Skepticism about the science establishment, then and now

I just read this book from 1991, “The Fail-Safe Society: Community Defiance and the End of American Technological Optimism,” by science journalist Charles Piller.

The book is all about distrust of the government and scientific authority, as can be seen from the chapter titles:

1. Technological Optimism Gives Way to Fear and Suspicion of Modern Science and Industry

2. Control over Science and the Evolution of Public Fears

3. The Rocky Flats Radiation War

4. Ice-Nine to Ice-Minus–A Battle over the New Biology

5. Biomedical Research and the Nightmare in Laurel Heights

6. The Far-Reaching Impact of Nimby Activism

7. Toward Democratic Decision Making about Science and Technology

The book concludes:

“A failure of trust courts chaos,” [EPA director] William Ruckelshaus has said. To a degree, Nimbyism represents a chaotic backlash to a system that has been allowed to go on too long without a democratic rudder. Without trust, people withdraw consent.

In a complex technological society, the definition of community must ultimately expand beyond one’s backyard. No magic will convert local obstructionism into creative participation in decisions about science and technology . . .

People have a responsibility to learn to distinguish between what is important and what is trivial; to balance danger and necessity. But to do this, the general public must be treated as a resource for solving complex problems, rather than shunned as an obstacle to expedient solutions. The public must be valued as a key actor in a social process, rather than despised as an inconvenience or labeled “Luddite.” People may be fearful, but they do not want a fail-safe society. They want to feel secure, in control of their lives, and they want to see that their influence amounts to more than a cipher. . . .

American youths are profoundly alienated and nihilistic. They see figures of authority as liars and hypocrites; politics, international affairs, and public involvement of all kinds as irrelevant to their lives, which are increasingly caught up in the pursuit of personal fortune. Their fears of nuclear war, of environmental collapse, and of violence and drugs in the streets mirror their cynicism about the ability of our political culture to solve those problems . . .

The most hopeful aspect of Nimbyism–a determination to be part of the process; in effect, to end alienation–can help build a healthier and more robust democracy.

So, very relevant to today. Nothing about vaccines, though—that particular conspiracy theory hadn’t taken hold yet.

But a lack of trust, sure. For decades after the Second World War, we’d been fed a bunch of hype about the mighty Soviet empire, polluters had been allowed to dump their crap pretty much wherever they wanted, and this all had the imprimatur of most of the government and corporate leaders. The government, business, and scientific establishment was spending down the reputational credit they’d earned from arming the Allies during the war and then winning the peace.

My point in discussing this book from 1991 is not to say that it’s always been this way, or to minimize the problems and opportunities associated with distrust of authority. Rather, I think these issues are real, and I also think it’s important to look at them with more historical perspective, rather than attributing this distrust to a recent mixture of the 2008 recession, the covid epidemic, and battles over masks and lockdowns.

I see two big differences between organized defiance of science in 1991 and organized defiance of science today:

1. Politicization. As in so much of our modern life, public attitudes on science have become politically polarized.

2. A newly ambiguous role of business elites. I get the impression that in 1991 that business was on the side of science and technological development; Nimbys were anti-business as well as anti-technology (even if at the individual level many of them may have worked for big business and benefited from technology). Nowadays, though, the anti-vax movement has been taken up by some prominent politically conservative business figures, also there’s a general sense that science, and academia more generally, is a liberal bastion, which leads to enemy-of-my-enemy sort of attitudes on both sides.

P.S. This isn’t the main point of the post, but I just wanted to say I appreciate how cleanly this book is written. It’s direct, to the point, and it has a lot of material for its length (205 pages + endnotes). In recent years, so many nonfiction books seem to be written to the airport-book template: 10 chapters, each starting with some personal anecdote, tons of repetition, almost nothing there. Even books with high-quality information provide very little of it, perhaps because the expectation is that no one will read these books from beginning to end anyway. I’m not saying that every popular nonfiction book is written in that airport style—Bad Blood, for example, was told very well, and with lots of detail, in the author’s own style—; I guess where I’ve really seen this problem is in books about science.