A Sucking Pit

Posted on October 14, 2005 in Evolution & Creation Thinking

Thrall of emotion that I am, I know that I do not always run myself down the wide grooves of strict rationalism. I am the wind, the winter floods bursting from the canyons, and I am not at all uncomfortable with the fact that while I am physically not any of those things, it is no folly to identify myself as them — so long as I respect the place of metaphor.

The image I use to identify the ways of Science is that of an archaeological dig. Researchers start at it with shovels, clearing away the obvious. When they strike the first artifact, they continue with trowels. For the most delicate objects, they use toothbrushes and tweezers to painstakingly remove the grains of dirt. The archaeologist does not jump to conclusions about what she will find beneath the soil. What she finds she finds. If it conforms to a theory she had, she rejoices. If not, she changes the theory.

I think the hostility to Science and expertise derives from the rudeness that Americans have made their trademark. We’re a nation whose citizens do not like to be corrected. And the result is a failure to respect others and a failure to learn.

Modern scientists bear part of the blame. Academics often cloister themselves inside the universities, unwilling to share their knowledge with any but a few graduate students. Twenty five years ago — before I flunked out due to a “nervous breakdown” — I was a graduate student at Duke University. I often predicted to my fellows and my professors that if they continued to isolate themselves from the public, they would find that the public would stumble into ignorance. These seemed to feel too good for the task, however, and turned their backs when I began to speak. Though these anthropologists read and discussed Marx and attended protests, they seemed to want to do little in the way of educating the public. They accepted grants from large corporations for their research and rocked no boats that might have allowed capitalism’s captive mermaids to return to the sea.

The People, they implied, were too stupid to understand. I disputed this and I continue to dispute this. (And thankfully, there are more than a few good science bloggers who write as if this was not true.) If you throw numbers at people, they will hide. But if you speak to them in plain yet eloquent language of the facts, they will listen.

The arrogance of scientists is often used in overexplanation of the anti-intellectual trend sweeping America today. Not enough is said about the arrogance of ordinary Americans. As I noted in connection with my citation about the rise of rudeness in America, ordinary Americans don’t like to be told. It’s a character flaw stemming, I think, not from a loss of proper training, but from a loss of confidence in themselves. The Fundamentalists who oppose Creationism see papers for the family farm, the factory, and the mill yanked away from them. Their vision of an anthropomorphic god is confused: in their eyes, God couldn’t possibly be punishing them. Or is he?

The strange mix of low self-esteem and arrogance leads the ordinary person to distrust all experts. Witness it in Tom Cruise who thinks he can reject all scientific findings to the contrary and state definitively that chemical imbalances have nothing to do with mood disorders. I have seen similar sentiments go unchecked on a popular science blog which otherwise speaks clearly to scientific controversies and noncontroversies.

These form a distinct minority, however. The real perpetrators are the guy across the street who, while fixing his motorcycle, does not want to believe that the fly sucking up his swirling sweat comes from the same ambitious cell as he does. He stands, wrench in hand, as the biology professor who lives a few doors down passes and curses his peer for trying to make a monkey out of him. The issue in the fellow’s head is entirely social. He doesn’t want to be the monkey. Regardless of the scientist’s real or imagined arrogance, he bears blame because he has allowed himself to think less of himself. Instead of struggling to state that his being is as worthy of respect as anyone else regardless of the actual workings of the universe, he levels the field by dismissing the scientist as a clever liar.

The tragedies that erupt from this way of thinking are legion: magical thinking, unnecessary quarreling, culture war, erosion of the scientific research base, prejudice not only towards those who work in science but also towards those who are the beneficiaries of its advances. By concentrating on Progress, the average person sells her/himself to retrograde elements who, while promoting this animosity against the learned, do not hesitate to claim and use the findings of the same.

There is no reason or sincere emotion in this that I can see, no compassion for the suffering of others or sense of their dignity. What I see is a wet dump, a sucking pit into which all are drawn unless they have the smarts to move towards its rim.

[Popular newspaper reports have it that the problem comes out of “permissive” culture:

Peggy Newfield, founder and president of Personal Best, said the generation that came of age in the times-a-changin’ 1960s and 1970s are now parents who don’t stress the importance of manners, such as opening a door for a female.

In rebuttal, I must add that the new generation of parents comes out of the eighties and nineties. Blaming it on the Sixties and the Seventies is getting old, but I do not doubt that Retrogrades will be citing it as a fact until I am in my nineties.]