Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Dim-Witted Public


John Horgan takes exception to the idea that insights gleaned from neuroscience could help scientists to "frame" global warming in a way that would make it more coherent and palatable to the public.

Framing is just spinning, and neuroframing is spinning plus brain scans.
Although he acknowledges that we don't reliably "make choices based on self-interest [!] and reason," and are more likely to be influenced by "fear, suspicion, empathy and other emotions," Horgan worries that making the effort to adapt to this reality will simply reinforce the perception -- or the "frame," if you prefer -- that environmentalists are deceptive.
First of all, we don’t need MRI studies to tell us that we’re emotional, complicated creatures. Moreover, many people already view environmentalists as self-righteous and manipulative. This is a framing problem that neuroframing may exacerbate. The message is that environmentalists will go to extraordinary lengths—seeking guidance from cutting-edge brain science!--to help the dim-witted public see the world in the same enlightened way that environmentalists do.
There are a few problems here. First, choosing your words carefully, with regard to their likely effect on the perceptions of your audience, isn't going "to extraordinary lengths," nor does it necessarily imply that you believe your audience is "dim-witted." You'd think a professional science writer would understand this.

Second, Horgan blurs the distinction between "environmentalists" and "scientists," which is a perfect example of how not to proceed. The idea that environmentalism amounts to a special interest of some sort is fantastically weird and wrongheaded, in my view, but it's very common all the same. Given what the term signifies in everyday discourse, it's neither accurate nor constructive to conflate environmentalists with working climate scientists.

Third, Horgan seems to think that "framing" represents some sort of a departure from ordinary discourse (his own, for instance). But communication is...well, communicative, not just of facts and opinions but also of implicit and explicit messages about the speaker and the listener. Presenting oneself or one's field as the de facto embodiment of honesty and rationality and objectivity is no less a matter of framing than the tactics Horgan objects to (and can just as easily be attacked as elitist, arrogant, unethical, or whatever).

Horgan also seems to have fallen prey to the Broderist delusion that if you stop giving your opponents ammunition, the spirit of Fair Play will oblige them to stop shooting at you. This is a very popular response, nowadays, to organized bullying by corporatist reactionaries. You can ask the Democrat Party how well it's worked (or if you've succumbed to cynicism, how well it's intended to work).

My own concern about what Horgan calls "neuroframing" is that it may overlook the actual structure of the journalistic field and the money and allegiances that produce it, which is a bit like trying to describe space-time without any reference to gravity. It's not just that scientists have to understand how to talk to the public; it's that they have to understand how to talk to the public through media that distort their positions at best, lie about them at worst, and would never dream of subjecting the accuracy and honesty of their own journalists and editors to the microscopic scrutiny they give the IPCC.

That said, philosophical and political concerns about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and authority can't necessarily be overcome by "laying out the facts as clearly and honestly as possible," as Horgan recommends...especially if someone from, say, the CEI is brought in to ensure that what Pierre Bourdieu calls "the naively idealized vision of the 'scientific' community as the enchanted kingdom of the ends of reason" is properly balanced by "the cynical vision which reduces exchanges between scientists to the calculated brutality of political power relations." (Teach the controversy!)

And these are actually the least of my qualms about Horgan's article. Get a load of this:
Not all global-warming skeptics are ignorant, irrational idiots. I teach at an engineering school, and about one third of my students identify themselves as global-warming skeptics. They tend to know more about global warming than students who accept it as a fact.
I really don't want to be lectured on effective communication by someone who fails to see the rhetorical pitfalls here. If I were to claim that "evolution skeptics tend to know more about evolution than students who accept it as a fact," I'd be accused of talking nonsense, at best. I don't see what makes Horgan's version of this argument respectable or relevant or coherent.

As for the bit about "ignorant, irrational idiots"...it's silly, because a call for improved framing doesn't imply that people are idiots. And it's hypocritical, because Horgan not only acknowledges that human beings are irrational by nature, but also seems to believe that skeptics are ignorant (as evidenced by his desire that they be exposed, again and again and again, to the "facts").

