By DOUG SHAVER
November 19, 2010
It looks like we’ll have some vaccines for the coronavirus within a few weeks, but according to the press reports, there will be a problem with public acceptance. It seems a lot of people will doubt their safety or their efficacy, and many others are unconvinced that they’re even necessary. The main problem, we’re given to understand, is a widespread mistrust of authority. And, as usual, the left is blaming the right and vice versa. Also as usual, I think both deserve plenty of blame.
The political right started shacking up with the religious right during the Reagan era, and the religious right has never been entirely on board with science. Evangelical apologists will invoke it when they think it supports their dogma, of course. Everybody does. But when it doesn’t, then science is just something invented by secular humanists to excuse their rejection of scriptural or ecclesiastical authority.
The left was not as transparently selective until the present generation, but it was starting to move that way as early as the 1960s. This was documented by Kurt Andersen in his 2018 book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, a narrative that confirms my own limited memories of having lived through the countercultural revolution. Liberals in those days were at most tepid in their support of science, and they’ve gotten worse since then. Their hypocrisy nowadays is practically a mirror image of that of young-earth creationists. When science seems to justify anything on their political agenda, then they’re gung-ho for science. But when it doesn’t, then science is just something invented by white male Europeans to excuse their oppression of non-whites, non-males, and non-Europeans.
It is no wonder, then, that so many Americans hesitate to believe any politician who tells them, “Medical science says you should do X.” It isn’t just the ones who have come to mistrust science in general. Even among those who still trust science itself, many have come to mistrust anything the mainstream press says about science. And with good reason. Journalists in general have long exhibited a remarkable incompetence in reporting news about science.
The politicization of science would not be such a problem if scientific literacy were more common. Anyone who knows how science is supposed to be done can read a news story about science and separate the facts from the clickbait. Scientific literacy is rare, though, and it’s been getting rarer. The nation made a feeble attempt to correct this during the early part of the Cold War, but distractions happened and the intellectual classes decided other problems needed more urgent attention.
What the intellectual classes didn’t realize was that this redirection of attention was self-defeating. Those other problems were as much in need of scientific solutions as was our technological position with respect to our Cold War adversary. This observation was, however, contrary to a dogma that was and remains regnant among the intellectual classes, which declares social and political problems to be unamenable to scientific understanding. Want to go to the moon? Sure, we can use science for that. Want to end racial injustice? Nope, science can’t help us with that. So said the commentariat on both the left and the right.
There is no political solution to this situation, at least none that wouldn’t create a worse problem. Politics is about the exercise of power, and there is a reason that “knowledge is power” became cliche. If knowledge is power, then people who hold power will be motivated to control sources of knowledge or access to those sources. Scientific knowledge, by its nature, can never be depended on to validate any political faction’s agenda. A government that needs the consent of the governed, then, if it wants to keep its power, will be cautious about facilitating the governed’s access to knowledge.
The consent of the governed was supposed to be a protection against tyranny, but uninformed or misinformed consent provides no such protection. In the present political climate, we cannot rely on the government to properly inform us about anything. We the governed must learn to properly inform ourselves. Most of the information we need to do that is out there on the Internet if we know how to find it. It will take some work, but it is work we’ll have to do if we wish to take our republic back from the people dominating it now.
When those vaccines become available, there will be publicly accessible facts informing us about their safety and efficacy. And if there are other facts indicating the contrary, they too will be publicly accessible, and scientifically literate people can make defensible decisions about which facts are more persuasive. We can do no more. Infallibility is not an option. There will always be those who claim to know of certain facts that the government is hiding from us, and I am not about to claim that our government would never do such a thing. But my skepticism doesn’t kick in only when the government is talking. I try to keep it active when anybody is talking to me, especially anybody who claims to have evidence that they are not at liberty to share with me. Maybe that evidence exists, and maybe it proves what they say it proves, but that’s for me to decide. I will not just take their word for anything, any more than I will just take the government’s word for anything.