Author: Ophelia Benson

We’ve been talking about certainty…haven’t we? Oh yes, I remember, it was in the comments on Comments (Notes and) last week, the ones that got tragically swept away in the server mishap. But then in some sense B and W is always talking about things like certainty; about skepticism and doubt, relativism and foundations, truth and truth claims, accuracy and error, and how to know the difference. So I always pay extra attention when people talk about certainty. Mind you, that’s been true for years, since long before B and W was even a half-formed idea in its founder’s mind.

A rather frightening Tory politician by the name of Ann Widdecombe was on Start the Week the other day talking about the need for de-secularization and re-imposition of religion. She was very emphatic about the value of certainty and how little of it most modern people have and what a lot of it she has herself, thanks to her religiosity. Another of the guests, the always brilliant Marina Warner, asked the obvious question: what do we do about all those other certainties? Ariel Sharon’s, George Bush’s? Widdecombe simply brushed the question off, but she certainly (yes, certainly) didn’t answer it. But what do we do about them? Not to mention of course Osama bin Laden’s certainties, and the Taliban’s, and the mullahs’ in Iran, and the Pope’s. The darling Pope (or the Vatican) has chimed in on the certainty front too, telling us that ‘There are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family…Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law.’ In the real world, you see, where we can only rely on evidence and our interpretation of it, rational people tend to be a little bit cautious in their pronouncements on matters like natural moral law. But people who rely on revelation and authority and tradition and a holy book have no hesitation whatever in telling the entire world what to do. Interesting, isn’t it. But as I say, frightening.

How B and W does keep rising in the world. A couple of weeks ago we had our first plagiarist, and now we have our first mole. I’m very chuffed. A mole in the Open University, this is, who has discovered a little vein of woolly thinking there.

Students of the Open University current undergraduate course on Renaissance studies have to learn of “the occult sciences, and … their very great contribution to scientific developments in this period” – something which might raise the eyebrows of one or two scientist historians of science. But I think most scientists, and many philosophers, might question the assertion “natural magic is best thought of as an esoteric form of physics”. I did physics as a first degree and wonder how my professors from those days would react to this idea. Perhaps ‘natural magic’ is the answer to hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics.

This is all too credible, especially to anyone who’s ever read any Frances Yates. I did, ten or fifteen years ago, so well before Higher Superstition and the Sokal hoax, well before fashionable nonsense about science and epistemic relativism had the glare of unfriendly attention and publicity turned on them. I was intensely puzzled by Yates’ tone. She seemed to think Renaissance thinkers who were skeptical of alchemy and astrology and the like were not, as I would have expected, more shrewd and critical, better scientists than the non-skeptics, but on the contrary, bigoted and narrow and unimaginative. I can remember reading the pages over and over, trying to figure out what she meant by it. Now I realize, she was a sort of premature Bruno Latour.

And popular with it. I also remember discovering how bizarrely popular her book on Giordano Bruno was. Again, I was baffled at first. Eh? thought I. A book on a fairly obscure Renaissance ‘philosopher’? Why on earth? Then I realized it had to do with hermeticism and occultism and New Agery. And, oh dear, more painfully, I also remember asking a Renaissance scholar of my acquaintance, one I had always thought a sane and skeptical type, about the mystery of Yates’ credulous tone – and his agreeing with her. If he’d told me he’d become a Republican (US variety) I couldn’t have been more shocked. And only recently, he told me he didn’t agree with my definition of the Enlightenment in the Fashionable Dictionary. Oh dear oh dear, poor guy. He’s in Their Clutches.

There is a highly interesting article in the July Prospect on a subject that, not surprisingly, keeps recurring on B and W: the quarrelsome relationship between journalism and truth. We examined the issue via the tale of Jayson Blair and the New York Times, for example, and also the self-contradictions and one-eyed views of the Guardian.

It is, after all, an important matter, isn’t it. Journalism is of necessity where most of us get our knowledge of what’s going on in the world. Even the movers and shakers, even the people who make things go on in the world, get some of their knowledge from journalism, and the rest of us naturally get most or all of it there. What on earth do we know of Saddam Hussein or George Bush, of AIDS in Africa and SARS in Hong Kong, of civil war in Liberia or military dictatorships in Burma, of plutonium reprocessing in North Korea or walls under construction on the West Bank, unless we read of it in the newspapers or hear it on the radio or tv? Nothing. Not one thing. And since we (we who produce this site at least, and many who read it) live in democracies, since we are able to vote, it is as well if we do know something of these things. And for the same sort of reason it is as well if the people who tell us about them make some effort to get them right. If they know the difference between accuracy and its absence, and if they think the difference matters. It’s unsettling to find out that they don’t.

Throughout the conversation, irritable on my side, Wellington adopted the patient, weary air of one who is dealing, not for the first time, with an unreasonable complainant….Oborne’s style was confident, impatient of questioning and diversionary-he kept turning the question to other issues, including my own journalism….Walters, Kampfner and Oborne interpret political events for, at times, millions of people. The last two appear routinely on radio and television, and write widely for other papers. Yet in their replies to my questions, they seemed surprised, even indignant, about being challenged. They were evasive and unconcerned to find out whether they had indeed misrepresented the facts…

To be sure, one of the two pieces John Lloyd is discussing here is an opinion piece, and opinions of course have more latitude than facts. But does that translate to a blank check for bizarre leaps of logic and ruthless oversimplification?

