By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health.
Two weeks ago I wrote about Vaccine Effectiveness and Scientific Communication. Today I want to follow up on that with something related that was published last year in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (est. 1890), When Science Becomes Embroiled in Conflict: Recognizing the Public’s Need for Debate while Combating Conspiracies and Misinformation (Stephen Lewandowsky of the University of Bristol, and others). That title is filled with meaning, and the article was written by nine serious scholars from an august group of research universities. It exhibits much that is good and essential in the academic approach to our common problems. But as someone who among other things has been an academic since he first entered the Main Library filled with 3 million books, I also recognize that it has blind spots that we all have in common.
From the Abstract:
Most democracies seek input from scientists to inform policies. This can put scientists in a position of intense scrutiny. Here we focus on situations in which scientific evidence conflicts with people’s worldviews, preferences, or vested interests. These conflicts frequently play out through systematic dissemination of disinformation or the spreading of conspiracy theories, which may undermine the public’s trust in the work of scientists, muddy the waters of what constitutes truth, and may prevent policy from being informed by the best available evidence. However, there are also instances in which public opposition arises from legitimate value judgments and lived experiences. In this article, we analyze the differences between politically motivated science denial on the one hand, and justifiable public opposition on the other. We conclude with a set of recommendations on tackling misinformation and understanding the public’s lived experiences to preserve legitimate democratic debate of policy. (emphasis added)
Democracies and expert opinion. Yes, all governments need “expert” advice to function in service of the common welfare and often these experts are scientists. This is not the place delve into the nature of American democracy, but one might note that what the people want and need and what their erstwhile political leadership delivers are not one and the same. Not that they ever have been, but this book by Jane Mayer, who is the granddaughter of Allan Nevins, is as good a place to start as any.
The question that is not directly addressed here is: Who are these scientists and what are their motivations? The default position of the powers-that-be has been to view scientists as disinterested seekers of the truth of the natural world. However, as pointed out so well by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway in Merchants of Doubt [1], scientists and their patrons who are “science adjacent” can be anything but disinterested. The people inevitably have figured this out, with the scientific and political responses to COVID-19 as the exemplary case. But 30+ years into the Statin Era, deaths from cardiovascular disease (CVD) are still the most common cause of death in the United States. It is not an accident that deaths from CVD have declined only marginally by 2.8% over the past ten years and remain highest in areas that are poorer and/or medically underserved. At the other end of the spectrum, neither is it unrelated that as the “science” of economics has become more influential over the past 40+ years, economic welfare has decreased for most people. [2]
Conflict, Disinformation, and Conspiracy Theories. Yes, conflicts both imagined and real often lead to conspiracy theories. This has been covered in a remarkable book by Thomas Milan Konda, Conspiracies of Conspiracies: How Delusions have Overrun America (2019). And why is this? The reasons are many, but in my view this passage has considerable explanatory power:
Contemporary research has found that people who see their situation deteriorating are particularly susceptible to conspiracy theories. Feelings of increasing powerlessness, especially of a diminution of socio-political control, lead people to conspiratorial conclusions. Believing that one’s plight is caused by a conspiracy can provide ‘a clear explanation for a negative outcome that otherwise seems inexplicable.” Such powerless can also lead to increased religious intensity or greater acceptance of authoritarian leaders, but when these feelings are linked with overwhelming, shocking events…the odds of turning to conspiracy are increased.” (p. 32)
As Richard Hofstadter put it in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, this also relies on a Manichean outlook that presumes the conflict of good versus evil related to the “megalomaniac view of oneself as the Elect, wholly good, abominably persecuted yet assured of ultimate triumph (with) the attribution of gigantic and demonic powers to the adversary.” When I first read Hofstadter as the proverbial college freshman, I thought he was overwrought. Now I tend to believe that he exaggerated only a bit, during the era in which Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination was a fundamental text of the nascent Professional Managerial Class (PMC) that was soon to be confused by a book written as sociological satire.
Conspiracy and the Undermining of Trust in Science and Government. Yes, but “Science” and “Government” have done quite well at undermining themselves on their own, as noted every day at Naked Capitalism, especially regarding COVID-19, of which this article is a case study.