Furthermore, Horgan has no problem calling people "wackos" when it suits his purposes.
Inconvenient Truth was a framing masterpiece, but Al Gore’s linkage of global warming to Katrina, however qualified, has made it easier for wackos to claim that single weather events, like the big blizzards that struck Washington, D.C., this winter, contradict global warming.
Maybe so. But is overstating the significance of single weather events what we're talking about when we talk about "framing"? Is this, or anything like it, what the neuroframers with whom Horgan has been hobnobbing actually recommend? Failing that, is it an inevitable result of their approach? If not, then what in God's name is Horgan's point?
Climategate showed that some climatologists have become so obsessed with framing that they have harmed their credibility.
Much as I hate to stray from the dispassionate objectivity of scientific discourse, that's a metric assload of unmitigated fucking bullshit. This attack on scientists "harmed their credibility" because their goddamn e-mails were stolen and cherrypicked, and because intentional misrepresentations of the things these e-mails said were treated as intellectually serious and scientifically relevant by countless media outlets, while simple and factual corrections were either ignored, or dismissed as mere opinion.

Again, before Horgan rejects framing, he might want to note that there's a huge difference between reinforcing the victim-blaming denialist narrative of "Climategate," and presenting it, accurately, as an orchestrated and pathologically dishonest media spectacle based on a fucking crime, for fuck's sake.

In summation:

Environmentalists should forget about neuroframing. And that’s my we-map talking.

And the moral of that is: Be what you would seem to be, or if you'd like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

7 comments:

Cheryl Rofer said...

This is the position that scientists always take: just the facts, ma'am. As if there were a neutral way to state the facts, which they believe is the way they state the facts. It is a problem that is driving me nuts right now, and I don't have a solution.

And Horgan, of all people, should know better.

Phila said...

It is a problem that is driving me nuts right now, and I don't have a solution.

Me neither, believe it or not.

Obviously, it's not really the fact that's at issue, but the legitimacy of the process by which it came to be affirmed as a fact. Which, as you say, is something that scientists sometimes have a hard time remembering.

That said, AGW isn't just threatening specific political and economic projects, but undermining their philosophical foundations. So it's no wonder that the resistance is incredibly intense. It's likely to get much worse, in my view.

I understand the need for scientists to try to operate apart from these influences and power struggles...but one shouldn't mistake that for "objectivity," IMO.

Also, the endless obsession with public opinion is a distraction from the real issues, I think (and a welcome one for denialists). If 95% of the public suddenly accepted the basic facts about AGW, would we then get serious political results?

I'd like to think so, but I'm not so sure. Money and power have an awful lot of inertia.

Rmj said...

That said, AGW isn't just threatening specific political and economic projects, but undermining their philosophical foundations. So it's no wonder that the resistance is incredibly intense. It's likely to get much worse, in my view.

The problem in a nutshell, of course. Which takes us back to "framing."

One might as well say the French are less ethical than we are, because they tolerate torture as a TV show. And where the first irony there is obvious, the second is that the premise of the show is the work of an American scientist.

So there is an interesting question as to whether we are even "moral" any more (I take "ethical" as Aristotle originally described it: the pursuit of happiness. That obsession we Americans have down pat.). And wouldn't a proper morality not just threaten "specific political and economic projects, but undermin[e] their philosophical foundations"?

Which is the problem, isn't it? We've lost any sense of the "other." We've lost any public sense of morality.

Or as good as done, anyway.

Phila said...

And wouldn't a proper morality not just threaten "specific political and economic projects, but undermin[e] their philosophical foundations"?

Absolutely. Though what's even more striking, IMO, is that a proper economics would do the same thing. We can't even afford to follow our popular substitute for morality to its logical conclusions.

Which is the problem, isn't it? We've lost any sense of the "other." We've lost any public sense of morality.

