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Shawn Otto
is a novelist, screenwriter (House of Sand &
Fog), green architecture practitioner, National
Merit Scholar, TV and radio speaker, political commentator,
member of Mensa and Phi Beta Kappa, and a consultant
for the National Academy of Sciences (including producer
of a US Presidential Science Debate in 2016 that included
Trump, Clinton, Gary Johnson, Jill Stein, Obama, McCain,
and Mitt Romney.) He has published in Science, Salon,
Huffington Post, New Scientist, Rolling Stone, Scientific
American, and Nature Medicine. He graduated Magna
Cum Laude from MacAlester College. My interview with
him regarded his book THE WAR ON SCIENCE.
Jonathan Lowe: You
describe three areas in which science is under attack.
How are they related philosophically, and is the intent
short term profits at long term expense?
Shawn Otto:
All three areas are motivated by protection of their
vested interests, and they do this by attacking the
objectivity of science. Science creates knowledge,
knowledge is power, and that power is political because
it either confirms or challenges someone’s power
base. In the war on science, attacks are coming from
the postmodernist academic left, the fundamentalist
religious right, and industry whose business models
are threatened by new advances in health or environmental
science. Postmodernists argue that science is just
one of many ways of knowing, and that there is no
such thing as objectivity. What gives one authority
to speak on a subject is one’s membership in
a political identity group, eg, one’s race,
creed, sexual orientation, gender, political party,
etc. Instead of objectivity, authenticity is viewed
as having more authority. But science was developed
to strip what we actually know away from all those
subjective biases. If it rains and we both stick a
ruler in a bucket, we’re going to get the same
objective result no matter out identity subgroup.
Yet this false idea has been taught in journalism
and education schools for forty years and has eroded
the public’s capacity to think about what is
real. Journalists are especially guilty of this when
they take the view that the only thing they can do
is be fair and balanced. They will present in one
half of the story a scientist relaying all the objective
knowledge created by scientists over thousands of
experiments, and in the other half, to be “balanced,”
they will present someone with an opposing opinion.
This false equivalence of facts and opinions elevates
extreme voices on our public dialog. And, it opens
the way to authoritarianism, because if there is no
objective standard on which we all agree, how do we
settle arguments of contested facts, such as those
made by Donald Trump? The only means left is by the
person with the biggest stick or the loudest megaphone
funded by the biggest wallet. Around the same time
postmodernism was taking root in academia, fundamentalist
religion found its power base threatened by advances
in the bio sciences, particularly around human origins,
especially reproduction and sexuality. So we began
to see a very sophisticated development of alternative
theories to compete with, attack, and cast doubt on
or outright deny science around evolution, birth control,
when pregnancy begins, sexuality, gender, sexual orientation,
stem cells, abortion, HPV vaccination, sex education,
and in-vitro fertilization. They took advantage of
the foundation laid down by the postmodernists to
argue that science was something you either believed
in or not, rather than a matter of know-how. This
view was also adopted by industries who sought to
forestall or prevent science-based regulations that
affected their business model. So we see industries
opposed to pesticide regulation, tobacco regulation,
CO2 regulation, farming regulation, pharmaceutical
regulation, sugar regulation, and mining/extractive
industries regulation all mounting sophisticated public
relations campaigns taking advantage of postmodernist
ideas to create public uncertainty about the science,
and then argue that since we are uncertain it’s
premature to do anything.
Jonathan: I
saw a Wall Street Journal ad featuring a two legged
battle vehicle similar to the Avatar model that Col.
Quaritch climbed into, bristling with weapons. The
caption was "The future of everything."
The new novel AMERICAN WAR postulates a new dystopian
civil war in America between north and south in the
coming decades. Do you think we are headed for a breakdown
of society or economic collapse if we continue down
the anti-science, pro-military path, as Einstein said,
"Nationalism is the measles of humanity?”
Shawn: Yes,
it’s one of the things that I worry about and
have been warning about for several years. The breakdown
in the enlightenment idea of objectivity that modern
democracy was founded on is putting democracy itself
on a shaky political foundation, allowing authoritarians
to find a new legitimacy for their arguments that
they are the only way to bring stability, when it
is authoritarian attacks on democracy that are producing
the instability in the first place. Adding to that,
there is a growing sci-tech - democracy gap. Thomas
Jefferson encapsulated his thinking about democracy
when he wrote that “wherever the people are
well-informed, they can be trusted with their own
government.” But we have anti-democratic PR
campaigns that should be illegal as attacks on democracy
confusing the people about what is real, combined
with this growing gap between increasingly complex
sci-tech and the general public’s ability to
understand it. Arthur C Clarke once said that a sufficiently
advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic.
When that happens, and I’d argue it’s
happened with microelectronics and AI, when the average
American can’t take something apart and figure
out how it works, science and tech cease to be a matter
of knowhow and become a matter of belief Both Harry
Potter’s broom and your smart phone were made
by people cloistered away wearing long robes and uttering
strange incantations. What’s the difference?
And at that moment, we become vulnerable to disinformation
campaigns and democracy begins to face an existential
crisis.
Jonathan: One
of the crazy things about social media is all the
fake news going viral. Youtube is awash with Flat
Earth nonsense. I have tried to engage some of the
most prolific of them in answering questions, but
they either ignore the questions (and ask their own)
or block me outright. Which is why I started a literacy
blog at Good-Reads.blog. The detailed and lengthy
discussions on Youtube suggest some actually believe
it, although they know next to nothing about how science
works (not by observational empiricism, but rather
by idea leading to testing leading to theory, with
the intent to find better explanations.)
