Denialism
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 - Vioxx and the Fear of Science
Chapter 2 - Vaccines and the Great Denial
Chapter 3 - The Organic Fetish
Chapter 4 - The Era of Echinacea
Chapter 5 - Race and the Language of Life
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
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Copyright © Michael Specter, 2009
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Specter, Michael.
Denialism : how irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet,
and threatens our lives / Michael Specter.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-15102-0
1. Science—Social aspects. 2. Research--Forecasting. 3. Belief and doubt.
4. Science—Philosophy. I. Title.
Q175.5.S697 2010
306.4’5—dc22 2009028489
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To Emma, who all by herself
is reason enough to reject denialism.
INTRODUCTION
Ten years ago, while walking through Harvard Yard, I saw a student wearing a button that said “Progressives against Scientism.” I had no idea what that meant, so I asked him. Sci entism, he explained, is the misguided belief that scientists can solve problems that nature can’t. He reeled off a series of technologies that demonstrated the destructiveness of what he called the “scientific method approach” to life: genetically modified foods, dams, nuclear power plants, and pharmaceuticals all made the list. We talked for a few minutes, then I thanked him and walked away. I didn’t understand how science might be responsible for the many scars humanity has inflicted upon the world, but students have odd intellectual infatuations, and I let it slip from my mind.
Over the next few years, while traveling in America and abroad, I kept running into different versions of that student, people who were convinced that, largely in the name of science, we had trespassed on nature’s ground. The issues varied, but not the underlying philosophy. Society had somehow forgotten what was authentic and there was only one effective antidote: embrace a simpler, more “natural” way of life. No phenomenon has illustrated those goals more clearly than persistent opposition to genetically engineered food. “This whole world view that genetically modified food is there so we have no choice but to use it is absolutely terrifying and it is wrong,” Lord Peter Melchett, a former British Labour minister, told me when I met him a few years ago.
Today, Lord Melchett, whose great-grandfather founded one of the world’s largest chemical companies, is policy director of the British Soil Association, the organic food and farming organization. The first time we spoke, however, he served as executive director of Greenpeace, where he was in the midst of leading a furious campaign against Monsanto (which he referred to as “Monsatan”) to rid the world of genetically engineered foods. “There is a fundamental question here,” he said. “Is progress really just about marching forward? We say no. We say it is time to stop assuming that discoveries only move us forward. The war against nature has to end. And we are going to stop it.”
I felt then—as I do now—that he had gotten it exactly wrong; scientists weren’t waging a war at all, he was—against science itself. Still, I saw Lord Melchett as a quaint aristocrat who found an interesting way to shrug off his family’s industrial heritage. His words were hard to forget, though, and I eventually came to realize why: by speaking about a “war against nature,” he had adopted a system of belief that can only be called denialism. Denialists like Lord Melchett replace the rigorous and open-minded skepticism of science with the inflexible certainty of ideological commitment.
We have all been in denial at some point in our lives; faced with truths too painful to accept, rejection often seems the only way to cope. Under those circumstances, facts, no matter how detailed or irrefutable, rarely make a difference. Denialism is denial writ large—when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.
Denialism comes in many forms, and they often overlap. Denialists draw direct relationships where none exist—between childhood vaccinations, for example, and the rising incidence of diseases like diabetes, asthma, and autism. They conflate similar but distinct issues and treat them as one—blending the results of different medical studies on the same topic, or confusing a general lack of trust in pharmaceutical companies with opposition to the drugs they manufacture and even to the very idea of science.
Unless data fits neatly into an already formed theory, a denialist doesn’t really see it as data at all. That enables him to dismiss even the most compelling evidence as just another point of view. Instead, denialists invoke logical fallacies to buttress unshakable beliefs, which is why, for example, crops created through the use of biotechnology are “frankenfoods” and therefore unlike anything in nature. “Frankenfoods” is an evocative term, and so is “genetically modified food,” but the distinctions they seek to draw are meaningless. All the food we eat, every grain of rice and ear of corn, has been manipulated by man; there is no such thing as food that
hasn’t
been genetically modified.
