Eteraphobia and Michael Crichton
"... A tournament, tournament, a tournament of lies.
Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives and I decline." --- End of the World by REM
There must be a word that best describes an aversion to alternatives.
Alternaphobia sounds too contrived. Omoiosophilia (love of similar things) is too alliterative. For want of a better Greek word, Im thinking of proposing "etera" meaning "other" -- so it would be "eteraphobia."
The reason Ive been trying to create a useful label is that I keep seeing this aversion to consdiering the alternatives. And its not just guys like me who refuse to stop and ask for directions. Everywhere I turn there seems to be a deep reluctance to ponder alternatives:
- War in the Middle east? No alternative oil reserves.
- Global warming? No alternatives to gasoline.
- Malaria and West Nile virus? No alternatives to DDT.
- Octane additives for fuel? No alternatives to lead (or MTBE, or BTX).
- Fire protection? No alternatives to asbestos.
- Electric power? Choice of coal, gas or nukes. No alternatives.
- Safe cars? No alternative to SUVs.
The list goes on and on.
If Crichton wants to talk about the scientific method, he can hardly claim to be scientific on the one hand and then insult environmental scientists by calling them cult members and mass murderers on the other. In each of these cases, alternatives have existed for decades and are well known to experts. Mineral wool works just as well as asbestos. Venezuela has bigger oil fields than all of the Middle East. DDT is not the last word in malaria control. Renewable energy is more affordable than nuclear power. SUVs, for all their bulk, are not as safe as other cars because they roll over.
But why the information gap? Why have our critical facilities rolled over?
One explanation is that experts can have strong interests in specific technologies.
The classic historical example is the 1925 case of a Standard Oil (Exxon) executive who testified that there was no substitute for leaded gasoline, a "gift from heaven" -- and then fired off a secret memo to his cronies about threats to the business from substitutes that were coming on the market.
In recent years, US Department of Energy officials have said the energy future was: "coal, oil and nuclear power, and that's it." How seriously can we take their claim that there are no real alternatives, when nearly all research and subsidies go to coal, oil and nuclear power?
Or take Middle East oil. Is it true that two thirds of all the world's known oil is found in the Middle East? Actually, no. In fact, two thirds of a particular category of oil -- "proven" reserves --is found in the Middle East. In fact, the world's largest known oil field is located in Venezuela's Orinoco region. True, this oil is heavier and would take an extra 25 to 50 cents a gallon to process, but then, that minor additional expense hasn't exactly been on the list of alternatives.
Another explanation is there are political points to be scored by ignoring the alternatives.
Two years ago there was a claim that if asbestos had not been banned during the World Trade Center construction, the WTC would have held up during the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Much to the dismay of cleanup workers, it turned out that plenty of asbestos had actually been used. Even so, engineers later said that no amount would have held the buildings up against the attacks. Score: zero.
Or take the case of supposed mass murders by environmentalists. In lectures to scientists and businessmen in 2003, fiction writer and right-wing extremist Michael Crichton claimed that "environmentalists have killed 30 million people" in the past 30 years because DDT was banned. This is supposedly because:
1 -- Environmentalists pushed for a DDT ban despite questionable scientific evidence, thus dooming people in developing nations to massive malaria epidemics; and
2 -- Environmentalism is an irrational, pseudo-religious approach to life and not the rigorous, scientific, dispassionate approach to facts that should guide us.
The DDT example had been used by political conservatives in the past, but Crichton elevated it to a new level by putting crunchy granolas in the same category as Hitler, Stalin and Atilla the Hun. His hysteria aside, here's why the case was already weak:
In the first place, bans on agricultural use of DDT never extended to public health uses in developing nations. DDT is still widely used where needed for public health. It is recommended by the World Health Organization for indoor applications in malaria prone areas. Nor have environmentalists opposed this. Non-governmental organizations sitting at UN treaty conventions have never tried to stop limited use of persistant organic pollutants when human lives were at stake.
In the second place, there are dozens of effective and acceptable alternatives to DDT. All he would have had to do was call up a "Google" search on the Web to find thousands of references to DDT alternatives.
Score, once again, zero. But again we see eteraphobia -- fear of the other, the alternative, the road not taken.
If Crichton wants to talk about the scientific method, he can hardly claim to be scientific on the one hand and then insult environmental scientists by calling them cult members and mass murderers on the other.
The scientific method dispassionately considers all alternatives. Scientist and philosopher Carl Hempel in Aspects of Scientific Explanation notes that an adequate scientific explanation considers "first of all, what consequences each of the different alternative choices is likely to have."
But that's not what Crichton and other eteraphobics are all about. They want to wrap their political views in the mantle of scientific objectivity and, like the Exxon executive, insist that their product (or wisdom) is the only gift from heaven. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In Crichton's case, there is an additional anomaly involving the comparison to H.G. Wells and other science fiction writers. Crichton's familiar themes -- resurrecting dinosaurs, creating mutant monsters, going back in time -- owe much to Wells. Yet the moral foundations and cautionary intent of a Wells tale are not easy to locate in Crichton's work. Impersonal chaos theory is the general cause, and one poor slob's greed is the specific reason, that the dinosaurs get loose in Jurassic Park.
In contrast, the great themes that Wells, Jules Verne, Mary Shelly and many other science fiction writers developed were (in a nutshell) that (1) we mortals are not morally equipped to play God with deep science and high technology; and (2) that we might consider a wide variety of alternatives and perspectives on science and technology. We might, as Ghandi famously said, blend science with humanity.
You could argue that the dilemmas of science and technology are increasing over time, and you could also argue that our capacity to discuss them in fiction and non fiction is steadily decreasing.
But its hard as hell to argue with a man who says that environmentalists are mass murderers.
Crichton has narrowed his vision, abandoned his moral compass and taken to heart a sneering, priggish, politically biased ignorance which, he hopes, wont show through his thin white lab coat.
Too bad for another eterophobe: nothing could be further from the truth.
Links:
Reality check on DDT: World Health Organization's Roll Back Malaria campaign.
Crichton:
"Remarks to the Commonwealth Club," Sept. 15, 2003, by Michael Crichton. "And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them. Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not....
The DDT ban has caused the deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically advanced western society that promoted the new cause of environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus irrevocably harmed the third world. Banning DDT is one of the most disgraceful episodes in the twentieth century history of America. We knew better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die and didn't give a damn. ...
We know from history that religions tend to kill people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between 10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record. Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be flexible. And it needs to be apolitical."
"Aliens cause global warming," Caltech Michelin Lecture January 17, 2003 by Michael Crichton. "Let's think back to people in 1900 in, say, New York. If they worried about people in 2000, what would they worry about? Probably: Where would people get enough horses? And what would they do about all the horseshit? Horse pollution was bad in 1900, think how much worse it would be a century later, with so many more people riding horses?"
Further edification and amusement:
Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist
"Death by Environmentalism," by Robert James Bidinotto. And you thought greenies were idealists. They are, says Bidinotto, responsible for "diseased babies and starving children, crushed automobiles and disintegrating spacecraft, sweltering apartments and blazing forests ..."
More reality checks:
Hall of Shame -- Lists anti-environmental scientists and their funding sources.