Adelphiasophism
Ignorance and Criticism of Science
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, December 05, 1999
Postmodernist Criticisms
A school of literary critics called Postmodernists question whether human reason conforms to any objective reality. They argue that art, literature, history and philosophy do not reveal objective truth and do not pretend to. Science makes this claim to discover objective truth but they say it is subject to the pitfalls of the other disciplines. These pitfalls are relativism, subjectivism, and externalism.
Externalism. Since scientists work within a culture or society, their findings reflect that society and are conditioned by the common forces in it but external to science. Therefore, the preoccupations and prejudices of a society are found in its science as in its art and so on. Science and scientists have been racist, misogynist, sexist, anthropomorphist, jingoist, mercantilist, and so on.
Subjectivism. Science is a human construct, not a system of objective knowledge. Scientists have constructed a belief system, not discovered objective truth by objectively analysing Nature. Meaning exists only in language, and the question is whether words like “truth” have objective meaning. Deconstructionists try to free a discipline’s language from its concepts and referents to reveal hidden, subjective meanings. They conclude that knowledge or belief systems are unavoidably personal and subjective, and scientists create their understanding of Nature by imposing their a priori, subjective beliefs, biases, assumptions, and presuppositions on to Nature, not by disinterestedly investigating Nature to discover what is there.
Relativism. Postmodernists object to scientists’ claim to be approximating to objective truth precisely because of the way scientific truth changes. One theory replaces another when a paradigm becomes insupportable and is overthrown in a scientific revolution. For postmodernists, this proves scientific truth is only subjective and is succeeded by another subjective truth according to whim, fashion or prejudice. Postmodernism even challenges rationalism, the possibility of humans being able to reason correctly to reach valid conclusions.
The surest sign that these criticisms of science are wrong is that they have had no effect on the practice of science. If science could have been improved by their application, scientists would have done so to improve their results. On the contrary, scientists responded that they have always been aware of relativism, subjectivism, and externalism, and that the scientific method, as it is, eliminates them. It is true that science and scientists can be prone to fads and fancies like anyone else but they are always eliminated by the scientific method, if that is all they are, by the need for testing against reality and by scientific findings being open to others to validate.
The New Ignorance Movement
Those who run the world are not scientists. Most of our rulers are not clever enough to learn anything as hard as science. Instead, they learn a lot about how to use words whether spoken and written and how to manipulate people from their professions of politician or journalist. Then, faced with the successes of those second class citizens, the scientists, they begin to realise that they themselves are neither clever nor useful and start to run down the scientists in their own defence.
This is just what happened when the religion of ignorance—Christianity—took over the world from the religions of reason—Paganism.
Because princes, priests, politicians and their hacks cannot understand science, they pretend that it is fraudulent. Because they cannot grasp the beauty of a mathematical proof or the elegance of a scientific explanation, they turn to poetry that they say they can understand and accuse scientists of being coldly rational and soulless.
The truth is that specialists in humanities and classics admire poetic descriptions of Nature but have no conception of her awesome subtlety and ingenuity. Only by investigating Nature do we reveal her true splendour, but it is too difficult for hacks and spouters. The people who quote Wordsworth defend the indefensible destruction of our world in the name of free enterprise. The fact that we can come to appreciate Nature’s subtleties help us realise we are part of her.
People have used discoveries for their own good since the beginning of humanity. Science “per se” has nothing to do with the way governments and businesses destroy the world in their selfishness and greed. If poetry could kill, it would be a weapon. Human frailties are not induced by knowledge—we have them through our evolutionary history, not through science. Science has showed us that rigour and objectivity work to reveal the world. People that have always preferred ignorance—religious leaders, creationists and mystics of all kinds—attack the scientific method because fostering ignorance and superstition allows them to control people. Attendants of the Goddess or matriarchal women should not cast aside the path to knowledge and truth.
Biting the Postman
Linda Jean Shepherd, a biochemist, is the author of “Lifting the Veil: the Feminine Face of Science” (Shambhala, $14.00). She writes that when the institutions of science were forming during the mid-seventeenth century, the Royal Society of London stated that its business was “to raise a Masculine Philosophy.”
Francis Bacon advocated using the new experimental philosophy to inaugurate the “truly masculine birth of time”, to lead men to
Nature with all her children, to bind her to your service, and make her your slave to conquer and subdue her; to shake her to her foundations.
