You know, I have a theory, and it’s a theory that some people believe in, and that’s the vaccinations. I mean we never had anything like this. This is now an epidemic. It’s way, way up over the last ten years—it’s way up over the last two years. And you know, when you take a little baby that weighs like twelve pounds into the doctor’s office and they pump them with many, many simultaneous vaccinations—I’m all for vaccinations, but I think that when you add all of these vaccinations together and then two months later the baby is so different and lots of different things have happened, I really—and I’ve known cases.
—DONALD TRUMP
In Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, the rogue air force general Jack D. Ripper attempts to trigger a nuclear exchange by sending his wing of B52s to attack Russia. Shortly before shooting himself, he explains his motive to RAF exchange officer Lionel Mandrake:
RIPPER: You know when fluoridation first began?
MANDRAKE: No. No, I don’t, Jack. No.
RIPPER: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your postwar commie conspiracy, huh? It’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That’s the way your hard-core commie works.
MANDRAKE: Jack … Jack, listen tell me, ah … when did you first become, well develop this theory?
RIPPER: Well, I ah, I, I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love.1
Fifty years later, many otherwise apparently sane people are gripped by a fear very like General Ripper’s—that childhood vaccines, introduced like fluoridation in the name of better health, are in fact responsible for an epidemic of their own.
Like any drug, vaccines have side effects, and it has long been known that a few of the millions of children who receive vaccines will react adversely to them, on rare occasions very seriously so. Unlike other drugs, vaccines are generally administered to disease-free as opposed to sick children and adults. The seeming unnaturalness of that—the doctor or nurse pressing a needle into a perfectly healthy baby and making him or her cry—has always prompted atavistic fears in the minds of some parents. There are numerous historical examples of opposition to vaccination programs, especially when the authorities have attempted to make them compulsory. But the present panic about vaccination has an epidemiology of its own.
In 1998, the British medical researcher Andrew Wakefield claimed in a paper published in the Lancet that he and his colleagues had discovered a link between the MMR vaccine (which protects against measles, mumps, and rubella) and a form of bowel disease and autism. The overwhelming majority of experts in the field were skeptical about Wakefield’s claims from the start, and other research teams were unable to reproduce his results. The obvious danger—that giving excessive credence to scientifically unsound concerns about the safety of the MMR vaccine might cause some parents not to immunize their children with consequences for the health of the whole population—was also pointed out immediately.
But in the early years the story was often covered in the news in the UK and beyond as if the argument were evenly balanced. The BBC’s agenda-setting morning radio program Today covered the story assiduously, mounting a number of on-air debates in which nonexpert representatives of antivaccine pressure groups were given equal time with government scientists and doctors.2 And the weight given to the Wakefield theory had its effect. A Today poll in 2001 discovered that—egged on no doubt by the program’s own tendentious coverage—no less than 79 percent of respondents thought there should be a public inquiry into the topic.3 As predicted, rates of vaccinations fell, and not just in Britain but in other countries too, and some years later the incidence of measles in the UK and elsewhere began to rise.
The wheels of scientific and professional accountability grind slow, but in due course Andrew Wakefield’s paper would be discredited as not just erroneous but fraudulent. The learned medical journal Annals of Pharmacotherapy would describe it as “perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years.”4 Wakefield himself was struck off the medical register in 2010 for serious professional misconduct. His coauthors had disowned both paper and theory years earlier.
And that, one might have thought, would be that. But long before that final damning verdict was delivered on the MMR-autism claim, the antivaccination movement had gathered a momentum of its own. Rather than abandon their belief in the link, antivaccinators advanced a host of conjectures about ways vaccines might be responsible for autism and other disorders and disabilities. One of them was the “too many, too soon,” or “vaccine overload” theory. This is the theory to which Donald Trump is alluding (perhaps even claiming authorship for) in the passage from a phone interview with the Fox News morning show that begins this chapter.
There is no medical or scientific evidence to support this theory, or even a conceptual model to suggest why it might be true. The childhood vaccine schedule has been, and continues to be, exhaustively monitored. We have no more reason to believe that infant vaccination causes autism than that eating Brussels sprouts does. But to true believers, these facts are not facts at all but evidence of conspiracy and cover-up. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is one of many antivaccine campaigners to accuse the US government and the medical establishment of concealing the truth about the dangers, of holding “secret meetings,” of “collusion” with Big Pharma and, insofar as foreign aid encourages and funds vaccination in the developing world, of risking the world’s condemnation for poisoning their children.5 In a characteristic modern rhetorical inversion, the antivaccinators began to define that medical establishment as the “anti-vaccine-safety lobby” and describe themselves not as antis at all but as campaigners for children’s health. Look at a sample antivaccine site (childhealthsafety.wordpress.com), and you will find the defenders of vaccination described as “cyber thugs and bullies.” “These animals,” says the site, “are nasty, just nasty.”6
After the discrediting of Andrew Wakefield, most of the media adjusted their approach to the story, no longer granting vaccine skepticism equal time or equal treatment (in their interview with Trump, the hosts of Fox & Friends go out of their way to make it clear that most physicians do not believe there is any connection between vaccination and autism). But the fascination is still there, even if for reasons of journalistic and ethical safety the claims now tend to be followed by a question mark. Here’s a 2012 headline from Mail Online: “MMR: A mother’s victory. The vast majority of doctors say there is no link between the triple jab and autism, but could an Italian court case reignite this controversial debate?”7
One of the reasons for the continued media interest is that of many of the most vocal advocates of vaccine skepticism are celebrities. Take the reality TV star Kristin Cavallari: “You know, at the end of the day, I’m just a mom. There are very scary statistics out there regarding what is in vaccines and what they cause—asthma, allergies, ear infections, all kinds of things. We feel like we are making the best decision for our kids.”8
Then there’s the model, film and TV actor, and all-around personality Jenny McCarthy, who is perhaps the most prominent and persistent of the antivaccine celebrities: “Us moms aren’t treating autism, we are treating a vaccine injury. And when you treat the vaccine injury, the autism goes away, minimizes or disappears.”9
“In 1983, the shot schedule was 10,” she told Good Morning America: “That was when autism was 1 in 10,000. Now there’s 36, and autism is 1 in 150 … All arrows point to one direction.”10 As General Ripper might say, it’s incredibly obvious, isn’t it?
