Tears For Spheres

In 2013 Wall Street Journal opinion writer Bret Stephens--who with David Brooks now represents the conservative wing of the New York Times opinion page--won a "distinguished commentary" Pulitzer Prize for what I perceived as a year's worth of very unremarkarkable commentary. In 2017 his first column for the Times offered an extremely nonscientific challenge to climate science that leading climate scientists ended up correcting in an open letter. 

Sometimes Stephens moves from unremarkable to unhinged, as when in late 2019 he seemed to endorse (and later denied endorsing) a paper coauthored by a known racist that found a genetic basis for intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. For one of the few times in its history, as noted in Politico, the Times ended up having to retract parts of an opinion column and add an editor's note. A summary of Stephens' most unhingeworthy moments can be found here. 

But sometimes even unremarkable writers can have remarkable moments. Case in point: This SPOT-ON paragraph from Stephens' March 13th, 2020 column: 

The coronavirus has exposed the falsehood of so many notions Trump’s base holds about the presidency: that experts are unnecessary; that hunches are a substitute for knowledge; that competence in administration is overrated; that every criticism is a hoax; and that everything that happens in Washington is B.S. Above all, it has devastated the conceit that having an epic narcissist in the White House is a riskless proposition at a time of extreme risk. 

The suspicion of experts and exaltation of hunches, while a distinct feature of the MAGA cult, did not begin there. We've been on this path for a long time; for many decades now talk radio and the cable opinion shows have preferred verbal tug-of-war between tribal hyperpartisans over any kind of knowledge-driven discourse. The late astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned us of the consequences in his classic 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. He wrote: 

“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

Given the mess we are now in, I'd say Sagan's fears have been realized in a dramatic way that probably even he could not have imagined. The "combustible mixture of ignorance and power" is so deeply ingrained at so many levels of society that one has to wonder if even a global pandemic inflicting huge global casualties is enough to set us on a new path. 

Above: Carl Sagan prediction circa 1995. 

The Way Forward: Understanding Spheres of Argument

While the coronavirus pandemic has alerted us to the importance of appreciating science, what "appreciating science" means is not exactly clear. Does it mean more STEM education? Does it mean putting more scientists on television?  Does it mean, as comic Jon Lajoie has cleverly done, thanking God for the nerds? Should professor Harry Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" be required reading in high schools? Should every public university have a requirement similar to University of Washington professors Carl Bergstrom's and Jevin West's "Calling Bullshit"? (To be released as a book in August of this year.). Should more of us share the great Ira Flatow's Science Friday on our social media feeds?

From a media criticism perspective, the problem is not that Americans do not learn enough science in school (although that is certainly a problem.). Rather, the problem is that mainstream media coverage of science is generally poor, often featuring a kind of Scopes Monkey Trial framing in which the clash between a representative of science and a representative of some interest threatened by scientific findings is given priority over understanding the science. The entertainment value of the verbal slug fest between the Clarence Darrows and the William Jennings Bryans becomes more important than the issue that they are actually warring about. 

Newspaper coverage of the 1925 prosecution of science teacher John Scopes gave emphasis to the courtroom clash between Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan. Modern coverage of issues in science is often similar in tone. 

The "clash" coverage ends up minimizing and delegitimizing scientific findings while placing science advocates in the bizarre position of having to defend their reputations as if they were running for office. That's how someone like Dr. Fauci and other epidemiologists become political targets. But even worse, the delegitimizing of science results in even "respectable" sources downplaying findings that suggest an urgent need for action. In an excellent essay in The Atlantic, professor Zeynep Tufekci agrees that while Trump and his  right wing sycophants have tragically and willfully minimized the coronavirus from the start, the truth is that a range of journalists took too long to recognize the severity of the problem. On February 1 a Washington Post health writer said it was time to "get a grippe" because the 2020 flu was going to be much worse. A New York Times writer warned against "pandemic panic." Journalists around the world were generally better than their US counterparts at getting the story early, but it took an open letter from French journalists working in Italy to get the crisis elevated to the proper level of urgency. Bill Gates saw this coming more than four years ago, but no one listened. Perhaps if he'd questioned the authenticity of Barack Obama's birth certificate he would have gotten more media attention. 

So while more and better science education is necessary and desirable, such education doesn't count for much if our mediated public sphere continues to prioritize the spectacle of disagreement over its resolution. Allow me to explain: 

In 1982 Communication Studies scholar G. Thomas Goodnight released an important essay entitled "The Personal, Technical, and Public Spheres of Argument: A Speculative Inquiry into the Art of Public Deliberation." (Journal of Argumentation and Advocacy).  In it, Goodnight defined spheres of argument as "branches of activity--the grounds upon which arguments are built and the authorities to which arguers appeal." For Goodnight, argument takes place in three distinct spheres: the personal, the technical, and the public. 

The personal sphere is "the place where most informal arguments occur, among a small number of people, involving limited demands for proof, and often about private topics." Social media has give the personal sphere a public platform, which has had the terrible effect of reducing argument on social media platforms to something that you might experience at a neighborhood barbecue with lots of drunk participants: half-baked ideas and insults become the norm. 

The technical sphere is the "argument sphere that has explicit rules for argument and is judged by those with specific expertise in the subject." The technical sphere appears in academic journals, medical literature, the legal field, and other areas where knowledge must be vetted before release (a process known as "peer review."). The Republican Party has been at war with the technical sphere for a long time now, an unfortunate choice that made it easier for the Trump Administration in 2018 to relax pandemic preparedness standards. 

In 2005 the comedian Stephen Colbert famously invented the word "truthiness" to describe how knowing something in "the gut" is as good as knowing it from a book. His routine remains a classic satire on the Bush Administration's technical sphere assault. In hindsight, Bush was like Cicero compared to the current occupant of the White House. 

The public sphere is "the argument sphere that exists to handle disagreements transcending personal and technical disputes." In theory, everyone can and should participate meaningfully in the public sphere. In practice, the public sphere in most countries is dominated by voices that do not necessarily share the public interest. In the United States, the public sphere is displayed on commercial news media, where viewers and listeners are typically presented with "experts" who obtained the title not by significant achievement in the technical sphere, but by representing the interests of private powers. It's difficult to quantify the damage caused by these "think tank scholars" and pundits-for-hire, but the fact that the Mayor of Tulsa, OK has had to fend off accusations of being a Bible-Belt Hitler for issuing a shelter-in-place order should give us pause. 

Over many years we have allowed our public sphere to be dominated by voices telling us, repeatedly and fiercely, that we are all on our own. That we alone are responsible for solving our problems. That all government assistance is at best a necessary evil and almost always a form of totalitarianism. That we should not expect, nor are we entitled to, help from anyone else. That volunteering to help your neighbors is okay, but no one can force us to help them. 

What happens when a public fed an anti-civic diet for so many years is suddenly in the position of having to think about how each individual's behavior can literally result in the death of his or her neighbor? Tragically, we are seeing what happens. Mainstream media's long habit of amplifying the voices of cranks and charlatans has made us ill-prepared to handle a public space that now relies on the testimony of medical experts. Even as the body count rises, huge numbers of people fall back on the "please don't force me to think seriously about this" memes of "this is no different than the flu," "this is all being exaggerated," "we don't want the cure to be worse than the disease," etc. When our pubic sphere has been dominated for decades by glib evasions of the world's most pressing problems, none of this should be surprising. 

None of us knows how the coronavirus crisis will end. Without a rejuvenated public sphere that respects the technical and motivates the personal toward the greater good, it is not likely to end well.