It is always easy to feel superior to those who know less than us, and at that time Nature looked secure even if patriarchal attitudes pictured her as a dangerous tigress to be tamed. But Nature was, quite properly, seen as female and, typically, the word “masculine” was used to mean what was rational and reliable. Western science classified feminine qualities as irrelevant—even dangerous.
Shepherd says “even” Aristotle called femaleness “a deformity, a mutilation,” though why she should use the word “even” is a puzzle because, though Aristotle was a remarkable thinker, his reputation rests on the admiration given him by the Christian church as much as his insights which kept science on the “wrong” tracks for centuries.
He declared the eternal and immutable heavens as “male” and the changeable and generative earth as “female.” He was not to know that the heavens are changing far more violently than the earth, and that if birth and renewal are the features which signify the feminine, then the whole of the cosmos—heavens and earth—is “female.”
The US journal “Science Education” recommends that scientists “deliberately renounce all emotion and desire,” “think coldly,” and “be impersonal, dispassionate, and thoroughly self-controlled in thinking.” Shepherd is flattering men with what many of them like to hear, but is false, in implying that these are male qualities in opposition to the female qualities of warmth, emotion, passion—personal, desirous qualities incapable of self-control.
It does not do feminism, matriarchy or the Goddess any good to overstate the case. All of these qualities are ways of saying that scientists should try to be “objective.” To avoid the temptation of seeing what they might like to see, scientists are advised to stand apart from their studies. Even most female scientists can see the sense in it, and do not quibble about it as sound advise, especially as they know that, in practice, scientists get as passionate and emotional as anyone else in their pet experiments and hypotheses.
Shepherd concludes “if we don’t value the feminine side of our humanity, of our world, of our reality—if we don’t value feeling, nurturing, receptivity, co-operation and intuition—what do we miss seeing?” Again, she over-eggs the pudding. These are new qualities introduced into the argument, except perhaps “feeling” if it is equated with emotion. If it is equated with intuition, then intuition is mentioned twice in her new list and has not previously been mentioned at all.
No scientist, male or female, rejects intuition. All of them will agree that intuition is essential to making significant steps forward in scientific discovery. Co-operation and receptivity have always been necessary in science and get more important as science gets bigger, and how does any science at all get done unless ideas are properly nurtured from their inception. While few will disagree that some of these aspects are not fully drawn out by journals like “Science Education,” it gives the impression of feminist thumb-sucking petulance to pretend that they are not there.
Anyway, Shepherd goes on to show how these qualities can help scientists. Barbara McClintock, working in virtual isolation, often without tenure and with little funding for thirty years, won the Nobel Prize in 1983 for the discovery of mobile genetic elements known as “jumping genes”, which showed that the environment could change genes. The dogma of genetics previously was that genes were essentially independent of the environment, which therefore had little effect on heredity. Her studies of radiation damage was useful in treating atomic bomb victims.
In describing her work, McClintock says “I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately, and I find it a great pleasure to know them.” Shepherd says, for McClintock, science was not based on a division between subject and object, but rather on attentiveness as a form of love. Her vocabulary is one of affection, kinship and empathy, rather than of battles and struggle.
But yet McClintock’s work required her to damage the genes in her plants to find out how they repaired it and how the damage manifested itself. Of course, McClintock was intimately involved with her corn plants, they were necessary to her work. She had to succour them and nurture them so that she could study them. She could not go off on a wild weekend and come back to find the plants dead from a heatwave and no water, or infested with a virus. But when it came to beaming X-rays at her little charges, she had no compunction about it. If she had, she would never have won the Nobel Prize.
Her work involved studying the specific damage to each plant, and an intimate knowledge of them was essential to the success of work like this rather than statistical information. So, though she knew her corn plants almost as friends, she had to be objective enough about them to do her work and irradiate them when necessary.
Shepherd makes a good point about nurturing but it is a point not about scientists neglecting to nurture but about them neglecting to consider the role of nurturing in cells. Glial cells, ten times more numerous in the brain than neurons, have largely been neglected in favour of studying more active, exciting nerve cells. Glial cells were thought just to feed nerve cells and clean up afterwards—playing the “little lady role”.
Disdain of a mere feeding and cleaning role held back the discovery that glial cells communicate between the brain and the rest of the body. By moving between the brain and the body, where they become a type of white blood cell of the immune system, glial cells destroy the myth of the blood-brain barrier—a physiological reflexion of the Western belief in the separation of mind and body. Interestingly, the number of glial cells per neuron increases as mammals ascend the phylogenetic scale from mice to humans.