The liberal comedian and talk show host Bill Maher told his HBO audience that he did not believe that healthy people were vulnerable to the H1N1 flu virus and was against anyone—and particularly the government—sticking “a disease into his arm.”11 In point of fact there is no doubt that healthy children and adults are vulnerable to H1N1, that many have caught it and some died from it. The vaccines that protect against it do not contain live virus, as Mr. Maher seems to think.
The intriguing question is why Bill Maher thinks he has sufficient expertise to hazard a judgment about flu vaccination in the first place. Is it that he believes that virology is less specialist than other scientific disciplines, and that the issue of who will and who won’t benefit from a given vaccine is a topic on which anyone, no matter how sketchy his grasp of the science or how limited his access to the data, can add something useful? He gave a clue on a blog he posted in response to the furor that his original remarks had provoked: “I agree with my critics who say that there are far more qualified people than me—it’s just that mainstream media rarely interviews doctors and scientists who present an alternative point of view.”12
His argument seems to go like this. The powers that be (the government, majority medical science) are trying to stamp out heterodoxical—but quite possibly valid—perspectives on vaccine safety. “Mainstream media” is cravenly complying with this exercise in suppression and, as a result, these alternative points of view aren’t getting aired. Yes I, Bill Maher, may be underqualified to speak about them, but at least I have a platform from which I can raise them. And surely some conversation about vaccines is better than no conversation at all.
This is an appeal for open-mindedness and free speech, cast as a gallant David-and-Goliath contest between maverick but perhaps truth-telling “scientists and doctors” (and of course Maher himself) and the faceless power structures of the state and the pharmacological-industrial complex. The appeal transcends conventional Left-Right political orientation: conservative libertarians who have their own ideologically grounded suspicions about such sinister federal institutions as the Centers for Disease Control might well find themselves rallying to the Maher flag.
The question that Bill Maher’s argument provokes—to what extent, if at all, is it right to abandon the normal conventions of balance in debate and media coverage when medical or scientific findings are disputed by mavericks or nonscientists?—is an interesting one, and we will return to it. But that doesn’t make his argument valid in this case. In the blog, he describes vaccination as a “nuanced subject.” Actually, idiocy aside, it’s notably unnuanced—the science and the statistics are clear-cut—and insofar as there are nuances, they are ones that require scientific training to understand. And virtually none of the people who actually have that training believe there is any need to have the kind of debate of which Bill Maher seems to be in favor, one that would treat the inventions of Andrew Wakefield and the ramblings of Jenny McCarthy as if they were to be taken as seriously as real science.
So what effect are today’s vaccine skeptics having on public attitudes and parents’ willingness to vaccinate their children? A paper published in the journal Pediatrics in January 2011 (but referring to survey research conducted in 2009) suggests that the prudence we discussed in the last chapter is not dead. A representative sample of twenty-five hundred parents were asked whom they would trust to provide them with information about vaccine safety: 76 percent said they would trust their children’s doctor “a lot” and 22 percent answered “some.” Government vaccine experts/officials predictably got much lower, though still net positive, scores: 23 percent would trust them a lot and 61 percent some, while 16 percent selected “not at all.” As for celebrities, 2 percent would trust them a lot and 24 percent said some, though 74 percent of the respondents said they wouldn’t trust them at all.13
The celebrities, then, come a poor third to the family doctor. But that one-quarter of respondents who say they would trust the advice of celebrities on vaccine safety either “a lot” or at least “some” is still disturbing, given the potential impact of even a small percentage of parents refusing to allow their children to be vaccinated. And the same underlying survey suggested that broader—and unfounded—doubts about vaccines had taken significant hold: 25 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “Some vaccines cause autism in healthy children,” and 11.5 percent said they had actually refused a vaccine for their children that had been recommended by their doctor.14
These findings suggest that my Times colleague Frank Bruni was too pessimistic when he wrote in an op-ed that “whether the topic is autism or presidential politics, celebrity trumps authority and obviates erudition.”15 The battle is not lost yet, at least not so far as vaccines are concerned. But why should there be a battle at all? Why should anyone pay any attention to what celebrities and other entirely nonexperts have to say on the subject? Isn’t there some way of changing the way subjects like vaccine safety are discussed so that the simple scientific truth emerges and the public is no longer duped?
Serious, Rational, Reasonable
Throughout the history of the West, almost everyone who has thought systematically about our acquisition of true understanding has accorded a special status to science. What is privileged is less the emerging body of scientific theories as such than the methodologies that underpin them: first the application of logic and deductive reasoning in the case of mathematics and abstract science; second the scientific method, the systematic use of empirical evidence to test hypotheses about the observable universe. David Hume’s injunction that we should commit to the flames all propositions and claims that do not derive either from “abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number” or “experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence” encapsulates these two special claims.
During much of the twentieth century, the majority of politicians and public intellectuals were prepared to defer to the prevailing scientific consensus when they discussed science-related issues, even though they knew that knowledge of science was typically low among the general public, and that it was easy—and could sometimes be politically advantageous—to stoke public confusion and fear.