Politically motivated science denial versus justifiable public opposition. This is analyzed well in the article and will be considered below.
A primary focus of this article is the “COVID-19 infodemic.” This is an apt term to describe the past three years and has been defined as “an abundance of low-quality information (i.e., information that turns out to be false), disinformation (i.e., false information that is intentionally spread to mislead people), and conspiracy theories.” That much of this “low-quality information” has been published in “peer-reviewed” journals seems to be unappreciated by the authors. The political fault-finding here is what one might expect and is not particularly useful: “Trump’s dissemination of misinformation has been linked to reduced compliance with pandemic control measures, which eventually translated into higher COVID-19 infection and fatality growth rates in U.S. counties that predominantly voted for Trump in 2016 than those that voted for Clinton.” Facile, but perhaps.
The early responses to COVID-19 were primarily theatre, not “science,” and one can only have high hopes for the Covid Crisis Group’s book that was pre-reviewed at NC on April 24: Lessons from the Covid War (pre-ordered). I am reminded of a recent conversation with a retired internist colleague. She asked my whether I have been “boosted,” and I replied, “No.” She then asked in her PMC glory, “Is that because of the Great Orange One with all his misinformation?” Stifling a giggle, my reply was, “No. I was immunosuppressed for most of the year after my two Pfizer shots and did not want to risk another unnecessary challenge to my immune system.”
After a nod that I interpreted as assent I continued with, “What seems most sensible to me is the mRNA vaccines are experimental and do not work, in that they prevent neither infection nor transmission. In any case, I have not been convinced that boosters will work on the current variants of SARS-CoV-2. Or that the purported tunable character of mRNA vaccines as a practical and rapid response to emerging infections will ever matter with a rapidly evolving virus such as SARS-CoV-2. And besides, cheap and easy non-pharmaceutical interventions such as effective masks, improved ventilation, and air filters are much more likely to work in the short term, with anti-virals coming next, and then effective intranasal vaccines that will stop SARS-CoV-2 before it starts. Up to now, virtually all of our efforts have been devoted to intramuscular mRNA vaccines, which may cause too many side effects to be safe enough to justify their widespread use.” No argument in response and even a short disquisition on vaccine effectiveness and how that is measured! Medical school memories, I suppose.
How has COVID-19 affected our democracy, according to Lewandowsky and co-authors? Primarily by interfering with economic freedom and individual liberty (leaving the relationships between democracy and “economic freedom” aside for the time being). As they rightly emphasize, “Any infringement upon civil liberties must be thoroughly examined before it can be justified as an unfortunate exception in the interest of public health.” But this was not done effectively, or at all during the pandemic. Nevertheless, shutdowns and work-from-home did protect some of us, including yours truly who was able to work a mostly normal schedule and can survive and sometimes thrive for extended periods in a hermit-like existence.
Nevertheless, “these social restrictions have disproportionately impacted women, single parents, minority groups, refugees and migrants, and poor people who cannot afford to buy basic personal protective equipment (PPE).” Or the “essential workers” who did not have the option or the wherewithal to stay home during the successive COVID-19 waves (meatpacking plant workers, for example) or work-from-home for the duration, which for the WFH contingent may last quite a while in some businesses. In one of the most effective passages in the paper the authors note that:
Frustration with, and opposition to, social restrictions are therefore potentially legitimate grievances that deserve to be heard in democratic public discourse. Pandemics deprive people of their feelings of control and security, factors that are known to enhance the attractiveness of conspiracy theories. Some people may therefore be driven towards conspiratorial rhetoric out of psychological or rhetorical needs rather than out of an intrinsic disposition. Although the epistemic status of argumentation is independent of the proponent’s circumstances, those circumstances or grievances may be relevant to determining the appropriate response. The need to recognize and empathize with these grievances is amplified by the fact that the pandemic has had the most severe impact on low-wage and low-skill employees. These employees were hit in multiple ways, from wage insecurity for hourly workers to dense living conditions and the inability to escape crowded and unsafe workplaces. (emphasis added)
Although they are generally ignored in common PMC discourse, the truth of the matter (i.e., “epistemic status of argumentation” in perfectly fluent academic jargon) is that legitimate grievances of the working class should be recognized and understood (one can hope) and disagreement with the status quo of our political economy should not be taken as evidence of one’s deplorable character. And indeed, “the pandemic has had the greatest effect on low-wage and low-skill employees…wage insecurity, dense living conditions…crowded and unsafe workplaces.” At which point I must point out that the “low-skill employee” trope has no place in legitimate academic discourse, however common it is.