Our ability to cut genes from one organism and paste them into another has transformed agriculture. But it is a change of degree, not of type. Denialists refuse to acknowledge that distinction, in part because it’s so much simpler to fix blame on a company, an institution, or an idea than to grapple with a more complicated truth: that while scientific progress has brought humanity immense wealth and knowledge, it has also caused global pollution severe enough to threaten the planet. Denialists shun nuance and fear complexity, so instead of asking how science might help resolve our problems, they reject novel strategies even when those strategies are supported by impressive data and powerful consensus.
Until I learned about Holocaust deniers, it never occurred to me that a large group could remain willfully ignorant of the most hideous truths. Then, twenty-five years ago, I began to write about people who refused to acknowledge that the human immunodeficiency virus caused AIDS, despite what, even then, was an overwhelming accretion of evidence. Holocaust deniers and AIDS denialists are intensely destructive—even homicidal—but they don’t represent conventional thought and they never will. This new kind of denialism is less sinister but more pervasive than that.
My unusual encounter at Harvard came back to me a few years ago, and I started to think about writing this book. I kept putting it off, though. Some of the delay was due simply to procrastination. But there was another, more important reason for my hesitation: I had assumed these nagging glimpses of irrationality were aberrations, tiny pockets of doubt. Authority may be flawed, and science often fails to fulfill its promises. Nonetheless, I was convinced that people would come around to realizing that the “scientific method approach”—the disciplined and dispassionate search for knowledge—has been the crowning intellectual achievement of humanity. I guess I was in my own kind of denial, because even as things got worse I kept assuring myself that reason would prevail and a book like this would not be necessary.
Finally, a couple of years ago, I was invited to dinner at the home of a prominent, well-read, and worldly woman. She asked what I was working on and I told her that I had become mystified by the fact that so many Americans seemed to question the fundamental truths of science and their value to society. I mentioned as examples anxiety about agricultural biotechnology, opposition to vaccinations, and the growing power of the alternative health movement.
She suddenly became animated. “It’s about time somebody writes the truth about these pharmaceutical companies,” she cried. “They are evil, making vast sums from lifestyle drugs like Viagra and letting millions die instead of helping them. The government is no better; they are destroying our food supply and poisoning our water.” Some years earlier she had been seriously ill, and she explained how she recovered: by taking dozens of vitamins every day, a practice she has never abandoned. With this woman’s blessing, her daughter, who had just given birth, declined to vaccinate her baby.
The woman didn’t actually say, “It’s all a conspiracy,” but she didn’t have to. Denialism couldn’t exist without the common belief that scientists are linked, often with the government, in an intricate web of lies. When evidence becomes too powerful to challenge, collusion provides a perfect explanation. (“What reason could the government have for approving genetically modified foods,” a former leader of the Sierra Club once asked me, “other than to guarantee profits for Monsanto?”)
“You have a point,” I told the woman. “I really ought to write a book.” I decided to focus on issues like food, vaccinations, and our politically correct approach to medicine, because in each of those arenas irrational thought and frank denialism have taken firm root. Today, anyone who defends science—particularly if he suggests that pharmaceutical companies or giant agricultural conglomerates may not be wholly evil—will be called a shill.
That’s denialism, too—joined as it often is with an almost religious certainty that there is a better, more “natural” way to solve our medical and environmental problems. Answers are rarely that simple, though. Even in the case of the drug Vioxx, which I describe in the next chapter—where Merck was as guilty of mal feasance as a company can be—it’s likely that had the drug remained on the market, it would have been responsible for a hundred times more good than harm.