There was generally less agreement among experts in economics, sociology, and the other social sciences, so the politicians could pick and choose experts whose take on a given policy area accorded with their own perspective or ideological preference. Nonetheless, these experts were also typically accorded—and showed one another—a significant level of professional and personal respect. All this was important because, as we noted in chapter 6, public policy formulation became progressively more technocratic as the century progressed, and the standing of the scientists, doctors, economists, and other experts who were helping to draft those policies was critical if the policies themselves were to command public support.
As with so many other forms of rhetorical restraint, this set of conventions began to break down in the 1990s and is now in ruins. The controversy about vaccines is far from an isolated outbreak. This willingness to ignore or argue against science and the facts in pursuit of one’s own point of view is apparent in many other policy debates: climate change, genetically modified crops, and energy policy are all prominent cases in point. In the social sciences, obfuscation and outright denial of even those facts which all the experts regard as incontrovertible is endemic. During the campaigns leading up to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and the 2016 vote on the UK’s membership of the European Union, for instance, it proved impossible in the public debate to reach any common ground about what the economic and constitutional consequences of a yes or a no might be. Both sides dismissed the claims of academic economists with whom they disagreed, and categoric statements by such theoretically independent and impartial experts as the governor of the Bank of England were simply ignored by everyone who found them inconvenient. In the case of the referendum on the EU, constitutional experts who warned about the narrow framework for exit set out in the Lisbon Treaty were dismissed out of hand by those politicians who feared that the legal reality might frighten off the public, and who wanted instead to present the treaty provisions as nonbinding and open to negotiation. It was if there were no facts or laws, only opinions, and the public was free to believe whoever it liked.
It is plain that the way authority plays out in contemporary public language has become disordered—in how it is used in argument and, more important, how it is heard and evaluated by the listening public. In this chapter, we will examine why. Science will be our main focus: its claim to objective authority is uniquely clear-cut, and the failure of that authority to prevail is therefore uniquely stark. But what goes for hard science and medicine also goes in a significant degree for the social sciences, urban planning, and the many other fields where specialist knowledge finds itself in collision with modern adversarial politics.
Let’s begin with a sophisticated example of the case against science—sophisticated because it doesn’t take issue with the authority of science in its own realm but argues that when it comes to public policy debate, science needs to learn its place:
Ladies and gentlemen, the climate change debate is much more than just a battle over scientific theories and environmental statistics. At its core is the question of which approach our societies should take in view of a serious concern that could possibly turn out to be a real problem some time in [the] future. What rational societies and policy makers need to ask is: what are the most reasonable and the most cost-effective policies that neither ignore a potential problem that may possibly materialise in the distant future nor the actual economic costs of such policies here and now. Fundamentally, these are social, ethical and economic questions that cannot be answered by science alone but require careful consideration by economists and social commentators.16
The speaker is the social anthropologist Dr. Benny Peiser. He is the director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a British think tank–cum–pressure group chaired by the former Tory chancellor of the exchequer, Nigel Lawson. Dr. Peiser was introducing the foundation’s annual lecture in 2011.
Let’s take a close look at this passage. What comes across at first is the judicious tone. Climate change is a “serious concern” that might turn into a “real problem.” What “rational societies and policy makers” have to do is to arrive at policy responses that are both “reasonable” and also “cost-effective.” Serious, rational, reasonable.
If we look closer, we detect a little rhetorical filigree: within a couple of sentences, that “serious concern” is getting pushed linguistically away from us with a triad of qualifications—it turns out that it’s a potential problem that may only possibly happen in a distant future, whereas staring us in the face is another triad that is only too immediately present—the actual and specifically economic costs that we will have to pay here and now. These contrasting triads are a trope that was well known and widely used thousands of years ago.
Having thus contextualized and “fixed” climate change, Benny Peiser turns to science’s role in formulating a response. Here’s comes another triad: “fundamentally” these are “social, ethical and economic questions” that “cannot be answered by science alone” but require careful consideration by “economists and social commentators.” That word “fundamentally” is important. It implies that the layer of policy consideration that addresses social, ethical, and economic questions is somehow weightier or more critical than the scientific layer. It’s as if the science were a necessary but insufficient precursor to the real debate. In support of this, I offer some remarks Dr. Peiser made a few months before the passage I have just quoted: “The global warming hysteria is well and truly over. How do we know? Because all the relevant indicators—polls, news coverage, government u-turns and a manifest lack of interest among policy makers—show a steep decline in public concern about climate change.”17
There was considerable polling evidence to back Dr. Peiser’s contention that by 2011 public anxiety about climate change was indeed receding. But this second quote again implies that there are two layers of discourse about climate change: a scientific layer whose “relevant indicators” are atmospheric temperatures and so on, and a separate layer of public perception, policy, and politics with its own quasi-scientific metrics—opinion polls, news coverage, and that (presumably slightly harder to measure) “manifest lack of interest among policy makers.” The good news, at least as far as Dr. Peiser is concerned, is that in this second layer the metrics are going his way. But of course none of that tells us anything at all about the first layer. The planet could be heating up even as public interest in climate change cools.
The subordination implied by that “fundamentally” in Dr. Peiser’s first quote seems to apply not just to the science of climate change but to science as a whole. When it comes to policy discussions and the assessment of possible responses and mitigations, whatever science discovers will require “careful consideration by economists and social commentators.”
