July 09, 2008

April 21, 2007

Packaging Science

By Jonah Avriel Cohen

"When your opponent uses a merely superficial argument and you see through it, you can, it is true, refute it by setting forth its captious character.... But it is better to meet him with a counter-argument which is just as superficial, and so dispose of him."
So wrote Schopenhauer in his devilish little book The Art of Always Being Right.

"For it is with victory that you are concerned, and not with truth," he added.
That polemical advice is the basic theme of recent articles by Chris Mooney, the leftist author of The Republican War on Science, and Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist. Mooney says in the Washington Post,

"Scientists have traditionally communicated with the rest of us by inundating the public with facts; but data dumps often don't work. People generally make up their minds by studying more subtle, less rational factors."
Thomas Friedman in the New York Times Magazine similarly observes,

"In the world of ideas, to name something is to own it. If you can name an issue, you can own the issue. One thing that always struck me about the term 'green' was the degree to which, for so many years, it was defined by its opponents - by the people who wanted to disparage it. And they defined it as 'liberal,' 'tree-hugging,' 'sissy,' 'girlie-man,' 'unpatriotic,' 'vaguely French.'"
Accordingly, Friedman says:
"I want to rename 'green.' I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic."
And Mooney likewise argues that "scientists should package their research to resonate with specific segments of the public."

That is to say, in the language of Schopenhauer, scientists should speak to the "less rational" public with just as much superficial twaddle as rightwing spin doctors, since in the realm of politics one is concerned with victory, not truth.

Condescending and manipulative advice indeed. But it has some merit. Certain activist scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, would have done far better for their cause had they "packaged" their arguments with slightly less gladiatorial and patronizing diction toward Middle America. Says Dawkins:   

"There's the intelligent, educated, open-minded America, which is prepared to listen to evidence, prepared to listen to argument, prepared to change its mind. And there are close-minded, fundamentalist people who don't want to know, don't want to learn, don't want to listen.... And it's almost as though there's a kind of partition in America between the educated thoughtful half of the country, and the closed-minded thoughtless part of the country."
Actually, most "fundamentalist" people listen to such smugness all too well.

And they resent it, and that resentment has political consequences. As Tom Wolfe observed,

"I don't think these people are left or right, they are just religious.... I think support for Bush is about not wanting to be led by East-coast pretensions. It is about not wanting to be led by people who are forever trying to force their twisted sense of morality onto us, which is a non-morality. That is constantly done, and there is real resentment. Support for Bush is about resentment in the so-called 'red states.'"
Friedmans seems to grasp this, as does Mooney who understands how politically unhelpful Dawkins' approach has been:  

"Leave aside for a moment the validity of Dawkins's arguments against religion. The fact remains: The public cannot be expected to differentiate between his advocacy of evolution and his atheism. More than 80 percent of Americans believe in God, after all, and many fear that teaching evolution in our schools could undermine the belief system they consider the foundation of morality. Dawkins not only reinforces and validates such fears -- baseless though they may be -- but lends them an exclamation point."
Well said. I once wrote in this magazine a somewhat sympathetic article on intelligent design and, though I made it clear I believed in evolution, I attempted to speak to people of faith without insulting them. And surprise, surprise, it worked. I not only met and learned from some interesting religious thinkers, I also convinced a few of these "closed-minded fundamentalists" to accept my own thesis that intelligent design should be taught in philosophy classes.

Yet the downside of my efforts at dialogue with them was that I was personally trashed by a number of people on "my own side," as it were, who reckoned I was some kind of covert creationist because I didn't buy every political argument against intelligent design. One particularly nasty professor slurred me as a "rightwing crank," an "idiot," "ridiculous" and other hyperbolic insults, all in the name of science. Such ad hominem attacks, far from representing the scientific spirit, only in the end strike many red state voters as a kind of angry fundamentalism in itself, and naturally they're turned off.

So Mooney and Friedman are largely right. They understand they're losing much of the debate in the American heartland simply because certain activist scientists could stand to improve their communication skills. A little less haughtiness, and a little more generosity toward those who think differently, would go a long way toward "getting the message across."

But aside from such basic manners, there are limits to the effectiveness of advising politically active scientists on how to better spin their products.

The first is that asking them to politicize scientific information risks inviting further cynicism and opposition among the public. Scientists "with a political agenda will be perceived as such," correctly observes blogger MikeGene:

"That is, their attempt 'to persuade' will be recognized as an attempt to persuade. And since the scientist has entered the political fray, arguing for an agenda that has opponents, opponents of the agenda will quickly figure out that the scientist's 'social power' must be cut away. And it would be easy. How? If you simply point out that the scientist is not behaving as a scientist, and instead is behaving as a spin doctor, you now provide the cynical public with a good reason to dismiss the inconvenient facts as untrustworthy."
The second problem with turning scientists into spin doctors is that, sure, they can rename global warming or any other hot-button issue all they want. But they're still going to be faced with disagreements regarding matters of interpretation. That is because beneath language reside genuine and conflicting values, desires and passions-the true origins of political disputes.

When Russian President Vladimir Putin joked that global warming would benefit countries like Russia since his people "would spend less money on fur coats and other warm things," he actually made an old and profound philosophical point, namely, that there is a distinction between raw facts such as the earth's temperature, on the one hand, and the value and importance we place on them, on the other. The former is the realm of science; the latter, morality and politics. If Russians want a warmer climate, no scientist, however eloquent, will ever get them to back the Kyoto agreement.

Bottom line, Mooney and Friedman offer some handy recommendations, but you can't bewitch people just by renaming deep-seated political controversies. Such conflicts are rooted in opposing values, wants and philosophical assumptions. And that's why people generally see through spin and cant. Especially when you've gone ahead and loudly announced your public relations strategy to the world, as Mooney and Friedman have just done, evidently forgetting Schopenhauer's other sinister advice:

"Conceal your game. If you want to draw a conclusion, you must not let it be foreseen... It is a trick that needs no illustration."
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