Environmental sciences, reality television, and western values

The environmental sciences are difficult, dense, technical, challenging, and interdisciplinary.¹ They do not lend themselves to a reality television program. Even so, that is what has been proposed.

This seems to be what is happening now, at least in the governing political class in the United States. Scott Pruit, the new administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, has proposed that the “issue” of what is driving climate change (since he agrees that the planet is warming) should be debated on television and implies that scientists should not fear open debate because the truth is reached through disputation.² One might observe how well that worked in the Scopes trial (State of Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes, 1925), a show trial and media event that was the reality disputation of its day, on radio.³ Readers unfamiliar with this court case only need to know that a teacher was found guilty of violating a religion-inspired state law against teaching evolution, that during the deliberations scientific evidence for evolution was excluded, and that on appeal the decision was upheld in part on the grounds that the state legislature had the privilege to ground its laws on whatever evidence it saw fit, including dogmatic, personally-held belief.

We like to think of science as value free and transcending culture and history. In this day and age, it generally is, but that is because we have made it that way. Science, as a systematic way of seeking the truth by proposing alternate ideas of the truth (we call them “hypotheses”) and then methodically disproving them, had to be invented. Then it had to demonstrate its usefulness against other ways of knowing that are more emotionally satisfying and less taxing, such as accumulating empirical evidence through simple observation, relying on prior authority, unquestioning faith, and personal revelation, and reliance on deduction rather than collecting data. That it did so was a watershed in civilization. It meant that it was possible to achieve objective and universal knowledge without being bound to a rigid and fallible belief system. Once invented, science became universal.

Modern science is a product of the Enlightenment in England and France around the 17th century. This legacy embeds it in a philosophy of liberal thought, small “l,” meaning individualism and freedom rather than left-leaning or partisan politics.⁴ It is not a coincidence that science thrives most abundantly in an atmosphere where there is a tradition of questioning, free expression, and collaboration, and especially where there is a liberal economic system that not only provides material support but also rewards individual effort and supports the exchange of ideas and applications. These are Enlightenment values, built on a foundation laid four centuries ago. The organized scientific enterprise began as an Enlightenment project. However, the Enlightenment was also a time of rigorous questioning and sometimes sacrilege, a time of cutting sarcasm (think Voltaire), and the biggest challenge to organized religion in Western Europe since the Reformation. Issues of theology and faith were not treated generously by the intellectual class, although religion remained a civic framework for society. Small wonder, then, that when science and other Enlightenment projects pinch the sensibilities of the faith community there is a reflex retreat into pre-Enlightenment values and thinking.

It is hardly surprising, then, that when science is inconvenient, there is a natural tendency to invoke faith, tradition, authority, and consensus. Other times and other civilizations have usually preferred belief systems that rely on faith, that presume an accepted order of society, or that rationalize contradiction. Science is disruptive because it requires a relentless and sometimes uncomfortable focus on what is and can be demonstrated to be true (more accurately, what cannot be disproven despite a concerted effort to disprove) as the surest road to knowing. How much more comfortable, then, to fall back on established tradition, comfortable ways of thinking, and a belief that humankind will be protected and restored by supernatural powers. Issues of fact become conflated with issues of belief. Objective reality is seen as a social construct and therefore negotiable, subject to not only alternative interpretations (which it should be), but even “alternative facts” (which it should not be).

Now we are faced with a challenge to science as a way of knowing. The political and social manifestations of this challenge arise primarily out of a reaction to painful findings in the environmental health sciences. The most obvious and dramatic example is the steadfast refusal to accept the evidence of climate change, which has long passed the point of being overwhelming. However, presented with the growing evidence for anthropogenic climate change, those for whom it does not fit their worldview become even more recalcitrant in denying it. This has led to a rediscovery of a rich body of knowledge in the behavioral sciences explaining the dynamics of bias and cognitive dissonance, leading to the extraordinary conclusion that people are not rational. Faced with strengthening evidence against their accepted position, people become more resistant, not more open, to the evidence; the primary mechanism appears to be self-protection because it is so threatening to be seen as wrong. Enlightenment values fade; the more familiar, atavistic ways of thinking come back.

Treating science as a reality television show and letting the audience keep score is a perversion of democratic process. It creates a superficial image of free debate while actually choking off the dense, technically informed debate that would be necessary if scientific disputes could ever be resolved this way. It allows personal and political agendas to be projected onto the debate, puts a premium on performance rather than evidence, and glosses the whole thing over with a superficial appearance of reasonableness. A cynic would think that this is exactly the intent.

The community of scientists has, over the centuries, adopted and refined basic rules of scientific discourse. These rules may appear to be culture bound, extravagant, and even elitist to some because they come from a particular time and place in intellectual thought. However, they have proven themselves to be universal. The rules of scientific discourse also have a huge, easily demonstrable advantage: they work exceedingly well in getting at the truth.

Declaration of interest

The views and opinions expressed in this column represent the opinion of the author and not necessarily those of the editorial board of this journal, the publisher, or other parties.