Now, we all know who economists are, but what about these “social commentators”? What training and qualifications do you need to become one? Or is social commentator, like that other modern media standby, the community leader, an office that involves an element of self-election? If you read through the names on the board of trustees of the Global Warming Policy Foundation and indeed some of the authors of its reports, you’re left with the impression that in practice “social commentators” are retired politicians and civil servants, academics in the social sciences, and—there is no easy way of breaking this to you—journalists.
Let’s try substituting that in Dr. Peiser’s last sentence. These are … questions that cannot be answered by science alone but require careful consideration by journalists. That’s not very reassuring, is it? That’s because of the stark difference in authority between scientists and journalists. Ipsos MORI tracks levels of trust expressed by members of the British public in different professions. In their 2015 survey,18 89 percent of respondents said they would generally trust doctors to tell the truth, while the number for scientists was 79 percent. But only 25 percent said they would trust journalists, while ministers and politicians as a class were trusted by only 22 and 21 percent, respectively. In a straight fight for credibility between scientists and journalists, then, journalists are going to be massacred, and retired politicians will fare even worse. Much safer to ask them both to kneel, receive a tap from the sword, and arise as members of that splendidly new and untainted category of authority: the social commentator.
Dr. Peiser’s remarks are all about authority—specifically, which authority takes precedence when it comes to weighing public policy choices. Indeed, the Global Warming Policy Foundation’s Web site is itself a kind of shrine to authority, or at least a simulacrum of it. The foundation, the site tells us, is all about “restoring balance and trust to the climate debate,” which certainly sounds suitably measured and grown up. Who, after all, can be against “balance” and “trust”? To someone like me brought up in a tradition of impartial journalism, the word “balance” suggests an even-handed approach to a topic, but that isn’t what the founders of the GWPF have in mind. Their site is an anthology of straightforward and thoroughgoing climate skepticism, much of it from familiar voices. Let one author and one title stand for many: Christopher Booker and The BBC and Climate Change: A Triple Betrayal.19 “Only triple?” I want to say. Standards really must be slipping.
But in one sense, I think the GWPF really is an attempt to restore balance to the debate. Faced with the formidable scientific institutions backing the case that dangerous climate change is almost certainly taking place—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Royal Society, the American National Academy of Sciences, and so on—the foundation is an attempt to put a heavy paw into the other scale by gathering together a group of committed climate skeptics, many with distinguished careers in government, business, and academia. Dr. Peiser’s remarks are best seen as a demand that these other authorities be taken as seriously as, and when it comes to policy formulation, perhaps more seriously than the scientists. When such important social and economic questions are at stake, isn’t it both dangerous and politically unrealistic to leave science—and particularly the policy implications of science—to the scientists?
How best should we think about this gambit? Let me begin with myself. Like most nonscientists of my social and educational background, I accept that science is by far our best way of understanding the material world. When it comes to an argument, I almost always find myself instinctively on the side of mainstream science. I don’t do that because I have personally checked the evidence that underpins The Origin of Species or worked through Schrödinger’s equations: I haven’t the expertise to do either. No, I back science because I find Karl Popper’s account of the scientific method compelling20 and because, at the level of common sense, the explanatory and predictive success of science is so overwhelming. And I’ve spent enough time with scientists to be convinced that the culture and practice of science genuinely aim at truth.
At the same time, I know it’s too simplistic to say that science is always and immediately right. Sometimes there’s not enough data, or the puzzle of what the data means has yet to be cracked, or the whole thing is still a work in progress: the science is, or at least appears, unfinished. On other occasions, scientists disagree—there are rival explanations, or there’s a candidate’s explanation that some scientists back but others oppose: in these cases, the science is disputed. On still other occasions, someone may call into question the good faith of the scientists—they’re in the pay of the government or big business or committed to some cause and therefore their work may lack impartiality and thus reliability: we might call this corrupted, or at least compromised science. We also know that on very rare occasions, there have been dramatic revolutions in the history of science when a consensus view has been overturned in favor of a radical new theory.
So as we listen to a scientific debate, in principle any number of doubts can arise. Yes, of course we still believe in the authority of good, finished, honest science—but maybe in this case it’s not quite ready; or maybe we’re in the middle of a he says–she says wrangle; or maybe there is something fishy about the way that report was paid for; or maybe that lone scientist I heard on the radio is right and it’s the other 99 percent of physicists who will be proved wrong in the end. In an age of endemic suspicion and uncertainty, it doesn’t take much for the weevils to get to work.
And there’s something else. Let’s imagine a conversation between two characters. We can think of them as stereotypes, though many of us have encountered plenty of real-life examples of both. Let’s call the first person the Executive. She doesn’t dismiss the green agenda out of hand, but she thinks there’s a lot of nonsense and political correctness attached to it and she’s genuinely terrified about the cost and bureaucracy involved in some of the proposed solutions. To her, what the Global Warming Policy Foundation says probably makes a lot of sense. The second person I’ll call the Environmentalist. He worries at every level—from the practical to the moral—about the damage he believes humanity is doing to our ecosystem. His fear is not that policy makers are doing too much but that their actions are too little and too late.
The conversation begins with climate change. Unsurprisingly, the Executive has grave doubts about the so-called science behind global warming. Didn’t those scientists in East Anglia do something wrong and didn’t even the IPCC drop a clanger about Himalayan glaciers? Are you a scientist? asks the Environmentalist. No? Then who are you to doubt the conclusions reached by the overwhelming majority of the world’s climatologists?
Then the conversation switches to genetically modified foods or GMOs. Now it’s the Environmentalist who voices doubts about the science: perhaps it’s not ready and we don’t yet understand the potential risks. Or perhaps, because of the commercial interests involved, the science isn’t truly independent. And now it’s the Executive who makes the case for simply backing the experts.