Only a professor or the completely oblivious (not always the same) could view a waiter, line cook, barista, bartender, meatcutter in the “meat factory” in Nebraska or Kansas, certified medical assistant, or nurse’s aide as a “low-skill employee.” But I digress again to note that the problem with too many of my PMC colleagues is that they have never had to actually work for a living, which has been one of the many lessons learned from COVID-19. For an excellent recent and concise philosophical treatment of work, see A Philosopher Looks at Work by Raymond Geuss, a child of the American working class who found himself at Cambridge.
Which brings us to scientific argumentation and scientific denial, the latter of which “arises when people reject well-established scientific propositions that are no longer debated by the relevant scientific community.” Common examples are biological evolution, anthropogenic climate change, and the link between HIV and AIDS. As with many standard academic approaches, an acronym exists: FLICC: Fake experts – Logical fallacies – Impossible expectations – Cherry-picking – Conspiracy theories.
Fake scientific experts have been a thing at least since Big Tobacco enlisted scientists and physicians to deny the link between smoking and lung cancer, which was proven, even if the molecular mechanisms remained unknown for 40 years, as I have noted before by Richard Doll and Bradford Hill in the early 1950s. The relevant science is more accessible in The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. [3] Logical fallacies include “straw man arguments” and false dichotomies. Another example is conflation of logical and temporal prediction. An example of the former is: Fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases and the climate will get warmer. The latter has been common since the ancient prediction of eclipses and the development of celestial mechanics. These forms of prediction are not related. Impossible expectations include “proof of global warming,” which, while it cannot actually be proven by the deluge that hit Fort Lauderdale earlier this month, that Glacier National Park should be renamed National Park when our children have grandchildren, if not sooner, is good evidence for AGW. Another may be that “herd immunity will save us from COVID-19.” Cherry picking is self-explanatory. As I have taught my graduate students: Once is an anecdote, twice is data, three times is a result. Conspiracy theories can be an adjunct to denial, which often has understandable origins for those who will listen.
The brief for the distinction between science denial and scientific argumentation is not particularly convincing, as has been illustrated throughout COVID-19. The Great Barrington Declaration may have been associated with something called the American Institute for Economic Research, but the authors are scientists associated with Oxford, Stanford, and Harvard Medical School, just as are many of the 937,000+ signers of the declaration. Scientific truth is not a matter of declaration. Herd immunity against coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV-2 remains “problematic,” and this has been known for a long time. Dr. Anthony Fauci famously told us he “represents science.” The context of that statement does not support the notion that he believes he “is science,” as commonly reported (it is no accident that a Startpage search returns mostly articles from the Right side of the political spectrum). But the statement was cringe-inducing and reminded too few actual scientists of John 14:6, in which Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” The mRNA vaccines about which Dr. Fauci was talking in his interview with CBS News were at the time, and remain, “problematic.”
Finally, the authors conclude with: “When science has an impact on policy and on people’s daily lives, two fundamental rights of the public collide: the right to be heard, and the right not to be misled. We propose that this tension can be resolved, and legitimate democratic debate be facilitated, in at least two ways.” Perhaps “coincide” rather than “collide” should be used to describe the relationship between these two fundamental rights. These first recommendation is:
Misleading and inappropriate argumentation must be identified…Rapidly evolving crises can overwhelm the scientific process, which cannot provide firm answers at the speed at which they are demanded by the public and policy makers. However, lack of scientific knowledge or scientific uncertainty does not legitimate misleading or inappropriate argumentation.
