Chickenpox parties are 'misguided'
A Brisbane mother advertises a pox party on Facebook to infect other kids and get the disease "over with". Nine News
PT1M54S 620 349In North Carolina, a community rejects a solar farm amid concerns it could "suck up all the energy from the sun" and cause cancer.
On the sidelines of climate negotiations in Paris, an eccentric British peer continues to insist anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. In Canberra, prominent backbenchers publicly share the same doubts. So, it seems, do 17 per cent of the Australian population.
The principal of Brunswick North West Primary School makes a point of respecting the "diversity" of views on vaccination. Months later, a quarter of its student body comes down with chicken pox.
A North Carolina community reportedly objected to a solar farm being built in its vicinity amid concerns it could "suck up all the energy from the sun".
After two centuries of the "special success" of the scientific method of inquiry, people are apparently deciding to pick and choose which science they want to believe or ignore. Wilful denial of science has become an epidemic to rival the diseases science itself has helped keep at bay.
How did it come to this?
There's some easy, emotionally satisfying answers to that question. Unfortunately those answers are mostly wrong.
After two centuries of the "special success" of the scientific method of inquiry, people are apparently deciding to pick and choose which science they want to believe or ignore. Photo: Paul Harris
Are these people simply stupid? Some, sure, but certainly not all of them.
Is it a problem of education? That's certainly a charge with a long history to it. In 1853, as the "table turning" craze swept the parlours of Europe, the British scientist Michael Faraday wrote a letter to the Times explaining how involuntary muscle movements, not the spirits of the dead, were behind the phenomenon.
He ends his letter with a note of alarm: "I think the system of education that could leave the mental condition of the public body in the state in which this subject has found it must have been greatly deficient in some very important principle."
Science has had "special success" – unprecedented transformative power had compared to any other form of knowledge about the natural world. Photo: John Woudstra
But as the Brunswick outbreak demonstrates, an educated (and affluent) public can still fall into various forms of science denialism. I sat in on a class at Brunswick North West Primary a few months ago. The students were among the sharpest and most thoughtful children I've ever seen and it was clear their intellectual curiosity was being nurtured at home too.
In some ways I feel sorry for their principal – we inner north parents are a pushy and self-righteous lot – and understandably he needs to keep the peace among parents with strong beliefs. But simply preaching "tolerance" of different views, rather than pointing out that one of those views is, in fact, uniquely and rightly privileged, confuses neutrality for civility.
Better scientific literacy might help. But science denialism is more fundamentally about authority rather than education or intelligence. What the antivaxxers and Dennis Jensens and Lord Moncktons of this world have in common is a refusal to accept that their views on certain topics simply don't count.
Illustration Andrew Dyson
The "special success" of science – the unprecedented transformative power it's had compared to any other form of knowledge about the natural world – entails most of us making at least two difficult sacrifices.
The first is that the results of the scientific method trump our subjective experiences or expectations. There's already a certain loss of autonomy just in being asked to accept that your personal observations don't determine reality.
The second is that knowledge is socially distributed. There's simply too much for any one person to know, particularly in fields where the evidence isn't 'exoteric' – that is, not simply open to anyone to understand and evaluate. And so we're forced into ever greater reliance on communities of experts.
As a result, for most of us, it simply doesn't matter what we think about whether humans are changing the climate or whether vaccines or genetically modified organisms are safe, or whether wind turbines make you sick. We don't get a vote on this.
All of that bruises the ego. It clashes with our commitment to egalitarianism, and strains at our rightful suspicion of power. It also wounds our pride in "thinking for ourselves".
None of the groups mentioned here, for instance, would see themselves as "science deniers". The comments section below will be full of special pleading of the form "Don't lump me in with that other lot: my reasons are totally different."
But science isn't a democracy. You might say it's a contest of ideas, but like any contest, this one has rules. Science denialists don't play by those rules; in fact they don't play the game at all. They want their views to be taken seriously but don't want to do the hard yards of training, research and publication.
It's like running onto the ground during the Grand Final with your own football, kicking it through the goals, and then declaring yourself the winner.
It would be funny, if there weren't so many people who buy into what the denialists are selling.
Perhaps we're focusing on the wrong sort of literacy. It's not enough that people get the science. They also need to get where science begins and ends, and so which things we do get to have an opinion on, and which topics require us to defer to others.
There's an important range of questions that we as moral agents and citizens are rightly entitled – indeed, required – to have views about: now that we know human activity is warming the planet, what should we do about it? We know vaccination is safe and effective, but how much pressure can we rightly put on people to vaccinate? How do we ensure science as a practice is conducted ethically and reliably?
The bad news is we don't all get to decide for ourselves what's true about the natural world. The good news is that "what should we care about?" and "what should we do about this?" are questions that are open to all.
Patrick Stokes is senior lecturer in philosophy at Deakin University and a member of Stop the AVN, a group that campaigns against anti-vaccine misinformation.
223 comments so far
More comments
New user? Sign up
Make a comment
You are logged in as [Logout]
All information entered below may be published.
Thank you
Your comment has been submitted for approval.
Comments are moderated and are generally published if they are on-topic and not abusive.