In other words, our preconceptions—our worldview even—can be critical in determining whether we’re prepared to accept the authority of science or to turn up the dial on all the available doubts. How can we predict whether or not someone is convinced by the scientific case for anthropogenic global warming? Is it how many years he’s spent studying science in school and college? Or does it depend on how much she’s read or how many scientists she’s heard talking about the subject? In fact, it turns out that a strong indication is how he or she votes. Numerous polls in both Britain and America suggest that people on the Left are more likely to believe the case than those on the Right. To take a single example, the results of a Pew poll conducted in the United States in 2014 suggested that 42 percent of Democratic voters thought that dealing with global warming was a “top policy priority,” whereas only 14 percent of Republican voters did.21 One’s response to a piece of hard, technical science can, to a significant degree, be a matter of ideological taste.
We tend to view science, like everything else, through the lens of our own beliefs and prejudices. As we saw in the case of vaccine safety, and notwithstanding the fact that scientific uncertainty is itself a topic that requires scientific expertise to master, we can easily find ourselves treating the reliability of a given scientific claim as if it was like any other debate in which our own and other people’s lay opinions are as good as anyone else’s. And we arbitrarily shift our view about our own level of authority. We probably won’t argue when a dentist tells us that the X-ray of our mouth shows an abscess. But we may very well believe we have something useful to add—something we’ve read on the Web, the benefit of our common sense, a fond anthropomorphic memory of The Wind in the Willows—as a scientist explains the case for or against culling badgers.
* * *
When we consider this background—of preconception and expectation, fear and prejudice—against which science has to make its public case, the puzzle of why scientific evidence and judgment is so often treated as just one more opinion becomes easier to explain. But we need to add to this another factor that concerns the structure and character of argument itself.
Modern public debates about science often represent a messy clash between two not just different but diametrically opposed approaches to argument: scientific argument and advocacy.
Scientific argument—if we imagine it idealized in a perfect scientific paper—seeks to state its case not just as clearly as possible but in a sense also as weakly as possible. Every objection, every area of doubt should be mentioned and dealt with. If there is a rival theory, which the paper intends to argue against, it should be presented in its most compelling form. All of its strong points should be set out before the evidence supporting the paper’s own hypothesis is brought to bear.
Advocacy does the opposite. Advocacy prefers to ignore or skate over the weak points in its own case and focus on those in its opponent’s. It feels less of an obligation to clarity and comprehensiveness, and is happy to rely on rhetorical effects to win the day. Advocacy can itself be part of a systematic search for the truth—in the context of a law court, for instance, where each side can make its own case and challenge the other’s—but it is a quite different way of seeking the truth.
So what happens when you mix science and advocacy? Let’s take an example involving the UK’s most distinguished scientific body, the Royal Society (RS). In 2007, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary called The Great Global Warming Swindle which, as its title suggests, aired strongly skeptical views. It was the most high-profile part of a wave of skepticism that many scientists feared might be turning public opinion against the case for anthropogenic climate change. In June that year, the RS weighed in with a paper called “Climate change controversies: a simple guide.” It begins with these words: “The Royal Society has produced this overview of the current state of scientific understanding of climate change to help non-experts better understand some of the debates in this complex area of science.” Then it lays its cards on the table. The paper, it says,
is not intended to provide exhaustive answers to every contentious argument that has been put forward by those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change and deny the seriousness of the potential consequences of global warming. Instead, the Society—as the UK’s national academy of science—responds here to eight key arguments that are currently in circulation by setting out where the weight of scientific evidence lies.22
Next we are treated to a series of punchy ripostes to eight of the arguments put forward by the climate skeptics on pages headed “Misleading argument 1,” “Misleading argument 2,” and so on.
This passage is almost a rhetorical mirror image of Benny Peiser’s introduction to the GWPF’s annual lecture. Now the “weight of scientific evidence” and “the UK’s national academy of science” in all their sober might are ranged against “those who seek to distort and undermine the science of climate change.” The only real caveat offered is that the “consequences of global warming” are only “potential.” Note also the withdrawal of the assumption of good faith. This is not a debate between people of integrity but a battle between enlightened science and hostile forces who actively want to “distort” and “undermine.” The same claim is included in a letter to the journal Science in 2010 from hundreds of members of the US National Academy of Sciences: “Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence.”23
We’re told in neither case what the evidence is of this malign intentionality. The conclusion that the deniers have ulterior and dishonest motives was not arrived at through Hume’s “experimental reasoning”: it’s conjectural—and the kind of ad hominem point scoring we normally associate with political rather than scientific discourse. This is how the RS guide ends: “We must also prepare for the impacts of climate change, some of which are already inevitable.”24
Not probably inevitable, but inevitable. As advocacy, this is forthright stuff. It uses the extraordinary authority of the Royal Society to full effect and it spells out its case in plain language and with far fewer conditions and qualifications than one would normally expect to see in a communication from scientists.
And that was the problem. What followed was predictable: forty-three members of the RS complained about the tone of “Climate change controversies,” in particular its “stridency” and failure to fully acknowledge areas of “uncertainty” in the science. Accordingly, the RS commissioned a new guide, which was eventually published in the autumn of 2010.
The rhetorical flavor of this second guide is very different from the first. It is called Climate change: A Summary of the Science, and, at least to my nonscientist’s eye, it is exactly that. Now the question of scientific uncertainty is dealt with at length. Indeed, the guide is partly structured along a spectrum of certainty in sections with titles such as “Aspects of Climate Change Where There Is a Wide Consensus but Continuing Debate and Discussion” and “Aspects That Are Not Well Understood.”25
As far as I can tell, the underlying scientific evidence on which the two guides rely is almost identical. I’ve no doubt that the majority of the scientists who signed off on the second guide were just as convinced that the weight of the evidence points to a high probability of significant anthropogenic warming as the authors of the first. The difference between the two guides is in the character of the argumentation: the second draws back from the techniques and language of advocacy toward something that is much closer to straightforward scientific exposition.