Marian Diamond, a neuroanatomist at the University of California at Berkeley, compared Einstein’s brain with eleven other male brains. The only difference she found was that Einstein’s had the largest number of glial cells per neuron. The difference was particularly significant in the area associated with the conceptual powers of imagery and complex thinking.
The concept of the active male and passive female has coloured scientists’ view even at the cellular level of eggs and sperm. Up until 1980, biology texts describing fertilization emphasized the passivity of the egg waiting for the sperm to burrow into it. Then Gerald and Heide Schatten, using a scanning electron microscope, discovered that the surface of the egg extends small pseudopods or microvilli that clasp the sperm and draw it into the cell. This had been observed since 1895 but had been ignored. A complex biochemical conversation remained invisible as long as the egg and female reproductive tract were seen as simply passively receiving the sperm—merely receptive—and uninteresting.
All Nature is at war; one organism with another; or with external Nature.Charles Darwin.
Fixation on a competitive model blinds us to seeing the cooperative side of Nature, seen in the glial cells ministering to the neurones, but best exemplified by symbiosis—organisms living cooperatively together, such as bacteria in cows’ guts digesting cellulose for them. Symbiosis is interdependence at the biological level.
Lynn Margulis showed that biological diversity arose as much by microbial co-operation as through competition. Initially derided, biologists now agree that mitochondria, energy-producing organelles, were once oxygen-producing bacteria, and chloroplasts, photosynthesizing organelles, were originally cyanobacteria. These organelles have their own DNA, which is part of the cytoplasmic inheritance of the egg, passed down through the mother line.
The major source of evolutionary novelty is the acquisition of symbionts—the whole thing then edited by natural selection. It is never just the accumulation of mutations.Lynn Margulis.
Most theories of evolution still emphasize mutation as the source of new genetic information. Symbiosis remains an obscure, virtually unfunded, subfield of biology. It is either ignored or merely defined in the major textbooks on evolution.
Insight or knowledge gained without evident rational thought is unpredictable and mysterious—and so has been called feminine in our culture. Throughout the history of science, there have been stories of scientists receiving insights from such non-rational sources as dreams. Physicist Niels Bohr dreamed of a planetary system as a model for atoms, leading to the “Bohr model” of atomic structure—and a Nobel Prize. Mendeleev conceived of the periodic table in a dream.
Because intuition is unpredictable and individual, coming as a whole in a flash, it cannot be broken down to study its component parts. Those who develop their intuition feel a strong sense of unity with the natural world. They intuitively know that there is something more, something greater for us to reach toward, something deep within ourselves, deep within the fabric of the universe. They sense a love of Nature rather than a desire to subject it.
Seeing Nature as a lover rather than a slave would give us a different approach to science. Owners know little and care less about their slaves. A slave does as it is told and makes life more comfortable for the owner. The slave requires none but the most basic consideration. Lovers are partners in their love. They want to enjoy life together not apart. They want to defend each other, feed each other and reproduce together.
Science is the knowledge of herself that the Goddess gives. Science therefore is the face the Goddess offers us. Love of the Goddess is love of science, but exploitation of scientific knowledge is exploitation of the Goddess. Once we have a scientific discovery, we rapidly develop technology to exploit the knowledge. Now, we could make this planet uninhabitable. More than ever, we need the wisdom to handle the power of science more maturely and responsibly.
It is fashionable to blame science for the ills of the environment, to denigrate it and to reject it. Courage is needed to revise science rather than to reject it. Revising science doesn’t mean rejecting “masculine” aspects of science. The scientific method works, we know from experience, the point is to make it work better and make it work in a way in which its implications for Nature are transparent. Exploring approaches to science that include and integrate feminine qualities in a balanced way helps us understand aspects of Nature we have been neglecting.
That the whole is greater than its parts is a truism. Scientists have hitherto, in the main, all done their own little thing with no thought of the whole. The only people who had control of the output as a whole were multinational corporations and governments. Those feminists who want to set their Rottweilers to biting the legs of the scientists should turn their dogs on to the real culprits—the corporations that own scientific output and have control of all of the parts. Let us train our dogs to bite the robbers not the postman.
