natural speed please ;)
The scientist as hero is familiar enough. What’s less familiar is scientists demonstrating with placards and banners declaring “Science improves decisions” and other inflammatory assertions, such as “Science belongs to no country because knowledge belongs to humanity”. “Evidence not arrogance,” they demanded. But you don’t have to be anti-science to see that there is an inevitability about its difficult relationship with politics. It is the point where knowledge and belief collide, which is why it is now the crucible of the culture wars. Scientists can’t but be the villains of the Brexit narrative. They are highly educated in the ultimate transferrable skills. They are the quintessential citizens of the world, people who keep their passports in their back pockets, and often work not just in towns where they were not born but in countries their parents never imagined visiting. They might dream of a Nobel prize, but they may also have an eye on a job in Silicon Valley. More challenging than their lifestyles, however, is their insistence on the sanctity of evidence and the importance of making decisions based on established fact. Expert-deniers trade on the natural resistance to uncomfortable truth by asserting that the truth is a negotiable quality. Donald Trump thinks windfarms are bad for your health, and low-energy lightbulbs give you cancer. He has linked childhood immunisation with autism. Although he tweeted yesterday that “rigorous science is critical to my administration”, he has yet to appoint a scientific policy adviser. In one way, this is an argument that was already well rehearsed when Pope Paul V took on Galileo 400 years ago. Science and belief have always rubbed up against each other. They find compromise positions. Popes die. In the end, science emerges victorious. Yet there are differences. Trump is not arguing from some alternative, God-centred perspective. He just doesn’t like facts that contradict what he wants to say. The expert-deniers rest their case on experts sometimes being wrong. They refuse to recognise that to know something properly, it must be capable of being proved wrong. If it is, that in fact constitutes the advancement of knowledge.There is another reason science is at the heart of this argument. Science is good when it makes life longer, easier, richer and more comfortable and convenient. It is a harder sell when it points to unacceptable realities. It’s disagreeable to stop smoking or to drink less alcohol or to avoid sugary drinks. The people who make cigarettes, booze and fizzy drinks are often unscrupulous in defence of their products and their profits. Accepting that our way of life threatens the sustainability of the planet was never going to be easy. And there are millions of voters who believe Donald Trump can preserve their world: a world that depends on coal and cars. There was plenty to admire about the scientists’ protest. But it’s increasingly clear that their greatest skill – unearthing the truth – is not enough to win a culture war.