Shawn: These
social media bubble that focus on science denial extend
into the real world and are dangerous because they
mentally entrap people in a self-referential virtual
reality where if you accept one precept, you become
trapped in an intellectual web of all of them. A lawyer
seeing this stuff on social media also hears it on
AM talk radio, in email blasts targeted to the cookie
in his browser, in school textbooks containing text
denying science inserted by industry or religious-funded
interest groups, in fake newspapers like Environment
& Climate news, which the Heartland Institute
mails to every legislator in America and a good number
of government relations people, in unfounded Fox news
headlines about NASA fudging their measurements, in
“conservative” online sites like Breitbart,
and all this “evidence” reconfirms for
him the pre-determined conclusion that the folks pushing
this want him to have. It becomes psychologically
and sociologically nearly indistinguishable from cult
behavior, which is characterized by:
• Deeply partisan allegiance to a strong creed
or authority figure
• Denial of conflicting information: “We
have the truth and you don’t.”
• Deception and coercion in persuasion techniques
• Authoritarian, us-versus-them worldview; scapegoating
• Ideology explains everything; unfalsifiable;
“moving goalposts”
• Personality changes and/or dramatic shifts
in values
• Confrontation causes doubling down on ideology
• Leaving causes anxiety, depression, identity
loss, social loss
• Factors that make people more vulnerable to
recruitment:
• loneliness
• depression
• uncertainty
• insecurity — the same factors that characterize
heavy social media users
Jonathan: What
can we do to stop this madness?
Shawn: Academics
need to expose and discredit the authoritarian aspects
of postmodernist science denial. We need someone to
fund a national group like ALEC but that is there
to defend individual citizens and the idea of democracy,
and to craft model bills attacking denial, alternative
facts, and other attacks on our fundamental form of
government. Social media companies need to be pressured
to take more responsibility for insuring an equitable
exchange. They have effective taken over the public
square and monetized it, which has inserted perversions
into our public dialogue that need to be addressed.
Journalists need to stop the false balance; your true
job in a democracy is to hold the powerful accountable
to the evidence That should be your ethic, not “balance.”
Without that, how can the public hope to steer the
ship of democracy? Viewers who hear a false balance
story should immediately complain to the news show
or publication, and get their friends to as well.
Those station managers, news directors, editors and
publishers listen to that feedback and you can have
an impact. If you aren’t satisfied, white an
oped in a competing publication taking them to task.
Industry leaders need to stop it. Take a broader view
of “shareholder value” and corporate citizenship.
There is no legal basis for prioritizing shareholder
value above all else. An ethical business is there
to add value in every sphere it interacts in: adding
value for shareholders, but also for customers, for
employees, for the economy, and for society. Business
leaders who fail to do this are acting not only unethically,
but sociopathically. Science Journal publishers really
need to look at other funding streams so they can
afford to become open access. The public and journalists
need to linkable access to primary knowledge so they
can understand the know-how piece of science, and
that presented conclusions are not a matter of belief,
but of evidence. Granting bodies need to require and
fund 5% on lab outreach; labs have a responsibility
to maintain good relationships with and education
of the public funders of their work, and by focusing
on the how-to, the process of science, over the product,
scientists can begin to make science more accessible.
As Richard Feynman one said, if you can’t explain
it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.
Teachers need to focus more on process vs outcomes,
which I know is very difficult in an environment of
heavy high stakes testing. I speak to teachers a lot
and have lots of suggestions, lesson plan ideas, and
other resources to tackle these issues in a politic
and successful way. But start with team-teaching science
and civics, and have a unit on science as a civic
foundation. It will make both more relevant to students’
lives. Faith leaders need to stop rejecting science
or going for the political message and start subscribing
to the major science journals and publications. Houses
of worship are great places for moral and ethical
reflection, which is always necessary as science advances,
and science-literate faith leaders could, like the
faith leaders at the beginning of the scientific revolution,
seek to better equip their flocks to navigate the
many nuances of science in a complex world. Attorneys
who care about the erosion of facts, reason, and science
and the rise of authoritarianism should read the book
and use it as a foundation to begin to develop legal
strategies to defend democracy from denial, which
is an authoritarian tactic and thus unAmerican. Scientists
need to come out of the labs and meet people where
they are, in churches, civic clubs and organizations,
and in the media; to speak out about their work and
the importance of facts, objectivity, science, and
evidence in self-governance, to use inclusive language,
to create cognitive dissonance, and to be concrete
in their expression and examples.
Jonathan: What
reaction have you received to your books, and what's
next for you?
Shawn: I’ve
spoken in several countries about this growing threat,
and across the United States from the National Academies
to conservative churches to universities and non-profit
functions. People are beginning to recognize just
how shaky our current situation is, and that the rise
of authoritarianism is a real and present danger.
If people care about democracy, they should read The
War on Science, review it, and share it with their
friends and associates. The stakes are too high, and
people need to understand what is happening behind
the scenes that is causing this dangerous situation.
Next for me is to continue to write and speak and
organize on these topics. Perhaps I’ll find
a way to capture some of the ideas in popular fiction
to find a new audience, we’ll see. |
