Leonard Pitts, Jr. posed a thought-provoking question in the Miami Herald last week – "When the history of this era is written, who’ll be to blame?"
Although blaming the school system for not teaching critical thinking, or the Alex Jones’ and Fox News’ of America for fake news, or the internet for flooding the public with what looks like legitimate discussions may seem likely, Pitts thinks the real news media in general will take a large part of the blame for "failing to be energetic advocates for, and defenders of, the actual, factual truth."
His main thesis is this – "Be aware of false balance. Don’t surrender to a boneless both-sideism that simulates professional impartiality at the cost of clarity and fact." Having geologists on with creationists to discuss evolution is such a false balance.
This appears to be a symptom of modern society in the 21st century where Google Graduates have replaced Ph.D.s as the pillars of knowledge.
Maybe we did too good a job as scientists, solving major problems like polio, and engineering amazing technologies like our electrical grid, water and sewer systems, supermarkets, things that allowed the American people to no longer worry day to day about basic survival.
Maybe we’ve removed the average person so far from the nature of the world that we allowed them to not care about reality at all, and instead focus on their personal desires and beliefs. As if beliefs could hold up your car as it drove across a river. As if beliefs could keep you alive in the face of diseases, so you don’t vaccinate your children anymore.
Stephen Colbert coined the word truthiness to describe this phenomenon - that basically one’s desires, intuitions and fantasies are as true as reality and can substitute for them with no consequence.
This distrust of science, expertise and even written history, is profoundly illiberal to the world system that the United States fostered after WWII. A system that was to aid the world in moving towards democracies and republics, and which also trended towards prosperity and a generally higher quality of life at the same time.
But democracy seems to be in global retreat lately. It is not coincidental that the truth is too. That science is in retreat in America as well should be profoundly disturbing. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment and viewed science and technology as fundamental to the survival of our emerging Nation:
"There is nothing which can better deserve your patronage, than the promotion of science and literature." – George Washington, 1st State Of The Union Address, 1790
That a quarter of Americans in 2018 think the Sun revolves around the Earth isn’t as weird as it sounds. Half of Americans believed that 100 years ago. Almost 100% thought that in 1776.
But they didn’t influence scientific and public policy. Now they do.
Possibly the most glaring example of this distrust of scientific expertise is in nuclear energy, one of the earliest targets of truthiness. For the last few decades, non-scientists, and scientists from other fields, took over as the expert voices on nuclear, providing a false balance, even though they had little technical understanding of the subject.
This left Americans wide open to ideological diversions and disinformation, even with good intentions, and made them ready to turn on the scientific community underlying nuclear science. Scientists at places like MIT and Caltech are now considered shills for the industry, although few nuclear scientists work directly for industry - there are much easier ways to get rich than going into science.
Actual nuclear scientists are never consulted by the media, only people like Bill Nye (whom I love but has no expertise in nuclear) and Dr. Michio Kaku who, while being an amazing physicist and science communicator, knows little about the biological effects of radiation, nuclear waste, or even dose. The false balance that they bring to nuclear discussions is worrisome.
That’s why it’s so frustrating to watch my favorite shows like John Oliver and see him ignore actual nuclear scientists when he spent most of an episode discussing nuclear waste. Handling and disposing of nuclear waste is safer than working at WalMart. The risks to future generations are lower than eating potato chips.
Maybe the problem for nuclear is that there are very few of us – nuclear is one of the smallest communities in science. And the nuclear field has always been shy of the limelight, a left-over from the Cold War, and something that gave the spotlight to anti-nuclear activists.
Hurricane Florence is a case in point. There was never any risk to the nuclear power plants in the path of Florence, or any other hurricane in history, but that did not stop wild fears and speculation on what could happen if things went horribly wrong! Ridiculous comparisons to Fukushima abounded. But no nuclear engineer or scientist appeared on any news shows.
What made the news is that the nuclear plant issued an alert that all roads around it were flooded, but there was no danger to the plant, which had shut down as a precaution anyway.
It’s scary that scientific expertise has become a dirty word in some halls on Capital Hill. Political and ideological groups are adroit at pretending to include real science to push their agendas, resorting to pseudoscience when necessary. The new crop of Googol Graduates are their present-day soldiers and are flooding society with so much noise, it’s difficult to tell who’s a scientist and who’s not.
Vaccines are suddenly seen as more dangerous than diseases like whooping cough. Fluoride in water is a conspiracy. Instead of asking the Geological Society of America about earthquakes and evolution, it’s now OK to just surf Creation Ministries. We love TV shows featuring fancy CSI scientific gadgets, but that’s not how law enforcement works. Watching political activists on TV discuss events like Fukushima, one wonders ‘where are the actual nuclear engineers?’
These are dangerous and stupid trends, trends that have undermined our funding for science in America, that have eroded our scientific and technological leadership in the world, that have discouraged American students from entering the sciences, and that have made us more dependent on science coming out of other countries - like China.
If you don’t believe me, just ask an expert.
