Tag Archives: anti-intellectualism

Politics, Science

Anti-vaccination nutjobs

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As a skeptic, I’ve never been a fan of alternative medicine or even herbal remedies. I prefer that any medical treatments that I take be experimentally controlled, peer reviewed and statistically compared for efficacy against competing treatments. It feels however that I’m in the minority on this and even people who have a reasonably sound education in the sciences often just state that alternative medicine, while not necessarily being more effective than a placebo, is at least harmless and could provide some psychological reassurance to patients.

Frankly, I feel that this is conceding too much. Even if alternative medical treatments are physiologically harmless, admitting them into the mainstream dangerously blurs the line between truth and falseness. It means conceding authority to snake oil salesmen who claim to not only know better than trained doctors but that doctors aren’t to be trusted because they are in collusion with drug companies who poison patients. More importantly in the long run, it feeds the general perception that scientific truth is not objective and that you don’t actually need any academic qualifications in order to be a respected authority on scientific matters.

Currently the best example of how much damage the anti-intellectual crowd can do is the ridiculous argument against vaccinations. This profile of Paul Offit, a prominent scientist in the development and study of vaccines, in Wired should be required reading for anyone who isn’t convinced that the rise of alternative medicine is actively harmful. It is truly frightening how quickly the fad of parents refusing to have their children vaccinated has grown and how much damage it is already doing. Furthermore, it’s one thing if the parents are harming their own children by not getting them vaccinated, but it’s another thing when you consider that they’re endangering everyone else around them because a good vaccination program depends on everyone being vaccinated to work.

As the article explains, the fears about the risks posed by vaccines are completely groundless and even now diseases that were previously thought to have been vanquished are making a comeback because vaccination rates are dropping. The saddest part is that all this has happened before. In England and Wales in the late 19th century, an anti-smallpox vaccine movement got started causing the disease to flare up even though the vaccine had been invented in 1793. I guess this is what you get when people look to celebrities like Jenny McCarthy, Jim Carey and Oprah Winfrey for scientific advice instead of actual scientists.

Philosophy

Counterknowledge

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The Telegraph recently published an extract of an interesting new book by Damian Thompson on what he calls counterknowledge: wacky ideas and theories that are unsupported by empirical evidence, but are believed by many, and thanks to modern telecommunications technology and the internet, are flourishing as never before. Some of the examples cited include: the conspiracy theory that the Bush administration planned and executed the 9/11 terrorist attacks; that the plot of the popular novel The Da Vinci Code in which Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings is true, and that the Catholic Church knows about this and is covering it up; and the fatwa issued by Islamic leaders in northern Nigeria stating that the polio vaccine is really part of a U.S. plot to sterilize Muslims.

In many cases, you might think that the theories spouted by these cranks are harmless enough, except that sometimes they’re so widely believed that they cause serious harm, such as the spread of polio caused by parents who now refuse to vaccinate their infants. And when even a minister in President Sarkozy’s new French government, Christine Boutin, remarks that it is possible that Bush might have something to do with the 9/11 attacks, you realize that this isn’t a problem that’s confined to poor countries or uneducated people. I can think of plenty of other examples such as South African president Thabo Mbeki’s reluctance to believe that the HIV virus is the cause of AIDS; the formerly popular idea that the 1969 moon landing was faked in a movie studio; and, yes, even Chinese beliefs in qi, feng shui and any number of other superstitions.

As the extract notes, there are a number of reasons why such beliefs can take hold including encouragement by Left-wing multiculturalists who insist that minorities have the right to believe in things that are patently untrue and postmodern philosophers, again usually Left-wing, who insist that science and technology are products of Western culture and are not objectively true. In the developing world, opposition to Western science is seen as opposition to the political, intellectual and scientific elite of the Western world and a way of upholding the dignity and validity of their respective cultures.

In response to the conspiracy-minded, I refer to the now familiar quote by Robert J. Hanlon: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.” As my recent viewing of a particular South Park episode indicated, believing that the Bush administration orchestrated the 9/11 attacks means ascribing an almost superhuman level of competence to President Bush and his officials. As for those who argue that science is a cultural phenomenon that is inherently Western and therefore not objective, I say that reason, logic and the scientific method are the best tools that humanity has to discover the truth and they belong to all mankind. As Ayn Rand would say, our reason is the very thing that makes all of us human. Only a fool would deprive himself of science’s benefits just because someone else got it right first.