Indeed, but the correct and proper answer from the “scientific process” is “We do not know, but we will work hard to find answers that are needed for the public at large.” With COVID-19, this was not the answer. It was clear from the beginning that the physicians who dealt with the first wave of COVID-19 in Wuhan were correct in their response that what they were seeing required rapid and effective measures, to include travel bans, masks, social distancing, and other immediate acts in the face of an apparently novel, acute disease that kills. Instead, the scientific and political establishments argued among themselves about SARS-CoV-2 origins and pathobiology and conducted several experiments on millions of people, without their consent. I wrote earlier in this series that the mRNA vaccine experiment worked but the outcome was uncertain. What I meant is that all properly performed experiments work but they often produce an answer that is inconvenient if not unwanted. Which is the case with COVID-19 vaccines, so far. The good scientist revises her hypothesis and continues with her research. The bad scientist, who is often a marketer in disguise, doubles down on his original hypothesis and cashes in as soon as possible.
The second recommendation is:
The functional role of inappropriate argumentation must be interrogated (another favorite but out of place academic term). Do people believe and voice those arguments to express a relevant aspect of their circumstances? If people voice conspiratorial rhetoric, do they express a deep-seated belief or does the rhetoric serve other functions such as loss of control.
What strikes me most about this recommendation is that it applies to both the skeptical and perhaps conspiratorial public and the soi-disant scientists and administrators and denizens of corporate C-suites and their research directors who run the other side of the argument. All you have to do for the scientific side is replace “conspiratorial” with “self-interested,” as in having a vested interest in the outcome. And therein lies what I view as the problem with “science embroiled in conflict.” Fully half of the conflict comes from each side. The benefits have manifestly accrued to only one side of the argument during COVID-1, though. That result is to be expected, unfortunately.
Which leads me to the question “Why?” I do not know. I have looked. Many proffered answers are facile. There can be no unitary answer, but I have watched our “Social Capital” dwindle to nearly nothing during a working life that began just before Neoliberalism asserted itself as the dominant and only acceptable paradigm of political economy. Unless and until we rebuild our social capital in the form of “conventions, spaces, practices, and norms of conduct” that will not fail us, either in day-to-day life or in the crises that confront us from time to time, “Nothing will fundamentally change,” as the politician has said. We have work to do.
Notes
[1] Their recent book is The Big Myth: How American Business Taught us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market (Bloomsbury, 2023). Ninety pages in and it is not clear how “market fundamentalism” is anything but an essential attribute of modern, especially neoliberal, capitalism, whatever the regulatory environment.
[2] I violate Professor Horowitz’s Rule here and generalize from my own necessarily limited experience, but as a 17-year-old high school graduate I was paid $53,000 per year in 2023 dollars, including overtime at time-and-a-half – double time on holidays with meaningful fringe benefits, to work at the lowest level (a shovel and sling blade were my most commonly used tools, along with a dump truck and forklift) in Maintenance at a heavy chemical plant (union, of course) for a transnational corporation whose business address at the time was Number One Times Square. Similar jobs were readily available to many who wanted them in an economy that paid the most experienced hourly workers in that plant (relief operators who could perform every production task) $192,000 a year in 2023 dollars. Is it any wonder that many of them owned a boat and a small cabin on the river, and that they were (mostly) politically quiescent. Or that their children are often obstreperous in the early years of the new millenium.
[3] “In the twenty-nine months between October 1951 and March 1954, 789 deaths were reported in Doll and Hill’s original cohort (of 41,024 physicians). Thirty-six of these were attributed to lung cancer. When lung cancer deaths were counted in smokers versus nonsmokers, the correlation virtually sprang out: all thirty-six of the deaths had occurred in smokers. The difference between the two groups was so significant that Doll and Hill did not even need to apply complex statistical metrics to discern it. The trial designed to bring the most rigorous statistical analysis to the cause of lung cancer barely required elementary mathematics to prove its point.” The Emperor of All Maladies, p. 249. Of course, not all people who smoke get lung cancer, but of those who get lung cancer about 90% smoke or have smoked. Correlation and causation.