Saturday, December 05, 2009

Climate Change: Does it make sense to argue with rightist believers?

I have been reading the notorious Newsmax Newsletter for a while (it really is a painful thing for me to do), and it often leaves me speechless. For one, it clearly caters to the scientifically disenfranchised (which is a mild way of expressing it). At first it was difficult for me to understand that any even remotely educated person would fall for the style and content of these right-wingers’ arguments, but apparently there are enough relatively intelligent people with a cemented – and very limited - world view. Often it strikes me as if these people live in a parallel reality, and the method is to transfer bits and pieces of the actual reality into their limited realm where those morsels of facts and knowledge are cut off their roots and interpreted in the context of a world with which they have nothing to do. And although it is not politically correct to say that: it is impossible to convince a true believer of anything that contradicts his or her belief. It means to pull the mental ground away from under their feet – so understandably there is resistance to this onslaught of science. At the same time scientific ignorance is still the norm, not the exception. Even here in Germany – nowadays a very liberal, progressive and rather well educated society. If I go out onto the street of a big city, 80% of the 2009 populace I encounter there will not be able to tell me the difference between solar thermal applications and photovoltaic. Ten years ago I actually did a survey which included question aimed at finding out whether people could distinguish between “ozone hole”, “ozone smog” and “greenhouse effect”. The result was very sobering. So how much insight can be expected from the layman, when it comes to the tremendous complexity of the global climate system meeting the tremendous complexity of the globalized economy? It is near nil. And – although I am a trained physicist, climatologist and have over 20 years experience in the field: even much of my own perceived insight might amount to not much more than an illusion of understanding. When asked about the details I too often have to say “I don’t know”. The contrarians don’t do that. They blurp out their invented facts without doubt and hesitation. They are – or act like – believers. I have likened the situation to a medieval inquisition court. Imagine a scientist attorney in court addressing the Grand Inquisitor in favor of a defendant: “Your argument does not hold, because your fundamental proposition is unproven or wrong: the presumed existence of god and the devil.” I assume the argument would not have been very successful. But this points towards a fundamental problem: as long as we are arguing with people who live in an invented reality, there is no way of countering their arguments, because every scientific argument is a signal sent into and filtered by their closed set of quasi scholastic logics. They are, by their own definition, RIGHT. This means before their argument begins, they, in their own view, already have won the argument. There is no loosing. The scientific culture on the other hand is one of arguments, debate and discourse – a culture constantly in flux. The political right wing is by definition “conservative” - their values are solid, inflexible, well defined and ideally even eternal. Every change is perceived as a threat, and nothing is more disturbing to this mindset than the ever changing world of scientists. What a scientist like me considers a fascinating adventure of the mind that will keep me motivated up and running until the end of my days, many others perceive as an existential danger. So again: I am afraid there is no way to argue with anyone who religiously believes in any given ideology or religion and who is determined to defend their views – in fact their mental makeup – with every force they can muster. In such an argument everything you do or say – no matter what – will be turned against you. Because everything you do or say, no matter what, is, by definition, wrong from the onset. The only hope is to reach some of those who are not entirely inflexible yet, who’s mind is not yet completely close. That already would be a big success.

Such is that.

No comments:

Post a Comment