a suggestion? Not really. I do know that as an immune-compromised person, I am really frightened that don't-know anything-about-science-but-know-what-they-like anti-vaccination people are putting me and lots of others at risk. I do know that I am really frightened by people who are not concerned with climate change because the Apocalypse is coming and God will rapture all the righteous off the planet before anything bad happens. I do know that I am really frightened by politicians who think that women can't get pregnant if they are the victims of "legitimate rape," and that LGBT people can be "made straight" with the right kind of psychological counseling.
But while the human consequences of these kinds of beliefs are indeed frightening, even more frightening is the certainty of those who hold them. No argument, no amount of new information, no evidence that their hypotheses are off-base, will shake their conviction.
In The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research (Journal of Cell Science, 2008), Martin A. Schwartz, Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Yale, talks about the role of ignorance and failure in the scientific pursuit. He says:
“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”
The anti-science crowd will surely use this as a further nail in the coffin for scientific authority. "They don't know what they are doing: they're just blundering around." But Schwartz is talking about a particular kind of stupidity here, a "productive stupidity," a joy in getting things wrong because you know you are on the way to getting it right, a willingness to wade into the unknown without fear.
That indeed may be the best way of approaching the work of science. But it seems to me that it is also the best way of approaching life in general. And if we could just understand that, if we could just embrace the power of "productive stupidity" (as opposed to just plain old implacable stupidity), we might not be quite so dangerous as a species.
Today, by contrast, the young know almost everything about their parents' lives, the clergy are all-too-often in the news for various indiscretions, doctors are just another cog in the machine of the medical-bureaucratic system, teachers are more and more likely to "share" stories of their off-duty experiences with their students. Even the world's royal families have not been able to preserve the shroud of mystery that had kept their power unassailable for centuries. The exact disposition of the trousers of many of these is rarely left to the imagination.
And, all too often, our authorities have let us down. This, of course, is nothing new. With the centenary of the 1914-1918 War, the image of the British generals leading hundreds of thousands of men to their deaths at the Somme, Ypres, Verdun, the Marne is before us. The generals planned it, the clergy blessed it, the king told us that every death was noble, the press refused to report it, the politicians funded it; and after 1918, when the men in the trenches began to tell their stories, the underpinnings of the whole structures of authority started to crumble.In his wonderful book No Sense of Place (Oxford University Press, 1986), Joshua Meyrowitz talks about this process, and about about the role of the media in pulling off the "invisibility cloak" that had allowed authority to maintain its mystique, and hence its power over us. Meyrowitz, professor of communications at the University of New Hampshire, argues that mass media have broken down the established concepts of roles, hierarchies, and identities by showing us the intimate details of the lives of authority figures, and by closing the social distance between us and them. (The number of people who said they would vote for George W. Bush because "he seemed like a guy I could sit down and have a beer with." is just one example of this.)
All of this has been brought to mind in the past week or so by the furore surrounding the vaccination of children for measles. In the past, physicians and scientists simply told us that we should be vaccinated -- for polio, for measles, for rubella and whooping cough -- and we happily complied, largely without hesitation. Many of us had seen the terrors of polio, my mother had had whooping cough as a child, her father had had smallpox. We had as a part our common memory the devastation of infectious disease, and the high-priests of science had finally conjured up our salvation from it. We were grateful. We lined up for injections. It didn't matter that we didn't understand how they worked or why they worked. The "experts," the "authorities" told us that they would work, and we believed them.
But the world has turned, and the words of one anti-vaccination mother are shared by many: "You just have to follow your own heart when it comes to medical decision-making.” In other words, we may not understand science, but we know what we like. Or perhaps because we don't understand science, and don't trust the authority of scientists, we are left with "what we like" as the ground of our decision-making. Part of our retreat from scientific authority is that, as the chemist-poet Carl Djerassi (who died at the end of January at the age of 92) says: "The talk is heavy and the words are long." And so in matters related to science, whether the science of infectious disease, or climate change, or Ebola, or the risk of the earth being hit by a meteorite, we are left to the panderers of alarm (and the anecdotes of the alarmists) to tell us what to think and believe.
Perhaps part of it is that we have begun to feel with real intensity the disjuncture between the waning authority of those who engage in scientific pursuit on the one hand, the their immense power over our lives on the other. Carl Djerassi provides a good example. Most people, it is safe to say, had never heard of him, although among his peers he was honored and respected, not least for his work over such a wide range of scientific disciplines: from marine biology to artificial intelligence, from the structure of steroids to pest control.
But Djerassi's most lasting impact on the lives of ordinary human beings was through his groundbreaking work on oral contraceptives, which gave women control of fertility and family planning, and re-ordered the balance of power between men and women. Our lives and the life of our planet has been immeasurably and irrevocably changed by the work of this one man working in his lab on things that can only be described by "heavy talk" and "long words." (Anyone with allergies or hay fever should also be grateful to Djerassi, whose work led to the development of the first commercially-available antihistamines.)
I despair the generalized scientific illiteracy of my fellow citizens. But it is not very surprising: there is simply too much to know, and things move too fast, and even the simplest explanations, precisely because they are simple, get it wrong. The "authorities" can't explain it to us, and even if they could the underpinnings of their authority are unsound, and our trust is weakened. The group to which we belong, whether we are a "crunchy Mom," an evangelical Christian, a vegan, or a GMO activist, has far more power to interpret the world of science than those who are actually doing the work, "the experts." Our group latches on to anecdotes about MMR vaccines and autism, or outlier studies about "the myth of climate change," or the Biblical view of the age of the earth, and we know what to think. It has become simple.
Do I have a solution to all of this? Do I even have a suggestion? Not really. I do know that as an immune-compromised person, I am really frightened that don't-know anything-about-science-but-know-what-they-like anti-vaccination people are putting me and lots of others at risk. I do know that I am really frightened by people who are not concerned with climate change because the Apocalypse is coming and God will rapture all the righteous off the planet before anything bad happens. I do know that I am really frightened by politicians who think that women can't get pregnant if they are the victims of "legitimate rape," and that LGBT people can be "made straight" with the right kind of psychological counseling.
But while the human consequences of these kinds of beliefs are indeed frightening, even more frightening is the certainty of those who hold them. No argument, no amount of new information, no evidence that their hypotheses are off-base, will shake their conviction.
In The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research (Journal of Cell Science, 2008), Martin A. Schwartz, Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at Yale, talks about the role of ignorance and failure in the scientific pursuit. He says:
“The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn’t know wasn’t merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.”
The anti-science crowd will surely use this as a further nail in the coffin for scientific authority. "They don't know what they are doing: they're just blundering around." But Schwartz is talking about a particular kind of stupidity here, a "productive stupidity," a joy in getting things wrong because you know you are on the way to getting it right, a willingness to wade into the unknown without fear.
That indeed may be the best way of approaching the work of science. But it seems to me that it is also the best way of approaching life in general. And if we could just understand that, if we could just embrace the power of "productive stupidity" (as opposed to just plain old implacable stupidity), we might not be quite so dangerous as a species.
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