But the publication of the second guide did not signal a withdrawal by the RS from the policy debate about climate change. Senior representatives—including successive presidents—of the society have continued to play a lively part in that debate, urging governmental action at national and international levels while maintaining steady fire on the climate skeptics. That fateful transition from the dialectical and rhetorical zone of science qua science to that of advocacy has also occurred in the United States. “As scientists, it is not our role to tell people what they should do or must believe,” the American Association for the Advancement of Science said in March 2014, but then proceeded to do precisely that, going beyond the dissemination of scientific knowledge to urge action on CO2 emissions.26 This is the exact boundary between science and politics—the boundary not just between two vocations and disciplines but between two realms of discourse and argument—and both the RS and the AAAS have chosen to cross it.
As we noted, Benny Peiser’s 2011 claim that the global warming “hysteria” was over—or, to put it more soberly, that public and political interest and urgency on the topic were on the wane—was based on reality. In the UK, a Populus poll suggested that between the autumn of 2009 and the spring of 2010, those who said they did not believe that global warming was taking place had jumped from 15 to 25 percent and those who agreed with the statement “man-made climate change is environmentalist propaganda for which there is little or no evidence” rose from 9 to 14 percent.27 In the US, the percentage of respondents who thought there was “solid evidence” that any kind of warming was taking place fell from 70 percent in 2006 to 62 percent in 2014,28 and by 2013, when Americans were asked to rank global threats, climate change was cited by fewer (40 percent) than North Korea’s and Iran’s nuclear programs (59 and 54 percent, respectively), not to mention “international financial instability” (52 percent) and “China’s power and influence” (44 percent).29 Skepticism is lower in other Western countries and in much of the developing world, although the issue recently fell down the policy agenda in some of these places as well, especially after the global financial crisis drew the attention of both politicians and populations away from the environment and toward the challenge of restoring economic stability and growth.
Compare this with the overwhelming view of the world’s climate scientists. One survey suggested that 97 percent of atmospheric scientists believe that man-made climate change is happening.30 Skepticism is not unknown even among climatologists, but it is extremely rare. A study that looked at scientific papers on global warming published in peer-reviewed journals during 2013 and 2014 found that of 69,406 papers, only 4 came down against anthropogenic warming.31 This research was compiled by a campaigner against climate change skepticism, but many other studies support the conclusion that there is no meaningful “scientific controversy” between the overwhelming majority of working scientists in the field that there is a very high probability not just that the planet is getting warmer but also that industrial activity is a major cause and that the consequences for human life on Earth will be serious.
This stark contrast between the judgment of the experts and the public led many scientists to conclude that the world faced an acute failure in the popular understanding of a critical scientific issue. This failure precluded any public consensus in favor of meaningful action on climate change and, because politicians are so influenced by the public mood, that in turn was undermining national and multinational progress on the topic. The problem was not about our scientific knowledge as such, but about the transmission of that knowledge into the public realm. It was a problem of communication, in other words, and the scientists decided to address it as exactly that and with traditional rhetorical tactics. Stand up and be counted. State your argument with as few caveats as you can. Take the battle to the enemy. The campaigning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a compendium of the scientific evidence of serious anthropogenic warming based on Al Gore’s celebrated slide show, was an influential example of this more aggressive approach.
It’s easy to understand why, given what they believe is at stake, so many climatologists have felt it their duty to speak out on global warming, and why so many scientists who are not climate specialists have been emboldened to join them. Experts turn to advocacy when they fear that the facts may not be getting through, that they need to do something more to convince their audience. But how effective is it as a tactic? Not very, at least if climate change is anything to go by. Like any forthright manifesto, An Inconvenient Truth may well have rallied those who were already convinced that dangerous climate change was taking place, but there’s little evidence it convinced many skeptics or even made significant inroads into the undecideds. Nor is it demonstrable that stronger language from the IPCC or national scientific bodies has significantly changed opinions. Advocacy and arguments about bad faith play into the hands of the climate skeptics who would much rather have that kind of debate than one about the facts themselves. The more scientists sound like politicians with an agenda, the less convincing they are likely to be.
The Pollution of Meanings
How does the media manage to make sense of this complex landscape? With great difficulty, is the honest answer. The headline reasons should come as no surprise: the subject is hard, life is short, impact and controversy usually beat evidence and explanation. In the case of science and the media, however, it’s worth spending some time on the particulars.
First, with notable exceptions like The New York Times, there are far fewer specialist science correspondents today than a generation ago—the deteriorating economics of news has seen to that. The generalist reporters, editors, and commentators who end up covering science stories often have no more knowledge of the subject and, in particular, understanding of the difference between specialist scientific “opinion” and the hunches of an untrained activist or politician, than the average person on the street. This loss of subject-specific expertise is true across the social sciences as well.
