Being very interested in science myself, I couldn’t wait to read this book. Shawn Otto highlights some serious issues concerning science today. He helped found the ScienceDebate website which encourages presidential debate on important questions of science and lists the original top 14 questions facing America in the first chapter. We see that by 2008 several anti-science views had become entrenched in the Republican Party concerning reproductive medicine, evolution, and climate science. He notes that making science subordinate to authoritarian ideology occurred in cultures in the past, and those societies collapsed. We see less reporting on science in U.S. newspapers; newspapers had ninety-five sections in 1989, but just nineteen in 2012. By late 2010, ninety-four of one hundred newly elected Republicans denied current climate science concerning global warming. By 2012, antiscientific rhetoric had become normalized in U.S. politics.
As the author notes, science “takes nothing on faith, science is inherently antiauthoritarian, and a great equalizer of political power. That is why it is under attack.” Otto gives us the history of science going back in time to the 1600s when American was first settled by the Europeans. We learn the role science played in the protestant reformation, and the contributions by the “Islamic keepers of science.” More recently, we see the distrust of science that formed during the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs, the cold war, and the cloistered nature of scientists in the mid-twentieth century. Otto makes an important point at this point: “Democracy is, as we know, rooted in science, knowledge, and the biology of natural law. But most of our elected leaders have not had significant training in science, or, more importantly, in how the foundational ideas of modern law and democracy relate to, and grew out of, science.” And this is a problem today. We can see the public’s perception of science slide in recent years: by 1999 about 47 percent of Americans agreed that scientific achievements were very important, by 2009 the figure dropped to 27 percent. In 1994, Congress eliminated funding for the Office of Technology Assessment as part of a budget-cutting package. To add insult to injury congressional staffers turned to lobbyists and the Internet for science information – yikes.
Part II delves into the history of modern science politics. A shocking revelation to me was that after Einstein won the Nobel Prize in 1921, right-wing relativity deniers were on the rise – really! The concluding chapter in this section covers the vaccine scare, Polio misinformation, and the rise of yellow and gonzo journalism – all interesting stuff.
In Part III, the author elaborates on what he calls the three-front war on science. The first major front in the war is the “identity-politics or postmodernist front, waged by academics and the press.” This part got a bit philosophical for me and was somewhat intellectually dense. Postmodernists apparently view all of science as a sort of public-relations campaign by the elite and that truth is subjective, not objective. The second front is an ideological one. Here we have the attack on evolution via creationism, the vaccine controversy, and the sex-education controversy. The author describes a third front in the war: the industrial war on science. From Rachel Carson’s environmental concerns through the decades long fight by industry against climate science, Otto presents a very compelling account about this aspect of the war on science. I found this section very interesting and shocking at the same time. It is unbelievable what efforts and extent some will go to in order to protect their selfish interests. It is in this section that the author presents a “seven stage method of cloaking rhetorical arguments in the language of science legitimacy in order to influence public perception and effect a desired policy objective.” After reading this, it is no wonder that people are truly confused on scientific issues. The denial engine is incredible. One big topic of discussion in the book is climate science denial. Here the author lists the top ten climate-denial talking points, and goes on to present a wealth of information on this topic.
In the concluding chapters, Otto explains over several chapters what needs to be done to win this war. In chapter twelve, he presents fourteen battle plans that need to be implemented in order to do this.
I have thoroughly enjoyed this brief tour “of the vast intellectual, ideological, and economic war on science.”
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Top reviews from other countries
Peter Monien
What could we achieve if we would follow the scientific process instead of "the science"
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A very biased view, from a writer with too much faith in the myth of 'Scientific Consensus,
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