Depends what you mean by "public." I'd say that a lot of what passes for morality is nothing but public...shallow, judgmental, economic, "democratic" in the worst sense, rigidly punitive, merciful only when it's OK with everybody else, and obsessed with transgression (which is where the sense of the "other" still thrives, unfortunately).

Language games aside (sort of)...were things really different, once, in the sense that a public morality was also a "proper" one?

I'm not asking this rhetorically. Nor even skeptically. I honestly have no idea.

Rmj said...

Absolutely. Though what's even more striking, IMO, is that a proper economics would do the same thing. We can't even afford to follow our popular substitute for morality to its logical conclusions.

The general philosophical basis for economics as presetned in this country (especially "free-market" economics, but discounting, say, Marxism, which is seldom considered an economic theory on these shores) is utilitarianism. Which as first proposed as a moral (or ethical) philosophy.

Language games aside (sort of)...were things really different, once, in the sense that a public morality was also a "proper" one?

I'm not asking this rhetorically. Nor even skeptically. I honestly have no idea.


I know I'm swinging widely here, and what deserves extensive consideration in long-essay form is truncated into a poorly worded comment, but the short answer is: Yes. Of a sort.

Michael Moore pointed out (and it's been bugging me since) that there were no large-scale bank disasters between WWII and the '80's, when Reagan deregulated things and the first to disappear were S&L's (remebmer them? I was in Austin, Texas, the epicenter of the debacle. I remember it well.) Essentially, we gave up public duty (regulating banks and S&L's) in favor of private gain. And now we bail out those who are "too big to fail," and treat these occurrences as akin to hurricanes and earthquakes: we prepare for them, we can't prevent them.

Except, of course, we can. Depends on the "frame." We tried Japanese soldiers for waterboarding, and declared certain acts "war crimes." Until, of course, a generation later, we conduct them. Then it's "national security." A cynical person might say it's the presence of the "other" that's decisive: when "they" do it, it's evil; when "we" do it, it's good. And there's certainly that strain in American history. But alongside it are the public figures who quietly dispute (and diminish) the impact of an Oliver Wendell Holmes (whose judicial pronouncements tended toward "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!"), people like Benjamin Cardozo and Learned Hand (Holmes was more popular, but as a jurist he's not fit to clean their pen nibs). There were Presidents like FDR and LBJ who saw to it that the "right thing" was done, Supreme Court Justices like Earl Warren, who tried to set right what he did wrong in California to the Japanese Americans there.

I don't see those people, now. I see Obama apparently championing new laws to give the POTUS the power to detain whom he pleases, or at least not denying that power that Bush took. I see Fox News discussing how the French apparently love torture, blind to the double irony of their statements. I see better leadership, and ethical and moral leaders in the church and society at large, but not now, where the one undisputed religious leader (Pope Benedict) is caught in the pedophile scandal (and the Archbishop of Ireland speaks more bravely and morally than the Holy Father), and the other religious leaders of the mainline US Christian churches are too small to hear, too tiny to notice. Not their fault, entirely, but: where are the leaders of yesteryear? Now that we need them, where are the public voices that can call "Shame" without dividing us into pure and impure (the public morality your rightly decry), but call us all to change?

Where is our Jonah, and our King of Nineveh?

Phila said...

RMJ,

It seems to me that you're talking mainly about a failure of leadership. No argument there. (Though our media make that kind of leadership harder than it used to be, IMO. As does our obsession with identity politics, perhaps. But no doubt the Internets will solve both problems, right?)

I agree with everything you're saying, basically. But then, as I've said before...segregation, fewer rights for women and gays, general inattention to environmental issues (though to be fair, some of that had to do with the state of the science at the time). And so on.

It's interesting that the forward movement on those issues has been accompanied by the regression you describe. I suppose the general anti-regulatory sentiment could account for some part of it.

Which is a pretty depressing thought.

Eh, who knows. Maybe someone can do a study to prove that it's all a matter of "licensing." With brain scans and everything!

Phila said...

what deserves extensive consideration in long-essay form is truncated into a poorly worded comment

Good thing this isn't true. I don't need you horning in on my racket.