Second, both they and the readers are often trapped in clicheic narratives and cultural stereotypes about science, which make for easy headline writing but impede rather than aid understanding. In their study of biotechnology and the popular press in Flanders, “Knowledge culture and power,” Peter Maeseele and Dimitri Schuurman included an hunches table of the four hundred metaphors used in the Flemish popular press between 2000 and 2004 to describe the debate about different kinds of biotech:
GMOs: use of the “Frankenstein” metaphor—22 times
GMOs are pollutants—4 times
The battle against GMOs is a crusade—twice
Cloning is Jurassic Park—6 times
Cloning means eternal life—26 times
Genetic manipulation is a Nazi practice—10 times
Genetic manipulation is “Brave New World”—6 times
Genetic manipulation is an activity pursued by Saddam Hussein—once32
And so on. Although a few are positive, the overwhelming majority of the metaphors are negative, and many are nightmarish. The powerful and readily digestible narratives evoked by the words “Frankenstein,” “Jurassic Park,” and “Nazi,” all of them redolent of science gone wrong or perverted to evil ends, have the effect of setting up a journalistically potent air of jeopardy and panic, which hardly helps readers judge the objective evidence and the case for and against GMOs. Promises of “eternal life” belong to another genre of science writing that chiefly trades in miracle pills and magic cures, the grotesque exaggeration of early-stage medical discoveries that in most cases lead to nothing at all. These kinds of myth and legend are widely disseminated, however, and their influence often crowds out science reality. In Flanders, Maaseele and Schuurman concluded that what they called the “science-industrial complex” had either lost or was losing the “interpretive struggle.”33
Even those science correspondents and columnists who are too sophisticated to play the Frankenstein card can still fall under the influence of deep narratives about humanity, science, and nature. Silent Spring, Rachel Carson’s 1962 warning about the use of pesticides, set out a substantial body of empirical evidence, but what made the book resonate was its focus on industrial mankind’s hubris as the central threat to the natural world, and Carson’s ominous, elegiac tone. In her “fable for tomorrow,” a dystopic description of an imaginary American town after nature has been ruined, she wrote that “some evil spell had settled on the community.” This almost religious sense of the fragility of the natural world, of wanton human greed and a squandered stewardship, has colored much of the reporting of environmental issues ever since.
The Club of Rome’s famous 1972 report, The Limits to Growth, successfully created a paradigm about economic growth and the exhaustion of the world’s natural resources that informs the reporting of these topics to this day, even though the simulation on which was based remains controversial and many of its projections, which were taken by the media at the time to be predictions, have turned out to be wide of the mark.34 What the press and public took from The Limits to Growth was a simple story, and that story stuck.
A third issue is that reporters and editors wrestle with many different kinds of authority. Doctors and scientists are clearly authority figures and are generally treated as such. But we live in an era where victims are accorded a high level of authority as well: their pain and, in the case of the bereaved, their personal loss is understandably thought to give them the right to speak out without aggressive cross-examination. Thus the asymmetry of a dispassionate expert debating the safety of a given medical procedure with someone who has no specialist understanding but who carries the immense human credibility of having been through the experience himself—and the inevitable risk that the statements that these two people make will be regarded as somehow equivalent.
We may not like it but, at least in media terms, celebrities have a kind of authority too. Many people are genuinely interested in their opinions and, as in the case of vaccines, some celebrities either are, or at least know, victims of the thing against which they are complaining. Jenny McCarthy has an autistic son. Even Donald Trump tells us, “I’ve known cases.”
At least from their own perspective, then, editors often find themselves trying to juggle and balance different kinds of authority within a story or a studio discussion. It is not that scientific authority is blatantly disrespected; rather that, in much of modern media, it is not granted the privileged status relative to other voices that most scientists—and plenty of thoughtful nonscientists—think it deserves. In many ways, this is the heart of the media’s conundrum of how best to integrate science, and the special language of science, into the public discourse that is their stock-in-trade.
* * *
In July 2011, the governing body of the BBC published a report on the impartiality and accuracy of the way the BBC covers science, written by the eminent British scientist Steve Jones.35 It’s a thoughtful and serious piece of work that was welcomed and accepted almost in its entirety by the BBC. It contains an argument—a rather civilized argument, it must be said, but an argument nonetheless—between Professor Jones and some of his BBC interlocutors that goes to the heart of the question of how we should think about authority in public argument.
When it comes to impartiality, to what extent should the BBC (and by extension the media as a whole) treat science like everything else—politics, religion, the arts—and to what extent differently because of science’s unique epistemological claims? To caricature the two extremes, the first would suggest that science should climb into the boxing ring like every other interest and submit to all the usual rules of adversarial debate, the second that the role of the broadcaster when a scientist wishes to speak is to turn on the microphone at the start and to say thank you at the end. I know many scientists who fervently believe in the second position. To use the framework I introduced in chapter 7, they are Enlightenment rhetorical rationalists, who believe that argument grounded in evidence and logic should always and immediately carry the day. They consequently find the many contemporary examples where this is manifestly not the case evidence of either a dysfunctional media or possibly some kind of collective public madness.
Steve Jones claimed that some people at the BBC told him that the doctrine of impartiality implied “equality of voice.” For a broadcaster or other news provider who strives for political impartiality, the concept of equality of voice is more or less obligatory for election coverage (where airtime to different parties may be allocated on the basis of electoral support and monitored with a stopwatch) and is likely to extend more loosely to all party political debate, and perhaps even to discussions between politicians and members of the public on broad questions—immigration, euthanasia, gay marriage—where there are broad divisions of opinion.
But it doesn’t make sense in all circumstances. The BBC’s Editorial Guidelines in fact call for “due impartiality,” which I take to mean an approach to fairness in debate that takes account of the specific context of the argument. There are many moral questions where there is something close to unanimity among the public—murder, terrorism, and other serious crimes, for instance—and where “equality of voice” would be regarded by most people as inappropriate and offensive.
