There are themes that I go on and on about—living with uncertainty, the hubris of our leaders, bad science, media lies, etc.--and sometimes I bore myself. Today I find myself thinking about science and narratives, and I’ll try not to be boring as I explain my thinking.
A decision seems to have been made at some point in the recent past that truth doesn’t matter so much as expedience. My suspicion is that this started in academia, particularly the Ivy League, but has trickled down and now colors public discourse. Success and failure do not matter, nor real dangers (as opposed to imagined). The future does not matter, nor does the past. Even winning and losing are unimportant. All that matters is carrying a news cycle and convincing enough people that what you say is real, is real; even if it is only for the very short term and the truth will come out in the future. It’s a silly way to live. It’s a sillier way to govern. It is akin to sitting at the kitchen table in the last week of the month, paying all of the bills and discovering the bank account is empty. Rather than face that reality and making changes to the budget, we throw up our hands and celebrate. “Yay!” we shout, “I’m not broke. I still have checks!”
This is happening all over the place, across the board. Rather than address the problem we face in Afghanistan (thousands of Americans and sympathetic refugees left behind to fend for themselves among the newly armed Taliban) the focus is entirely on the spin. How best to spin this story so it does not appear to be an unmitigated clusterfuck? The White House spokesperson, Jen Psaki, is far more concerned with how we define “stranded” than with the reality of Americans on their own and in danger. The military brass are far more concerned with claiming victory than with any questions about the wisdom of leaving 600,000 weapons, 76,000 vehicles, and 200-plus aircraft behind, in fully functional condition, for our sworn enemies. This week, the auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reposted two key reports on the U.S. war chest of military gear in Afghanistan, reports that had disappeared from federal websites. The problem, you see, isn’t that these tools of war were left behind, not to the best and the brightest. The problem is that you, and I, and the public, might learn of it.
Here’s the kicker. I believe genuinely evil human beings are a rare breed. Odds are very good that most—the large majority—of the individuals involved in this tendency to spin are decent folk, who love their families, their pets, and the country. They are simply too caught up in the careerist game to understand or see that careers are not of paramount importance. They remind me of a very nice man I met in 1990 who lived in Mystic, Connecticut. I met him in his kitchen and he patiently explained his dedication to recycling and the system he had put into place. Cans were carefully washed and placed in a container that held only clean cans. When that barrel was full, the cans would be crushed, and placed in another container. When that container was full the cans would be pressed into blocks about the size of a cinder block and strapped with tape, and then these aluminum bricks would be stacked in the garage.
“When do the bricks actually get carted away,” I asked.
He just looked at me, as if I didn’t understand, and went back to the beginning of the process.
The light bulb went on for me. Nothing leaves. Nothing will ever leave. He was a champion recycler, though nothing was actually recycled. It was an excuse for hoarding. Recycling was never the point. The process was the point. I imagine when his garage is completely full of aluminum bricks, he will just start stacking them in a spare room, convinced all the while that he is striking a solid blow for The Environment.
This is what bureaucrats spinning remind me of. Results don’t matter. The career matters.
Most people have a tenuous understanding of science, what the word means and the concepts it entails. We tend to think of very smart people in white lab coats peering into microscopes and swirling solutions in test tubes, and then making minor adjustments to enormous, unfathomable equations on a giant white board. Some of that goes on, but science is far more complicated and messy, full of blind alleys, cul-de-sacs, and hypotheses that went nowhere. In 2018, 15-year-olds in the United States ranked 18th in their ability to explain scientific concepts, lagging behind their peers in not just China, Singapore and the United Kingdom, but also Poland and Slovenia. An entire industry has been created to service this ignorance. It serves many to pretend that science has pinned down the nature of everything and is now a sort of amalgam of the Delphic Oracle, the neighborhood shaman, and the wise, grizzled king.
I call this Science by Press Release, but that is only because there really isn’t a name for it. Pick a topic—climate, Covid, diet, aging, pretty much anything—and you will quickly find someone claiming that the science is “settled” (“settled science” is an oxymoron) and that asking questions is anti-science (it isn’t). Wondering if Dr. Fauci is competent to butter toast is not “attacking science”. It is questioning Fauci’s conclusions and admonitions, which is exactly what Science does. Imagine how much a major corporation, Coca-Cola, say, or Kellogg, or Johnson and Johnson would love to be able to claim that their product is the absolute best thing you can consume daily and more, that the science is settled on the matter. If you question their advertising, you are attacking Science and just proving yourself a moron.
Yet, we have handed exactly this power to other industries—solar, wind, medical, and climate modelers—without regard for falsifying the claims made or the accuracy of their predictions. Threaten someone’s career? You threaten Science! This is crazy, of course, because scientists are humans and flawed (just like everyone else) and subject to the same foibles that inflict us all—hubris, bias, wishful thinking, etc. Science is a process, not a result.
Here’s one example of how this works. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s research demonstrated that all asbestos poses a danger of mesothelioma and in 1980 the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) announced, “All levels of asbestos exposure studied to date have demonstrated asbestos-related disease…there is no level of exposure below which clinical effects do not occur.” Many countries (more than 50, including the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and all 28 countries of the European Union) banned the use of asbestos outright. The science was considered “settled”. But, consider the research that was not done. Asbestos was widely used in the manufacture of automobile brakes. To the best of my knowledge, no one conducted a study to determine if brakes with or without asbestos are more effective in stopping moving cars. Suppose (and I’m speculating because this is how science actually works) we conducted such a study and discovered that brakes with asbestos were able to stop a car going 55 mph 50 feet sooner than brakes without asbestos. We would then have to ask, “How many lives are lost each year because brakes are less effective without asbestos?” Then, once the facts were determined, regulators would have to do the difficult moral math and weigh the number of deaths due to preventable traffic accidents against the number of deaths due to asbestos related mesothelioma. That’s hard. Now compound that by all of the other applications in which asbestos was employed. Fire safety. Insulation. Fire-retardant coatings, concrete, bricks, pipes and fireplace cement, heat-, fire-, and acid-resistant gaskets, pipe insulation, ceiling insulation, fireproof drywall, flooring, roofing, lawn furniture, and drywall joint compound. How many died in fires and accidents that might have been prevented had asbestos been used? No one asked, so we do not know. Society put science aside and just avoided this very difficult question. Today? Asbestos is Bad. Period. This is policy, not science.
I’m not suggesting asbestos needs to be brought back on line and featured in our lives. I don’t know, and that is the point. No one knows. Because the questions were not asked. To even ask the question would be considered pro-asbestos, pro-mesothelioma, and anti-health. Whatever the truth is, it was deemed unimportant. Asbestos is bad. That is, according to experts, all we need to know. This is not science.
We all engage in this sort of sloppy thinking every day. I know I do. It is ridiculous to assume that authorities, be they political, academic, or religious, do not share this very human trait.
We’ve all seen a movie in which the villain (or the hero) seeks to pass unnoticed through an area where there many people, so he dons a lab coat and drapes a stethoscope over his shoulders, or picks up a clipboard and a hardhat, and as he passes everyone just assumes that he belongs there because he has the trappings of authority. This is, to a significant degree, what our regulatory bureaucracy has become. Many, maybe most, are competent and honest and dedicated to the job, but many others are in it for the career and the trappings. No legitimate expert would resent being questioned. That is what science does. No one, secure that reality is on their side, resents facts. They welcome data.
Why do we tolerate those who do not? Why listen to anyone unwilling to take questions?