The most blatant forms of denialism are rarely malevolent; they combine decency, a fear of change, and the misguided desire to do good—for our health, our families, and the world. That is why so many physicians dismiss the idea that a patient’s race can, and often should, be used as a tool for better diagnoses and treatment. Similar motivations—in other words, wishful thinking—have helped drive the growing national obsession with organic food. We want our food to taste good, but also to be safe and healthy. That’s natural. Food is more than a meal, it’s about history, culture, and a common set of rituals. We put food in the mouths of our children; it is the glue that unites families and communities. And because we don’t see our food until we eat it, any fear attached to it takes on greater resonance.
The corrosive implications of this obsession barely register in America or Europe, where calories are cheap and food is plentiful. But in Africa, where arable land is scarce, science offers the only hope of providing a solution to the growing problem of hunger. To suggest that organic vegetables, which cost far more than conventional produce, can feed billions of people in parts of the world without roads or proper irrigation may be a fantasy based on the finest intentions. But it is a cruel fantasy nonetheless.
Denialist arguments are often bolstered by accurate information taken wildly out of context, wielded selectively, and supported by fake experts who often don’t seem fake at all. If vast factory farms inject hormones and antibiotics into animals, which is often true and always deplorable, then
all
industrial farming destroys the earth and
all
organic food helps sustain it. If a pricey drug like Nexium, the blockbuster “purple pill” sold so successfully to treat acid reflux disease, offers few additional benefits to justify its staggering cost, then all pharmaceutical companies always gouge their customers and “natural” alternatives—largely unregulated and rarely tested with rigor—offer the only acceptable solution.
We no longer trust authorities, in part because we used to trust them too much. Fortunately, they are easily replaced with experts of our own. All it takes is an Internet connection. Anyone can seem impressive with a good Web site and some decent graphics. Type the word “vaccination” into Google and one of the first of the fifteen million or so listings that pops up, after the Centers for Disease Control, is the National Vaccine Information Center, an organization that, based on its name, certainly sounds like a federal agency. Actually, it’s just the opposite: the NVIC is the most powerful anti-vaccine organization in America, and its relationship with the U.S. government consists almost entirely of opposing federal efforts aimed at vaccinating children.
IN 2008, America elected a president who supports technological progress and scientific research as fully as anyone who has held the office. Barack Obama even stressed science in his inaugural address. “We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality . . . and lower its costs,” he said. “We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.”
Obama realizes the urgency with which we need to develop new sources of energy. That is why he frequently compares that effort to America’s most thrilling technological achievement: landing men on the moon. Obama has assembled a uniformly gifted team of scientific leaders, and when he speaks publicly about issues like swine flu or HIV, the president routinely makes a point of saying that he will be guided by their advice.
That is quite a departure from the attitude of his predecessor, who, in one of his first major initiatives, announced that he would prohibit federal funding for research on new stem cell lines. George W. Bush encouraged schools to teach “intelligent design” as an alternative to the theory of evolution, and he all but ignored the destruction of our physical world. His most remarkable act of denialism, however, was to devote one-third of federal HIV- prevention funds to “abstinence until marriage” programs.
The Bush administration spent more than $1 billion on abstinence-only programs, despite data from numerous studies showing that they rarely, if ever, accomplish their goals. Nevertheless, during the Bush administration, family planning organizations in the developing world were denied U.S. grants if they so much as discussed abortion with their clients. President Obama began at once to reverse that legacy and restore the faith in progress so many people had lost.
I wish I could say that he has helped turn back the greater tide of denialism as well. That would be asking too much. Despite the recession, sales of organic products have continued to grow, propelled by millions who mistakenly think they are doing their part to protect their health and improve the planet. Supplements and vitamins have never been more popular even though a growing stack of evidence suggests that they are almost entirely worthless. Anti-vaccination conspiracy theorists, led by the tireless Jenny McCarthy, continue to flourish.
So does denialism, abetted by some of the world’s most prominent celebrities. Oprah Winfrey, for one, has often provided a forum for McCarthy on her show, but she intends to do more: in early 2009, Winfrey’s production company announced that it had hired McCarthy to host a syndicated talk show and write a blog, providing two new platforms from which she can preach her message of scientific illiteracy and fear.