Scientists and the Wisdom of the Hacks
Science is too hard for journalists to understand so they habitually misrepresent scientists and their work. Hacks represent scientists as thinking they understand almost everything when only scientists really understand how much we do not know. Scientists have been accused of refusing to acknowledge the mystery of consciousness. But where is the scientist who claims to know the answer to this mystery? Scientists are addressing the problem, thinking about it, writing about it, but none are claiming to understand it. Many might refuse to bother about it because it is not in their line of enquiry or because the problems it presents are at present intractable but this is merely a practical decision not a smug one.
Fay Weldon, the novelist, some years ago had a swipe at scientists. She confessed her surprise that so many scientists professed a belief in God. Weldon rightly asked, "Doesn’t “belief” here mean acceptance without evidence? What is scientific about that?"
She is correct. These people don’t have the courage of their convictions, either way. Science has pushed God out. He is no longer needed to explain anything, and survives merely as a consolation—though this is even less explicable than God as a tyrant. People lose a child or a sister in some awful mishap and go to church to thank God!
It has been said, "We have to have a priesthood to interpret God’s will—and how expensive it is. They expect to live well, the better to reflect his glory." Priests tell us virtue is rewarded in the afterlife, and wickedness punished, hoping we will accept any sort of injustice in this life. They assure us that faith will grant us immortality, knowing that few like the thought of death and will accept the bait that will enslave them.
The Argument from Success
The hacks in our “scientific” culture persistently indulge and celebrate the supernatural and most people, including some scientists, cannot fully accept a world without it. Supernatural belief is promoted and justified by wishful, hopeful, and emotional faith and by fear. Yet, if naturalism is false and supernaturalism true, the three bases of scientific method are invalid. Empiricism—experiencing solely by the senses—is not sufficient to know the world. Rationalism—the use of reasoning—is not sufficient to explain our experiences. Scepticism—the testing of knowledge—is not sufficient to show knowledge is reliable.
Here is a puzzle. Three invalid methods lead to an unprecedented explosion in human understanding. Far from being invalid, their success justifies them. The scientific method is validated by its success, and if science is successful then naturalism is true and supernaturalism is false. The reason is that truth is built into scientific method. It has to produce results that tie in with reality and allow it to be predicted. Scientific method is so successful that it has profoundly and irrevocably changed human society, culture, and philosophy.
Critics of science call this argument the “argument from success.” They accept it as sound in respect of the applications of science but not of anything that impinges on God’s Creation or of species, like the pre-biotic chemical origin of life, evolutionary biology, and cosmology. This division is false.
Scientific hypotheses might be more or less true depending on their maturity but, as time goes on, they tend to be equally valid. The reason is that the branches of science are artificial. The whole edifice really interlocks like a huge multidimensional jigsaw. Many of the pieces are still missing but the overlap is sufficient to give us confidence that no part is grossly wrong. The theory of evolution fits in with so many other discoveries, not just in the rocks, but in the living world, that it cannot be seriously wrong. Evolution cannot be studied in the same way as electronics, but the accumulation of supporting evidence from many different places and disciplines still gives us confidence in it.
It is not scientists that we should fear but those who pay them and who own the results of their inquiries—the politicians and entrepreneurs of this world.
Science and Propaganda
”Science” used for propaganda purposes by corporations and governments is not science. Corporations and governments want justifications for practices that save them money. They use “science” to do it and, when critics protest that these practices are dangerous and cannot be justified, paid hacks, who have utterly no interest in science, raise the cry, “anti-science!” Needless to say, some scientists, whether out of defence of their lucrative contracts or misapplied loyalty to their profession, join in the chorus. The truth is that those who defend unsupported or badly founded practices are not scientists. It is their critics who are the sounder scientists. Science is based on the soundest evidence, and if their is any reason to think that evidence is faulty, science demands that it be tested.
Greenpeace revealed that “scientists” for government and the atomic energy industry were wrong to claim that dumping radioactive wastes in the Irish Sea was safe. The dumping continues to this day backed up by bought “experts”—and the Irish Sea is now radioactive! The “scientists” paid large sums by governments and corporations will appear on TV to laughingly reassure us that “everything is radioactive.” They mean that radioactive elements are ubiquitous, but describing the Irish Sea as radioactive is not merely saying it has a natural level of radioactivity in it, but that it has an unnatural level of radioactivity in it—unnaturally large.
”Radioactive” means more radioactive than is natural—radioactivity above the natural background level. We have no choice but to live our lives with a natural level of radioactivity, and suffer random cancers and genetic damage through it, but we have every reason to object when radioactive effluents put radioactivity dosages higher than the natural background. It means that some of the cancers are not natural and some of the genetic damage is not natural. People and food and livestock are being excessively damages by the extra radiation. “Scientists” who pretend otherwise are a danger to the world and a disgrace to their profession.
