Michael Specter’s book Denialism (de rigueur subtitle-of-absurd-length: How irrational thinking hinders scientific progress, harms the planet, and threatens our lives) might look like it’d fit nicely on the bookshelf with Why People Believe Weird Things and Unscientific America, but it would likely jump the other two and scuff up their dust jackets. Specter has been writing for the New Yorker since 1998, and some of the Big Apple’s pugnacity seems to have rubbed off on him. Or maybe he was always that way.
It’s a curious book because while you might expect Holocaust (or other genocide) deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, creationists, global warming skeptics, or other troublesome bands of misinformers to pop up, they don’t. “I decided to focus on issues like food, vaccinations, and our politically correct approach to medicine,” writes Specter in the introduction, “because in each of these arenas irrational thought and frank denialism have taken firm root.”
Yet as Grist argues in a critique of the book, if a small group of global warming deniers delays action long enough that we reach a point of no return for the planet, that’s a big deal. If a small group of people insist on paying more for Whole Foods organic produce because it makes them feel healthier, that’s…part of their shopping budget. Yet, Grist notes, “The book’s index has no entry for ‘climate change.’ The entry for ‘Global warming’ cites just one page—a reference to genetically modified foods as a “solution” to global warming.”
I can’t speak for Specter, but his approach feels Freakonomics-y or Gladwellian: one of those “forget everything you thought you knew” come-ons, juiced up with the blood of a few hodgepodge sacred cows. In his introduction, Specter’s language is fairly circumspect and even-keeled. But the chapters on the “irrational” response to Vioxx, hysteria around vaccines, the rise of the organic food fetish and natural supplement worship, and the role of genetics in medical treatment, contain what some call “provocative” and others might call “unsubstantiated” claims.
Even when I agreed with him, Specter managed to rub me the wrong way. Though he struggles to sound filled with empathy for the irrationalists, Specter comes off as an old-school anthropologist tolerant of a tribe’s quaint superstitions. Of course it’s natural for you to believe that god threw the lightning at you, he seems to say. (I kept wondering who he was writing for–I’ll get the chance to ask him when he’s town.)
Again and again, Specter presents what sounds like both sides of an argument, except that one’s irrational, anti-science, and threatening all our lives. Specter takes the lesson of the Vioxx scandal to be primarily one of emotional overreaction. We don’t understand pharmacological medicine, so we trust and fear it in equally overreaching amounts. If we rationally accepted its risks, Vioxx might be on the market today.
What he doesn’t spend a lot of time considering is whether the overreaction is called for given the scope of our reliance on this medicine. That is, we can’t really afford to have pharmaceutical companies lying to us about known problems with medicine prescribed to millions–it would set a troubling precedent.
There’s an argument to make for Vioxx, and Specter makes it persuasively. But he also tells a story of practiced deceit, political pressure, and retributive firing and ends his chapter saying: “Most people don’t walk out the door trying to hurt other people.” No, they don’t. But most people don’t run pharmaceutical companies. That pool is tiny. And a few bad apples could potentially poison the apple cart. So we hold them to higher standards.
His chapter on vaccines is an easier read, as it has less of a “gotcha” set-up. The history of vaccines’ effectiveness is very good. As we’ve distanced ourselves from firsthand experience of the diseases the vaccines prevent, we’ve become more upset about the rates of real and imagined reactions to the vaccines. Despite numerous studies not finding any correlation between MMR and autism, you just can’t persuade some people otherwise. Good enough.
The “Organic Fetish” chapter, on the other hand, almost immediately hits a sour note when Specter goes to Whole Foods and discovers that the word “organic” is being used extremely loosely. In this and the “Era of Echinacea” chapter, Specter inveighs against organic foods and natural supplements for not being marketed ethically. But if some organic-label foods aren’t really organic, and natural dietary supplements are mostly unnecessary for people eating a balanced diet, the issue isn’t just denialism, it’s the fact that marketing claims, across the board, are highly suspect.
Then, comes this: “To those people [the world’s poor], the Western cult of organic food is nothing more than a glorious fetish of the rich world–one with the power to kill them.” There’s so much wrong with this statement, I’m nonplussed. Yes, that’s where we should start with our criticism of American over-consumption. Organic food. The admittedly watered-down label that comprises less than five percent of American food.
When Specter goes on to defend Monsanto and the industrial farm products of conglomerates like ConAgra from the court of public opinion, you sense that he might have his Davids and Goliaths mixed up. And when he says, “Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth,” and says that because we’re losing arable land, we need another agricultural revolution, he loses me. Just out of curiosity, have we lost more or less arable land since the last agricultural revolution?
There’s a good debate worth having about what works with industrial farming and what’s broken, and whether genetically modified crops are not just an option but a necessity, but I don’t think I want Specter to moderate it.
Specter makes plenty of good points; certainly it’s worth understanding denialism as a human response, and what triggers it: that we’re not all that good at weighing disparate risks, that a poor grasp of history aids and abets our imaginative doomsaying capacity, and that we deal with the unpredictability of complex systems by invoking conspiracy theories.
Certainly there is a strong anti-science movement made up of people who find intellectual discovery inimical to their traditional beliefs, and of people who prefer the amazing malleability of woo-woo explanations. Five minutes in the Bay Area can load you up on enough pseudoscience (and bud!) to last a lifetime. Or you can drop in at the Creation Museum in Kentucky. (I’m not convinced that the alternative medicine research of NCCAM is, on the other hand, a complete betrayal of the scientific method.)
But trauma and violations of trust have radicalized others, who may permanently watchdog all pharma companies, not just those who have been caught red-handed. These people are not in denial, just hypersensitive–they’re placing a bet on corporate culture and the corruptibility of humanity. It would be a mistake to characterize debate on these issues as solely between reason and unreason, which unfortunately is a side-effect of the book’s structure. Reasonable people disagree, and not simply because someone’s calculations are incorrect. Our values differ.
- Michael Specter speaks in Seattle on November 17, for the World Affairs Council. The talk begins at 7 p.m. at Kane Hall at the UW. Tickets are $15 general, $10 WAC members/students.
