The Conspiracy of Left and Right to Discredit Science

by Lorna Salzman (July 2015)

Huffington Post is laughable. This pretension at publishing is a low-brow joke foisted onto liberals but it is by no means the worst. Democracy Now, truthdig, alternet, et al, are far worse because they eschew lurid trivia about sex over 70 and micro-penises in favor of “serious” political analysis. Huffington gets the clown prize when it complains that “..slave owning, Indian-killing Andrew Jackson” is still on the $20 bill. Pretty soon a Huffington yellow journalist will publish heavy-breathing exposes of all the signers of the Declaration of Independence, leading to demands to remove all mention of them from our textbooks, not just our paper currency. “Benjamin Franklin was a philanderer in Paris” (we’ve already had a version of “Thomas Jefferson seduced and impregnated his favorite slave and then cut her out of his will”). Alexander Hamilton! Boy, is he going to get it from the leftist Vice Squad….even though Aaron Burr finished off that libertine and his capitalist economic views.

Is there a bright spot? YES. One just appeared: Naomi Oreskes. Her book Merchants of Doubt, co-authored with Erik Conway, is one of the most thorough and revelatory books ever written about the deliberate corporate/free marketeer conspiracy to undermine science. And it names names too, most notably F. Fred Singer, a physicist and ex-environmentalist who went over to the dark (i.e. wealthy) side, and including the former head of the National Academy of Sciences and Rockefeller University, Frederick Seitz, William Nierenberg, Robert Jastrow and other black-hatted masters of mendacity. Singer’s vicious attacks on Roger Revelle, a pioneer in climate change science, pursued Revelle to his hospital bed where was being treated shortly before his fatal heart attack. Posthumously Singer published quotes from Revelle that he grossly edited to remove Revelle’s staunch support for anthropogenic climate change, and later filed a lawsuit against Justin Lancaster, a defender of Revelle who charged Singer with deliberately falsifying Revelle’s work. Singer prevailed in the suit which put a ten-year gag order on Lancaster, sealed the court documents and forced him to retract his claim.

Oreskes and Conway have slashed open the hat and the rabbit and revealed the entrails of the odiferous assemblage called the “free marketeers,” whose campaign to undermine any and all government regulation in the name of “freedom” has never eased up. For them, denying honest science and creating their own science out of whole cloth is the only way to stave off creeping socialism. But wait. The story isn’t over. On the left side of the aisle is a different kind of merchant of doubt: Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s modus operandi barely differs from one of the main strategies of the corporations, and in one key respect it mirrors it directly. It is the mastery of questions and the introduction of new hypotheses. Both of these are arguably the most effective way of avoiding outright lies and enhancing the credibility of your own positions. Being a master linguist, Chomsky’s hypothesizing mode is exquisitely fine-tuned and effective, and for the paleo-liberals and the left, especially the America haters, he was a god-sent messenger: scholar, academic, intellectual, researcher, at a prestigious university. A whole generation, maybe two or three, opened their eyes, ears and brain orifices and took in his line as leftist gospel. 

But let’s go on now to a choice example of Chomsky’s use of hypothesis to obscure, distract and confuse. Here is an excerpt from an article that I wrote a few years ago, in which Chomsky took issue with Senator George McGovern over the atrocities committed by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, both of whom Chomsky staunchly defended. Technically it is not an hypothesis but a “What if?” postulation, but the function and result are the same: raising a hypothetical alternate scenario to rebut his adversary….without having to either lie or present verifiable figures. This is truly one of the cleverest and most devious verbal deceptions ever invented (worthy of some lawyers though).

Here is the excerpt:

An Australian leftist upon whom Chomsky relied for much of his source material on southeast Asia, Ben Kiernan, used to write for the Maoist Melbourne Journal of Politics, but later recanted in an article in the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, after learning that in Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, Pol Pot was responsible for the murder of 21% of the population, about 1.67 million out of a total of 7.89 million. Not even China or the Soviet Union came close to this, especially since many of the deaths under Mao and Stalin were not direct murders but were due to well-documented and observed starvation, concentration camp mistreatment and hard labor.

NOR WOULD HE HAVE BEEN LIKELY TO PROPOSE THIS EXTREME MEASURE IF THE DEATHS IN CAMBODIA WERE NOT THE RESULT OF SYSTEMATIC SLAUGHTER AND STARVATION ORGANIZED BY THE STATE BUT RATHER ATTRIBUTABLE IN LARGE MEASURE TO PEASANT REVENGE, UNDISCIPLINED MILITARY UNITS OUT OF GOVERNMENT CONTROL, STARVATION AND DISEASE THAT ARE DIRECT CONSEQUENCES OF THE U.S. WAR, OR OTHER SUCH FACTORS” (After the Cataclysm, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, page 139).

Just prior to this, in fact, Chomsky cast similarly clever doubt on the two million deaths mentioned by McGovern, using once again a hypothetical smaller figure of 25,000 and thus suggesting again that the official numbers of deaths might be much smaller.

Here Chomsky wins the prize for Leftist Merchant of Doubt. It’s a brilliant performance that F. Fred Singer would appreciate, but it is no less reprehensible than the many dozens of examples that Oreskes and Conway provide in their immaculately documented and sourced book. Chomsky may not be perceived as destroying science but he is most certainly violating the precepts of honest research and critical analysis. In the face of flawed scientific hypotheses, scientists are forced to relinquish those that cannot be replicated (i.e. confirmed). In the case of political claims like those of Chomsky, an ideologically motivated political hypothesis is being put forward so as to give the impression that it has a factual foundation. But no such foundation exists. Chomsky is in effect asking us to accept his hypothesis without evidence or providing any means of DISPROVING IT. It is an opinion masquerading as a hypothesis. If it persuades someone that it is credible, it has in effect functioned as a lie. Were a scientist to follow Chomsky’s methodology, he would be kicked out of the science community permanently.

Another example of anti-science attitudes on the left comes from the academic world where post-modernists, Marxists and some feminists have indulged in serious mischief-making over the past quarter of a century, giving contrarians, cranks, muddled New Agers and conservatives more ammunition to denigrate the discipline of science.

” and to place it on “a level field that does not privilege any single approach..”. He concludes that “the nihilism and relativism of radically constructionist critiques of science …while popular in some academic circles, is sophomoric (and) harmful because…it undermines efforts to save wilderness and biodiversity.”

Finally, even in some progressive circles, it has become fashionable to blame everything on the Enlightenment, during which new technologies based on new science were eagerly deployed.

But the Enlightenment was more than technological progress and exploitation. It was the shedding of the shackles of the Catholic Church and the separation of religion and state as well as the explosion in freedom of inquiry that was showered upon human societies. To blame science and technology rather than the follies and failings of human beings and their imperfect institutions is patently absurd. In the end the protocols of science are (or should be) models for human endeavors: a realm of hypothesis, dissent, rebuttal and often proof, a product of our intellect and reason rather than a promotion of an a priori ideology. In contrast to moralizing Religion, Science cannot tell us what is right or wrong but it can tell us the consequences of the choices before us. 

 

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Politics as if Evolution Mattered,” which addresses the intersection of evolution with socio-political policy. 

 

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