The same sort of scientific hacks will refuse to accept evidence that scientific caution would urge should be accepted. The “scientists” employed by the UKCEGB consistently in the 70s and 80s claimed that the evidence for acid rain damage was insufficient, even though more cautious scientists in other institutions and other countries saw danger in it and were already warning about it. The same is true of the threat of global warming. Governments and corporations were not prepared for the consequences for profits and growth of accepting the warnings. Their advisors said there was no proof that climate change would be so serious that policy changes were necessary, yet climate models did indicate the possibility of irreversible climate change.
If you are in a dark cellar and have reason to think that there is a gas leak, but you are not sure, do you strike a match? You do not need a PhD to err on the side of caution and decide to grope your way to the exit to get help. Faced with an option that might be disastrous individuals would avoid it. But not people in groups like governments and corporations, happy to hide behind their arm-twisted “experts.”
When scientific climate models are uncertain and the outcome is fuzzy, it is not sufficient for “scientists” to say, “we need more data to refine the model.” Doing nothing while more data are collected is a choice. The man in the cellar could do the same, hoping to be able to detect the gas by smell, but the gas might already have affected his sense of smell! So, chosing to do nothing might have more than scientific consequences. It is not just the people who collect the data and feed the models who are affected—we all are, including our economic, political and social leaders.
Assimilative Capacity
Moreover, the political and economic employers of the scientists demand an outcome, even though there might not be a clear one. They want to discharge poisons into the environment and be assured that the poisons are not dangerous. “Poisons are dangerous, so please refrain,” they do not want to hear. It would cost them money. Their employees, the scientists, are told to come up with defendable criteria, even though the scientists know from experience and toxicity tables that there are no such criteria. They are obliged to fudge the issue by using envoronmental assimilative capacity. In other words they have to say how much of the poison can be put into an environment before some obvious effect happens. They are made to accept the hypothesis that the environment will dilute and absorb poisons up to a certain point. They have to say that a certain lake can tolerate a certain amount of poisonous discharge each day and fish will not be harmed—up to certain limits. In other words, as long as there is no obvious effect on fish, it is all right to poison the lake.
Assimilative capacity has been used by governments and corporations to judge whether emmisions are tolerable. Yet they have been singularly and spectacularly bad in preventing environmental damage such as the die-back from acid rain PCB damage to fertility, CFC damage to the ozone layer and the accumulation of DDT through the food chain. All were unexpected and not allowed for, showing that assimilative capacity is deeply flawed. Even when some effect might have been expected as in the global warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions and eutrophication caused by nitrates and phosphates in lakes and coastal water, they have failed to predict the much faster rate of change that has been observed.
All of this applies to one particular poison, and critera will be established for another, and another, and others too. This is corporate man’s reductionism. For the sake of the company, complex issues must be reduced to something simple. Rarely, unless under the pressure of protest, will they consider the effect of these things together—their interactions—or even consider the long term effects of low concentratuions of poisons. A combination of chemicals can have subtler effects than the “scientists” considered. A vital elemt in the food chain of the eco-system might prove to be more vulnerable than expected, die and then starve all the animals higher up the chain. Or the combination, or persistent exposure to small concentration can weaken the immune system of the fish and make them susceptible to pathogens. This has happened often with dolphins and seals exposed to indudtrially polluted water. The ultimate, though is that, through some “accident,” the limits imposed will be disastrously exceeded. It always happens eventually.
Because the world is causal, it is easy for those determined to do nothing to reject any accusation because a causal relationship has not been established, even though circumstantial evidence, intuition and experience suggest otherwise. Excessive levels of bacteria in the blood of eels in contaminated water suggested that the contamination was damaging the eels’ immune system. But the eels were not yet ill! So, no causal relationship between contamination and disease has been established and nothing need be done. Never mind that when the disease does appear, the population of eels might be wiped out because they all have such damaged immune systems. It shows that waiting for the disaster to happen before anything is done is crazy. Whoever said that prevention is better than cure—not modern corporate bosses, for sure.