Kampfner’s e-mailed reply addressed none of my points and merely asserted that he had been fair. The compromises I and others had made to support the war, he wrote, “required an attack on multilateralism, on the positions of the UN, much of the EU and obviously France/Germany/Russia… in effect the adoption, however uncomfortably, of a Rumsfeld world view.” It’s a contention difficult to believe as one seriously held by a prominent political commentator, as against a prominent witch hunter. (You believe that Iraq should be invaded. So does Donald Rumsfeld. You thus must believe all the same things Rumsfeld believes. Confess!)

Journalists like to run up onto the moral high ground when they’re challenged, to claim to be doing the public’s work, keeping the democracy informed, respecting the right to know, and the like. But those claims are not always absolutely convincing.

I’ve been re-reading the chapter on democracy in Norman Levitt’s Prometheus Bedeviled. I’ve been pondering the tensions between democracy and science, public opinion and truth, elections and epistemology, for – well for years, really, but with renewed attention recently. The discussion of scientific literacy a few weeks ago, reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s new book on democracy, the naive surprise of so many of the good and great at the possibility (or likelihood) that democracy in Iraq might very well result in a fundamentalist theocracy, Julian’s latest Bad Moves on the democratic fallacy and majoritarianism, and more, have combined to show me or remind me that the subject is full of unnoticed pieties, assumptions, sentimentalities, untrue bromides, leaps of faith, and contradictions. Levitt’s chapter is a good place to find some open-eyed statements on the matter.

One point is that public opinion and the truth are two different things. Entirely. There is no law of nature, no provision by a kind and caring deity, that insures that their paths will ever cross. No mechanism ensures that sooner or later, eventually, in the end (whenever that is – there is no end, there is only now) public opinion will get it right. That’s how it is even in non-factual, non-scientific, fuzzy, opinion-based areas like morality and politics, and it’s certainly the case when it comes to facts and evidence and logic. No amount of public opinion can make it true that the sun travels around the earth. That’s blindingly obvious, of course, but people who want a ‘demotic science’ have to overlook or obfuscate it.

It is precisely because successful democracy needs a successful means of filtering evidence and theories that the political culture of democracy must acknowledge that science has created such a methodology, and that it is without counterpart in other areas of experience. To heap this kind of flattery on science is simply to recognize the role of logic and sound evidentiary principles in human affairs. This is what gives science its special social status as our chief instrument for dealing with a vast array of practical problems.

There are no short cuts. By all means, make science more democratic if that means more people being scientifically literate. But if it means demanding that scientists pay attention to public opinion no matter how ill-informed…that’s another matter.

Oh, the hell with the Enlightenment project, you know? Screw all that stuff about education and rationality and informed consent and critical thinking. Nah. Too much trouble. We’ve got better things to do, we’ve got tv to watch and sports pages to read and an inner child to get in touch with. Don’t bother us with that rational argument and evidence and peer review crap. Just manipulate us, okay? Just make us feel good, make us feel empowered and participatory and noticed and brimfull of self-esteem, and we’ll do anything you want.

Research over the past decade has begun to question the central importance of knowledge in shaping public opinion about science. Instead of public education programs, argue some social scientists, we should be more concerned with public engagement strategies that get citizens directly involved in science policy-making, and that enhance public trust in science-as-an-institution.

Trust. That’s the ticket. And not reasonable, well-founded, justified trust, either. No, that’s sissy stuff, that’s for those pencil-neck geeks in the labs who actually want to understand what they’re trusting and agreeing to. Pedants! No, I just want to trust blindly, thanks, I want to trust anybody who opens the door and invites me to come in and doesn’t mind that I don’t understand one single word of what anyone is saying.

At least, that seems to be the thinking behind this bizarre article. Someone who is getting a PhD in communication wants us to know that public acceptance of science is all about communication (just as hammers want us to know that everything is all about nails). But this is communication of a certain kind, communication as hand-holding and inclusion, communication as rhetoric and public relations, rather than communication as education and elucidation and (cover your ears, children) enlightenment.

Many social scientists, for example, question the heavy emphasis on science literacy. Instead, these researchers insist that the scientific community has been too quick to blame the public. By “problematizing” the public, scientists assume too often that the science they produce is “unproblematic,” even though technologies such as genetic engineering raise a number of valid technical and moral concerns. As a result, when science knowledge and know-how is brought to bear in policy decisions or communicated to the public by scientists, the view from science is often privileged over differing public perspectives about the issue, thereby simply reinforcing any resistance. The “public engagement” perspective asserts that scientific institutions and scientists need to focus less on programs designed to inform the public about the facts of science, and should instead focus on programs that get citizens involved in science-related decision-making, with a goal of promoting public trust.

Okay, but if we’re going to blow off scientific literacy, how are all these ‘citizens’ going to know, how are they going to have the slightest clue, which technologies ‘raise a number of valid technical and moral concerns’ and just exactly what those concerns are and how they should be dealt with? How does ignorance help? Do we have some sort of in-born intuition about which technologies raise valid concerns and which don’t? If so, where does it come from, how does it operate, and above all, how accurate is it? Or are we just talking Yuk-factor again. Or to put it another way, is it really such a brilliant idea to ‘get citizens involved in science-related decision-making, with a goal of promoting public trust’ without educating those citizens first? Guess what! I don’t want ignorant ‘citizens’ – people like me, for example – making ‘science-related’ decisions, even if that heady taste of power does promote their trust. Let’s promote citizens’ trust in some other way. Maybe we could inscribe something about trust on the currency.

[Note: don’t be alarmed if this N and C looks oddly familiar. I first wrote it last month, and it’s one of the many that disappeared during our little server mishap last weekend. But I have a hard copy, so I just ploddingly typed it back in again, because it’s relevant to some matters I want to explore further.]