Author: Ophelia Benson

Fashionable nonsense is a perennial subject, almost by definition. Time passes and fashions change, therefore at any given moment there is likely to be some fashionable and/or conventional wisdom around that needs correcting. Alan Ryan’s obituary for John Rawls in today’s Independent reminds us that Rawls’ theory of justice was among other things a correction of the views of the logical positivists and the utilitarians. Those views were a correction in their turn, and so back and back it goes. Humans being what they are, it can’t really be any other way: we always make mistakes of one kind or another, all we can do is keep patiently correcting each other, trying again, taking it with a good grace when others correct us. As Rawls did, in Ryan’s account: “He rarely took on critics head-on, not because he was hostile to criticism – he much preferred criticism to praise – but because he liked to revise his thoughts with his critics’ assistance, trying always to get clearer and more precise about just what the theory of justice implied.”

Malcolm Gladwell, in whimsical vein, writes in The New Yorker about the non-obvious connection between comedy-writing teams and groups that stimulate and encourage the creation of philosophy, psychoanalysis, art, ideas. He takes off from a book about the people who created the American tv show ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and then brings in Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, about the group of thinkers and inventors around Erasmus Darwin and Joseph Priestley in late 18th century Birmingham. Gladwell points out that one feature of group dynamics is that friends can encourage and provoke each other to take more extreme positions than they would on their own, and that this is generally considered a bad thing. “But at times this quality turns out to be tremendously productive, because, after all, losing sight of what you truly believed when the meeting began is one way of defining innovation.”

Surely he’s right, and group-think is yet another example of those tiresome, difficult, annoying phenomena where one has to say ‘Yes but’ all the time. Some of this but some of that; can be good but can also be bad; half full or half empty. Such things make it so difficult to generalise. There are groups like Aryan Nation and the National Front, and then there are groups like Monty Python or the circle around Emerson or the people who used to meet for dinner chez Magny in Paris in the 19th century. Groups of friends can encourage and embolden useful or beautiful new ideas, or vicious ugly ones. Moderation can be closer to truth or it can be just the tame conformist compromise that gets us nowhere. Extremism can be loony and absurd and futile, or it can reveal ideas and problems and solutions we need and want. It simply depends, is the boring truth of the matter.

There are many tributaries that flow into the river of hostility to science, and some of them are ideas and thoughts that, used well, have much to recommend them. Used badly, they are another matter. Good ideas misapplied can turn silly in a heartbeat.

There is for instance the matter of deference. There is a bumper sticker/T shirt slogan in the US: ‘Question Authority’. Of course it’s obvious if you think about it for one second that that idea can cut both ways. To get it right the slogan would have to use qualifying language that would ruin it as a slogan. ‘Question authority but also bear in mind that authority may well know more than you do and knowing more doesn’t absolutely always equate to arbitrary and unjust privilege so–‘

No, it won’t do. But that’s why slogans aren’t much use, really, except to rally the troops, and sometimes the troops are rallied to dash off in the wrong direction. As with hostility to science. Of course, many scientific disciplines have vast social impacts and implications and therefore should be accountable, subject to scrutiny and second-guessing and probing questions from outsiders. But it doesn’t follow from that that science as a whole, the scientific way of thinking, the emphasis on evidence and peer review and replication, is fraudulent or sinister or accorded undue deference. In some quarters it is considered as hopelessly naive and retrogressive to think science is in general a good idea as it is to think the earth is flat, or possibly more so. After all, who told us it wasn’t? Consider the source! Question authority!