Book Review: Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America

To the chagrin of many practicing scientists, science is political, writes Shawn Lawrence Otto in his new book, Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. Although the process of scientific exploration is ideally devoid of political bias, Otto argues, “[E]very time a scientist makes a factual assertion—Earth goes around the sun, there is such a thing as evolution, humans are causing climate change—it either supports or challenges somebody’s vested interests.”^{(p 23)} Science is knowledge; knowledge is power; power is necessarily political. This forms the central thesis of Otto’s thorough, outraged account of the political attack on science.

Science, Otto persuasively argues, is inherently antiauthoritarian though nonpartisan. Scientific knowledge rests on independently reproducible evidence alone, and therefore, strong scientific claims are intrinsically divested from dogma. The independence of such knowledge from belief or opinion can explain why science has flourished most in free, democratic societies. Otto contends, however, that liberty and democracy are threatened when the citizenry lose the ability to differentiate between fact and opinion.

The book’s second section begins with a disjointed chronicle of the relationship between science and politics from Galileo through Bacon, Locke, the Puritans, and America’s Founding Fathers. Otto picks interesting historical anecdotes to discuss a wide range of topics from the philosophy of science, the intermittently antagonistic and friendly relationship between science and religion, the importance of scientific thinking in the founding of the United States, and the generally positive status held by scientists through the early 20th century. The narrative, however, meanders aimlessly from story to story, occasionally doubling back on itself. The author’s arguments are unfocused as he travels down a list of insufficiently linked bullet points.

Otto shines, however, as he recounts the fractures between science and politics that developed following the Second World War when science shifted from being a source of wonder to a source of fear as the prospect of nuclear annihilation gripped the nation. In a state of terror, the United States began planning for a nuclear attack on American soil.

Defense policy transformed American society. The development of suburbs, for example, can be traced to the necessity of decentralizing the population away from dense cities and not, as commonly believed, to increased car ownership or a flight from desegregated schools following Brown v Board of Education. The National Interstate and Defense Highways Act of 1956 created a system by which citizens could evacuate densely populated urban areas while uprooting millions of impoverished minority communities through which the new roads were built. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 boosted spending on defense-related education in the sciences and engineering.

During this time science played a pivotal role in both the arms race and the space race. Unfortunately, increased government funding only served to isolate scientists from the public. Despite science being antiauthoritarian by nature, Otto states, “Scientists became figures of authority in white lab coats, bland, dry, value neutral and above the fray.”^{(p 85)} Science had divorced itself from the mainstream.

Through the 1960s and 1970s, science came to be seen as part of “the man.” The United States spent huge sums of money on science to send people into space and fight a war in Vietnam while racial inequality, sex discrimination, and poverty were running rampant. Well-intentioned technological solutions began to manifest unintended and sometimes catastrophic consequences. DDT, asbestos, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island seeded further mistrust of scientists and engrained them as agents of an out-of-touch and much maligned government.

A new religious political front began growing just as science began losing touch with the public and receded from the political front lines. The nation appeared to have lost its moral compass and Christian evangelicalism plugged the gap. This movement was, at worst, antiscience and, at best, ignorant of science. Whereas science and religion coexisted relatively peaceably at the turn of the century, the new Christian Right saw science as a threat.

Simultaneously, the secular left began to adopt its own version of antiscience: postmodernism. The postmodernists held that all knowledge is relative and dependent on perspective. There were no absolute truths, and objectivity impossible, since truth was contingent on language, cultural identity, and personal perspective. Science was no better than any other “ideology” for arriving at the truth. Indeed, for postmodernists science was only the truth according to the Western, dominant, white male.

Having outlined the backdrop for the modern political stage, Otto next tackles contemporary antiscience, which he sees as a combination of a fundamentalist backlash, a big-business propaganda war, and postmodern identity politics. By attacking science, these 3 prongs not only threaten the adoption of sound policies but imperil freedom itself and open a door toward tyranny.

Otto’s argument is far from hyperbolic. Objective truth can be absolute but it is anything but authoritarian. He argues that by

acknowledging that there is an objective reality and that we can form knowledge about that reality by using science and observation, we remove questions of fact from the authoritative argument. This is the great insight that the United States was founded upon.^(p128)

By separating knowledge from the individual, it ceases to be opinion. If we cannot base policy on the objective it necessarily becomes based on faith and, therefore, inherently tyrannical and intolerant. As Otto eloquently puts it, science “is not an article of faith—just the opposite. It’s an article of what’s left after doubt and scrutiny.”^{(p 279)}

The move away from objectivity has lead to the concept of a “marketplace of ideas.” Instead of reporting on facts to provide a common knowledge base from which further discussion can emerge, the mass media instead caters to opinion and drama. If there can be no common basis for knowledge, then political power can only be based on rhetoric.

Otto laments, “[I]n a time when the majority of the world’s leading country’s largest challenges revolve around science, few reporters are covering them from the scientific angle.”^(p13) Most politicians are not ethicists, but they are asked about morality; most politicians are not economists, but they are asked about economic policy; most politicians are not diplomats, but they discuss foreign policy. If so much of our present and future prosperity as a nation is tied to science, why do political candidates shy from discussing science?

Part of the solution Otto proposes is to engage the public and, perhaps more important, nonscientist community leaders such as preachers in discussions about the process of science. He believes that such outreach can be instrumental in circulating the message that good science is instrumental for making sound policy and economic decisions. This approach is both logical and laudable but remains far from certain that it can substantially change the status quo. Otto seems hopeful, but given his own detailed articulation of the deep entrenchment of antiscience thinking, one need not be a cynic to characterize his view as panglossian.

His bolder proposal is to stage formal science debates just as there are debates about foreign or economic policy. The hope is that forcing candidates to confront scientific matters publically will both increase public awareness of scientific issues and reduce the rhetoric that drives today’s political discussions. This, too, might strike the reader as overly optimistic, especially given Otto’s own account of the antagonism both political parties express toward the idea of a science debate.

Fool Me Twice is both easy to read and replete with interesting stories and facts about the tortured relationship between science and politics. It flows somewhat unevenly and especially choppy in its opening and closing sections. Otto is at his best when he dissects the causes underlying contemporary antiscience sentiment. His scathing attacks of both left and right wings of politics are fair and warranted. He is justified in focusing much of his ire on the pernicious effect the modern Republican Party has had on promulgating the stigmatization of science, but his tone risks alienating conservative readers. In his discussion of global climate change, for example, his bilious prose comes across as partisan and risks rhetorical interpretation, despite being well researched and accurate.

Fool Me Twice is required reading for any scientist or science-minded citizen struggling to understand how America lost its way with regard to science. It directly confronts the reader with the causes and severity of the fractured relationship between the scientific community and the public. This book will succeed in its mission whether or not Otto gets his science debate if he is able to convince scientists that it is in their best interest and in the best interest of the nation to reengage the public and politicians regarding the process of scientific discovery.