CEOs and Presidents or Premiers do not want to hear such things. Assimilative capacities can seem spuriously precise, but no scientist will accept anything so simple without thorough testing in conditions akin to those being created, but their bosses are rarely keen to spend money on anything that will end up in restricting their ability to make profit rather than assisting it. The way to stop it is for governments to impose punitive fines that corporate CEOs have to add into their sums if they want to risk discharging poisonous wastes. But governments are too keen to attarct busines not to deter it, and transnational companies can always find somewhere where the rules are lax enough for them to operate. Look at the lake of cyanide residues let into the Danube from some Australian owned plant in Romania.
Field Trials
Though science is meant to be self-critical, what happens is that corporations and governments impose additional constraints on scientists they employ to restrict their proper use of scientific method. Each company and government institution has its own culture, a set of values that conditions the work of the scientists employed. They have to conform, leave or be fired, or become a whistle-blower, a risky business. Scientists have families and commitments like any other human being. Often they settle with accepting the corporate culture, and might eventually identify with it fully. That, after all, is the way to the top. Let those of you critics of scientists without sin throw the first stone.
Environmental science has been dominated by physics based disciplines of measurement. Even on the biological side, most money is spent on molecular biology, which has industrial applications but so far relatively few on the ecological side—biomarking being the most important. No basis has yet been developed for understanding what happens to GM species released into the environment. To find out, under pressure from their corporate employers and governments, scientists set up idiotic “trials” that beg the very question they are asking. The trials are set up in the open to find out whether the environment is affected. It is the man in the gas-filled cellar striking his match.
Even if there is no obvious danger, the trials harm the living of nearby farmers aiming to be organic, and limit the choice of us all, because once GM genes are loose in the environment, nobody can be free of them. This is plainly the politcical aim of these trials, and the “accidental” mixing of GM seeds with natural ones. Governments aim to accuse protesters of wasting their time because the released genes cannot be withdrawn, like faulty tyres. That is precisely what the protesters are saying, of course. The trials should be carried out in greenhouses, while extensive tests are carried out to find out precisely how the genes can be spread, to what, by what and how far. Meanwhile scientists should be able to point to ignorance as a reason for caution, rather than a reason to proceed.
A Precautionary Principle
In other words, when some natural response is unknown but potentially hazardous, a principle of precaution should apply to anyone concerned with the matter, usually corporate bosses and governments. The burden of proof of safety should be on those wanting to proceed with the action. It should not be for those who consider the dangers to have to prove them. Those who want carte blanche to go ahead are those who hope to gain, the corporations. They are the polluters. They must find the proof.
The GMO trials are done in the field on the assumption that the scientists already know the results. The already know that the trials are safe, since otherwise they could not be done in the open. They know that beetles, bees and butterflies cannot take any genetic material into the next field where non-GM crops are growing, or into a neighbouring heath where natural species are growing. The parameters being studied are also assumed to be the releavant ones, so there is no allowance for discovery. Because they beg the question and assume they know the dangers, the trials are safe! This is not science. The scientist who will defend it should be sacked, and is only kept on as a tame mouthpiece.
The regulatory and government committees that oversee these tests ought not to be dominated by scientists speaking for their corporate employers but should also have independent lawyers and representatives of those who will suffer when things go wrong. The bias in funding can bias the results usually in favour of corporate as opposed to public need. Nominal independence is rarely true independence. All scientific institutions must have a budget from somewhere, either government or corporations, and that means they are not independent.
There is no such thing as “green” science. What is “green” is the political or economic decisions that come out of the science. Science follows the scientific method and extra scientific decisions by politicians and CEOs are not part of the science whether on deciding to do it or on deciding what to do with it. Practicioners of science can examine their own consciences in respect of the ethics of their own studies, but that is not science.
The precautionary principle is used when any parent tells a child not to walk on a frozen pond. In a former war zone, even adults will be warned not to touch anything strange—it might be a mine or a booby trap. What is wrong with such precautions? No one is asking science to change—scientists perhaps, CEOs and ministers commisioning research, certainly, in their social decisions of what to do or pursue. There is no need to establish “clear causal evidence” through science to decide than any particulr action is risky. The authorities in Barcelona in the 80s were told by a scientific committee that they suspected that unloading soya beans was causing asthma in the city. They had circumstantial evidence but no proof.
The authorities stopped unloading soya at the docks for three months. There was never an asthma attack. When they resumed, asthma attacks began once more on the days when soya was being unloaded. Over further research that altogether took seven years the scientists were able to prove that soya dust was the cause and that it came from one particular silo that had inadequate filters. Proper filters were fitted and the asthma attacks have ceased. The Barcelona authorities acepted the precautionary principle on weak evidence and helped to prove the case.
