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MUST READ: Climate zombies and epistemic closure
H/t Matt Stroud, via FFFFound!
MUST READ: Climate zombies and epistemic closure
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| H/t Matt Stroud, via FFFFound! |
Your weekend's Must Read comes from David Roberts at Grist, who puts climate-change denial in its proper place — basically, alongside the Flat Earth Society.
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In reference to the above graph, Roberts writes:
For the most part the American public's feelings on climate change are shallow, sloshing around with the economic and political tides. When people are feeling safer and more prosperous, climate scientists will magically become more persuasive.
As for the professional skeptics and culture warriors, there's little point hashing out the same arguments with them again and again. I have long since abandoned it. Many people do it well and G*d bless them but I've had my fill of sunspots and medieval warming periods and Pacific Decadal Oscillations. Ideological trench warfare is wearisome and there are many other issues in dire need of attention, principally how we're going to respond to climate change. That's a conversation that engages people outside the armed camps.
However! It does seem to me that the right's climate denialism hasn't been properly linked to the larger phenomenon of epistemic closure on the right. When Jim Manzi, everyone's favorite sensible conservative, criticized fellow conservative Mark Levin for peddling intellectually shoddy skeptic arguments in his bestselling book Liberty and Tyranny, Levin went nuts, joined by a half-dozen other NRO writers. How could they not? The very same skeptic talking points in Levin's book appear in thousands of blogs and comment sections across the interwebs. If they are intellectually bankrupt, a whole lot of people are going to look stupid.
But here is what I think is the most important point.
Climate denialism is part of something much broader and scarier on the right. The core idea is most clearly expressed by Rush Limbaugh: âWe really live, folks, in two worlds. There are two worlds. We live in two universes. One universe is a lie. One universe is an entire lie. Everything run, dominated, and controlled by the left here and around the world is a lie. The other universe is where we are, and that's where reality reigns supreme and we deal with it. And seldom do these two universes ever overlap. ... The Four Corners of Deceit: Government, academia, science, and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That's how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.â
The right's project over the last 30 years has been to dismantle the post-war liberal consensus by undermining trust in society's leading institutions. Experts are made elites; their presumption of expertise becomes self-damning. They think they're better than you. They talk down to you. They don't respect people like us, real Americans.
â¦
The decline in trust in institutions has generated fear and uncertainty, to which people generally respond by placing their trust in protective authorities. And some subset of people respond with tribalism, nationalism, and xenophobia. The right stokes and exploits modern anxiety relentlessly, but that's not all they do. They also offer a space to huddle in safety among the like-minded. The conservative movement in America has created a self-contained, hermetically sealed epistemological reality -- a closed-loop system of cable news, talk radio, and email forwards -- designed not just as a source of alternative facts but as an identity. That's why when you question climate skepticism you catch hell. You're messing with who people are.
Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world's scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world's governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill. (Emphasis mine.)
This notion that your âcommon senseâ is as important as the âexpertsâ and their âdataâ has been imbedded in movement conservatism from its outset, but it goes back further than that. It's at the root of fundamentalist strains of religion, as well, and has reared its head whenever science came into conflict with religion. During the Scopes Monkey Trial, for instance, William Jennings Bryan, who died soon after arguing the case for the state of Tennessee, insisted that evolution was wrong because one's common sense and Biblical literalism should be taken more seriously than human-generated scientific knowledge. (In one famed moment toward the trial's end, defense attorney and civil libertarian Clarence Darrow snapped , âWe have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States.â)
It strikes me that, in a sense, we're re-litigating the Scopes trial with all this hullaballoo about climate change. There is an overwhelming, and undeniable scientific consensus about the reality of man-made climate change, denied by only a handful of outsiders and a cadre of industry-paid shills. And yet, somehow, the right's counter-argument, that all of these scientists are either idiots or somehow engaged in a socialist plot — or whatever — has gained traction; the right has, with considerable and alarming success, argued that its members' âcommon senseâ should trump the overwhelming scientific consensus.
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PS: In other news, the Flat Earth Society actually has a website. Wow.
[...] MUST READ. Climate zombies and epistemic closure. :: The Clog … [...]
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