Most of you who read this site are probably aware that a couple of weeks ago Newsweek ran a big cover story on the global warming “denial machine,” to use their very apt phrase. Well, the September 3, 2007 edition is out, and it has the letters in response to that issue.
To no one’s surprise, there’s the usual mix of people throwing rocks at each other, including some people from a zipcode that surely maps to a particularly badly lit corner of Bizarro World. But the there was one letter, reproduced in its entirety here, that almost made me stand and cheer when I read it (emphasis mine):
Sharon Begley’s article about “the denial machine,” as frightening as it was, misses a crucial aspect of the problem. It is not just that well-heeled corporations are buying up politicians or promoting science-as-they-want-it-to-be. It is that our society is more than happy to accept spin and cant because we have come to believe that all expertise is bias, that all knowledge is opinion, that every judgment is relative. I see this daily in my university classroom. Many of even my best students seem to have lost the ability to think critically about the world. They do not believe in the transformative power of knowledge because they do not believe in knowledge itself. Begley decries the tactic of making the scientists appear divided, but the corporations didn’t have to invent this tactic. It is built into our carefully balanced political “debates,” into our news shows with equal time given to pundits from each side and into the “fairness” we try to teach in our schools. We need not be surprised that people have become consumers who demand the right to choose as they wish between the two equally questionable sides of every story. Neither global warming nor any other serious problem can be addressed by a society that equates willful ignorance with freedom of thought.
Bernard Dov Cooperman
Dept. of History, University of Maryland
College Park, Md.
Wow.
I needed a cigarette after reading that, and I don’t even smoke.
The whole letter is exceptional, but that last sentence is such a perfect characterization of the hurdle we face in waking people up to the global warming and peak oil problems that I’m Kermit-the-Frog green with envy that I didn’t write it.
I will be contacting Dr. Cooperman to thank him as soon as I post this.
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August 29th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
This letter is very insightful about the American population, but it ignores one thing: The extremely “conservative” talk shows do not present anything except scorn for the Climate Change issue. Their whole take is that it does no exist, and there is no number of facts which make any difference. And, to be a true “conservative”, you have to drink that particular brand of koolaid, without question, even if you know it is going to kill you. Even before the Newsweek article, a very thorough review of the denial/denier Complex was published by George Monbiot, HEAT (what a nice simple title). This has been so thoroughly ignored that I bought a copy at a half price book store, but is truly worth double the price. I will tender a review when I finish, but the first part of the book kept me so infuriated that I couldn’t read more than a few pages at a time. It provides a more complete link between the Tobacco Science Deniers and the CC Deniers. I would highly recommend it as a sure-cure for low blood pressure.
I should comment on my mis-use of the term “conservative”. I do not accept that the extremists who call themselves “conservative” are at all conservative. I think of them as being from the Wrong Wing, and clearly they are not from the “right” wing. They are so outrageously liberal with their political opinions as to make the term give the term “conservative” a negative connotation, but trying to otherwise express any identification for this collection of misfits takes far too long, so I long ago began the use of the “”’s when referring to this distasteful group of people. I do not consider myself a liberal. In fact, neither did Richard Nixon when he introduced national health care, the value added tax, or many of the other concepts in government which are now proposed by the Democrats, and are being labelled as “liberal”. There is an extreme difference between being liberal and being compassionate, another spin word co-opted by the Current Occupant and his election team.
We, as a people, are far too accepting of the concept of being fair, when the other side, the misrepresenting assemblage, trying to confuse and delay and prevent the world from dealing with the facts about CC.
Monbiot made me think about CC in a new way, with a statement about environmentalists who work really hard to make changes and then fly off on vacation/holiday and do more damage than all of their actions could ever heal.
August 29th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
Brilliant. My thoughts exactly. If we could get rid of relativism as a mode of thinking, we would solve most of the world’s problems and quickly.