Put the Onus on the Polluter
Those hoping to kill action by delaying tactics are potentially causing untold trouble. Loose language is no defence whether by politicians and hacks or by scientists. Not all organotin compoundas are dangerous, so it is loose talk to refer to organotin chemicals as if they are. But the loose talk is also no reason to minimise the dangers of some organotin compounds. Equally the precautionary principle is not science and cannot be artificially grafted onto science. But science is a social practice and social practices are subject to social as well as scientific rules. Scientists themselves, as well as politicians and corporate bosses, should feel obliged to apply the precautionary principle as an ethical rather than a scientific principle. Social administrators certainly should.
Nor is there any reason why scientists should be denied the right to voice an opinion, even when there is no certain scientific evidence, based on their free assessment of the probabilities. They will tell us when they are assessing likelihoods rather than giving us confident findings. The principle should be that harm will be presumed unless the experts can assure us that the risks are negligible and are not accumulative. The onus is on the polluter. Some “scientists” claim this removes science from the decision entirely because science cannot prove innocence.
Well, science it was that proved that the wastes are harmful, so why should any scientist complain that we do not want them released into our air, water and food? The scientists and the corporations should be finding ways of recycling the poisons, many of them heavy metals that can be recovered and reused instead of digging out more from the earth to poison us. Poisonous organic materials can be processed also, to render them harmless or convert them into something useful. It will cost, but that is the only way to stop continuous excavation and manufacture of fresh poisons. Very large penalties or taxes must be placed on the removal of natural resources as long as they can be recovered. The technologies of recovery will have many advantageous spin-off in new discoveries and jobs, far more than are presently employed in the hugely mechanized methods of eroding the earth and destroying forests. Science should also be monitoring the environment, as it now does, but with a view to giving advanced warning of changes that might need precautionary action. The environment should be kept within the norms of Nature. Human activity, it is accepted will cause pollution, but we do not have to be foolish and impose additional risks onto ourselves. Science can guard against this.
In the social arena, the proper place for the precautionary principle, the question arises of whether it can be used in law. Plainly when fixed limits are set, the law can be used to enforce them, but can the law enforce an expression like “must not cause unnacceptable environmental change”? CEOs and their bondsmen say no, because “unnacceptable” is too vague to enforce. Yet the law is happy with expressions like “reasonable force.” “Unacceptable” will vary according to the pollutant and the environment, but the court will decide based on properly argued cases for both sides. The point for society is that corporations are not allowed to dominate them out of their wealth and that they should be punitively fined and made to clean up or suffer plant closure for ignoring the court’s decisions when they are against them.
It is not the scientists job to decide what to do once the evidence is available, it is the CEO’s or the minister’s, and they have to balance the risk against the social, economic and political costs. That means the cost of the risk under various plausible assumptions must be estimated, and the cost must be the total cost—the cost of cleaning up, rplenishing, curing and burying, together with quantification of suffering, ecological cost and social cost. Large corporations do similar things in forecasting studies, making assumptions and looking at possible outcomes. The same can be done here, and should be given the force of social concern by adding in substantial fines for causing damage. The point of all this is not to justify corporate practices but to get them to work on the basis of full costs, not just local licenses.
What’s in a Name?
The acceptance of continuous change as normal rather than the old idea that perfection is static and unchanging means that doing nothing in life should not be an option.
In grammar, nouns represent things, static and unchanging and verbs represent the movement or change that the nouns undergo. We should see ourselves as verbs not as nouns, or the activity should be captured and communicated in the noun. This used to be the case but today we often have abstract or abstruse names. A hunter hunts and a gatherer gathers, a tiller tills and a reaper reaps. What does a vice-President of a corporation do, or a chief executive? What does a priest or a bishop or a deacon do? What does a doctor, a scientist, an expert, a politician or a soldier do? Of course, they might do something useful, but they hide behind a name that does not explain itself as an action.
One wonders whether it is intended to hide something from us, but, whether it is or not, it does—at least for many people.
Scientists would perhaps be better understood if they were called “revealers”. It might also give those of them pause when they were doing the opposite on behalf of some multinational exploiter or government. Scientists reveal the truth about Nature, a sacred function, if Nature is taken to be sacred. So let them be openly called a “revealers” then stand before us and tell lies not the truth, if they dare.