Nor is equal time or equal attention applicable in debates about facts, where those facts are incontrovertibly or substantially known. The dangers to health from smoking are so clearly established that it would not be impartial but irresponsible to give a smoking enthusiast equal time with the chief medical officer or surgeon general, or fail to warn the audience about the very different background—minority perspective, lack of medical knowledge and corroborative evidence—against which to judge the interview. When it comes to climate change, the BBC has progressively shifted the balance of its coverage—and the access to the air given to the two sides of the debate—in the light of the growing scientific consensus about global warming expressed in successive findings of the IPCC and similar bodies. Despite errors in the early stages of the MMR-autism controversy, the same became true of coverage of that issue. Much of the rest of mainstream media made similar adjustments.
No responsible media organization slavishly interprets impartiality as “equality of voice” in every instance, and if any BBC editors told Steve Jones that such equality was appropriate in scientific controversies like that about climate change, they were wrong.
Of course, none of this will stop the skeptics demanding equality. Earlier in this chapter, we heard Bill Maher argue if not for that, then at least for more voice for vaccine skepticism on the basis that the science is less clear-cut than the orthodox view claims; as we saw, however, he was misinformed about the level of doubt about the science. Indeed, given the clarity of the science, vaccine skepticism is probably still over- rather than under-represented in terms of share of voice. Many climate change deniers similarly exaggerate the uncertainty associated with the science in order to argue for more airtime for their claims. The GWPF often does that, although as we saw with Benny Peiser, it has a second, altogether more interesting claim—that the “policy implications” of climate change demand a much broader debate because they inevitably impinge on matters of wider social and economic significance.
This point is impossible to dismiss, and it illustrates how difficult a task it is for the media to do justice to a topic like climate change while simultaneously maintaining due impartiality in every layer of the debate: at the level of the fundamental science, mirroring the balance of expert opinion and granting, say, less than 10 percent of airtime or words to the skeptical perspective, while handling a debate between political parties about the right policy response on the basis of “equality of voice.” The task is made that much harder by the fact that it is in the interests of all the parties—and particularly those on the skeptical side—to constantly flit back and forth between questions of science and those of policy.
Let one example stand for many. In February 2014, the Today program staged a discussion between Lord Lawson, the chair of the GWPF, and Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, director of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, about the connection between climate change and a recent spate of floods and other extreme weather events in Britain. The BBC received numerous complaints. The complaints were at first rejected but then in June 2014 upheld on appeal, on the basis that the radio interviewer’s failure to correct false statements by Lord Lawson on matters of science had failed to meet the corporation’s requirements for both accuracy and due impartiality. This is how one complainant characterized the case:
It is very unfortunate that the BBC sought initially to justify the interview with Lord Lawson on the grounds that he had been invited on, as chair of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a campaign group for climate change “sceptics,” to discuss the economics and politics of climate change. However, as in previous interviews, Lord Lawson used most of his air-time to dispute the science of climate change. This interview is symptomatic of the confused and flawed approach adopted by some BBC programmes towards the coverage of climate change. A review by Professor Steve Jones for the BBC Trust in 2011 recommended that programmes should be more careful about creating a false balance between scientists and climate change “sceptics.”36
“Confused and flawed” the approach may sometimes be, but in the real world of quotidian live media, the challenge of segregating science and policy debate is borderline impossible. Many scientists clearly believe that the best solution is simply to exclude the skeptical viewpoint from the media altogether, and some media organizations have adopted this approach. The Los Angeles Times no longer publishes letters that cast doubt on global warming,37 and the editors of the science forum subsection of Reddit have done likewise.38 But these moves led to inevitable cries of censorship and may give credence to the very conspiracy theories on which the skeptics dine out.
One can sympathize with the frustration of the scientists and their supporters, and still doubt whether anyone has ever won an argument by stopping their opponent from being heard. If you are confident of your case, and science has every reason to be confident about climate change, you should welcome every opportunity to debate it. Censorship speaks instead of weakness—and perhaps of a kind of despair about whether the public is capable of discriminating between the valid claims of science and the essentially false prospectus of the skeptics.
Writing in Nature, Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School who comments on the climate change debate, argues that the difficulty of successfully communicating information to the public about science lies not with the public’s reasoning capacity (that practical wisdom we discussed in the last chapter) but with a divisive “science-communication environment.” He goes on to say: “Overcoming this dilemma requires collective strategies to protect the quality of the science-communication environment from the pollution of divisive cultural meanings.”39 So now we have an ecology of language itself, and instead of Rachel Carson’s pesticides or those noxious vaccines, a pollution of “divisive cultural meanings.”
Yet although we may sympathize with Professor Kahan’s frustration, surely those “divisive cultural meanings” are an inevitable part of post-Enlightenment pluralism and open democratic debate, and even if we could imagine any “collective strategies” that could protect us from them—Professor Kahan suggests that both psychology and anthropology might come in handy—would we really want to employ them? And in any event, just who would decide which of the cultural meanings were the divisive ones? That too might well turn out to be a source of division; in a world that struggles to accept the special status of any discipline or expertise, an appeal to authority is likely to be a fool’s errand.
Nonetheless, Professor Kahan puts his finger on the problem. For evidence that our public language is heading into crisis, we need look no farther than the climate change debate. Science is meant to be the decider, a species of knowledge that stands above the fray and whose pronouncements should be listened to and acted upon without delay. But instead it too is subject to the blurring of definitions and demarcations that we have encountered throughout this book.
And if the authority of science no longer carries the day, then why should we accept any other branch of specialist knowledge? Why should we believe what the economists and social scientists and other government experts tell us? Or accept the decisions of the courts? After all, if knowledge counts for nothing and everything is a matter of opinion, we’re all experts and no one can persuade us otherwise.