"Distinguishing reality from fantasy,"
and other moral-pol
Hi everyone,
Seeing as how we haven't had a full blown discussion in quite a
long while, how about the following speech by author Michael Crichton
from Sept. 2003. . . .
These latest news reports about the "Super Dooper, Ultra-Top
Secret, Classified-and-Leaked Pentagon Climate Change Report"
reminded me of what Crichton says below: "The greatest
challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality
from fantasy, truth from propaganda." See:
<http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/03/03-09crichton-speech.html>
Michael Crichton - September 15, 2003
MEDALLION SPEAKER ADRESS
Michael Crichton
Author, The Andromeda Strain, Congo & Jusrassic Park;
Creator, "ER"
Jim here: No coincidence that environmentalists are as
guilty of fantasy as the next guy. (There, that should get us
going!) :-) Check it out--among other things Crichton
writes:
"I have been asked by The Commonwealth Club to talk about
what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I
have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is
the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from
propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge for us,
but in the Information Age - or as I think of it, the Disinformation
Age - it takes on a special urgency and importance."
. . .
"I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a
major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the
shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this
awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get
environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the
mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We
need to start doing hard science instead.
"There are two reasons why I think we need to get rid of
the religion of environmentalism. First, we need an environmental
movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted
as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill
people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between
10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record.
Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and
verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be
flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns
with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party
or another is to miss the cold truth - that there is very little
difference between the parties on this subject, except a difference in
pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for
the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save
us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated
than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard
Nixon. And never forget which president sold the federal oil leases,
allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get
politics out of your thinking about the
environment."
If you register (it's free) with the web site you'll get the
entire text.
Enjoy.
Jim T.
ps. oops, looks like that web link doesn't work any more.
I'll attach the speech here below as I originally received it for
discussion purposes. apologies for the length. thanks
everyone. jt
*****
Michael Crichton - September 15, 2003
MEDALLION SPEAKER ADRESS
Michael Crichton
Author, The Andromeda Strain, Congo & Jusrassic Park; Creator,
"ER"
I have been asked by The Commonwealth Club to talk about what I
consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a
fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the
challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from
propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge for us,
but in the Information Age - or as I think of it, the Disinformation
Age - it takes on a special urgency and importance.
I think we also all have to recognize the extent to which we may
not really want to hear the truth, and it reminds me of the guy who
went on vacation and left his cat in the care of his friend. He's on
the beach and he gets a telephone call from his friend, and he says,
"Listen, I have terrible news. The cat got up on the roof and we
couldn't get it down. We called the fire department, the cat jumped
onto a tree, the fire department went after it, but the cat fell and
the cat's dead."
He said, "Oh my God, I can't believe you would tell me that
in that way. It's horrible."
He said, "Well, what should I have done?"
He said, "You have to prepare me. Look, the first day you
call and you say, 'The cat's on the roof and we can't get it down.'
Then the second day you say, 'The fire department has come but the
cat's jumped into the other tree.' And then finally on the third day
you say, 'The cat's dead,' and by then I'm prepared."
The guy said, "Oh, okay, all right, if that's what you
want."
About a week went by and the guy's friend called him again and he
said, "Listen, your mother's on the roof and we can't get her
down."
We must daily decide what threats we face are real, whether the
solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're
told exist are real problems or non-problems. Every one of us has a
sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given
to us by the people around us and the society we live in; in part is
generated by our own emotional state, which we project outward; and in
part it results from actual perceptions of the world. In short, our
struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of
our perceptions are genuine and which are false because they are
handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and
fears.
As an example of this challenge to mankind, I want to talk today
about environmentalism. And in order not to be misunderstood, I want
to be perfectly clear that I believe it is incumbent on us to live our
lives in a way that takes into account all the consequences of our
actions, including the consequences to other people and to the
environment. I believe it is important to act in ways that are
sympathetic to the environment. I believe the world has genuine
problems and that these problems can and should be improved. But I
also think that deciding what constitutes responsible action is
immensely difficult, and the consequences of our actions are very
often hard to know in advance. I think our past record of
environmental action is discouraging, to put it mildly, because even
our best intended efforts have often gone awry. But I think we do not
recognize our past failures and face them squarely. And I think I know
why we don't.
I studied anthropology in college, and one of the things I
learned was that certain human social structures always reappear. They
can't be eliminated from society. One of those structures is religion.
Today it is said we live in a secular society in which many people -
the best people, the most enlightened people - do not believe in any
religion. But I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the
psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely
re-emerges in another. You cannot believe in God, but you still have
to believe in something that gives meaning to your life and shapes
your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is
environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice
for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look
carefully at the beliefs. If you do look carefully, what you see is
that environmentalism is, in fact, a perfect 21st-century mapping of
traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.
Let me give you some examples: There's an initial Eden, a
paradise, a state of grace and unity in nature; there's a fall from
grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of
knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day
coming to us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we
seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is
salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is
its Communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with
the right beliefs, imbibe.
Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday -
these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly
conservative beliefs. They may even be hardwired in the brain, for all
I know. I certainly don't want to talk anybody out of them, as I don't
want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of
God who rose from the dead. But the reason that I don't want to talk
anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can't talk anybody
out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues
of faith.
And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems
facts aren't necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all
about belief. It's about whether you are going to be a sinner or
saved, whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of
salvation or on the side of doom, whether you are going to be one of
us or one of them.
Am I exaggerating to make a point? I'm afraid not. Because we
know a lot more about the world than we did 40 or 50 years ago. And
what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental
myths, yet the myths don't die. Let's examine some of those
beliefs.
There is no Eden. There never was. When was that Eden of the
wonderful mythic past? Was it the time when infant mortality was 80
percent, when four children in five died of disease before the age of
five? Was it a time when one woman in six died in childbirth; when the
average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago; when
plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke; when
millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?
And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony
in the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent,
the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge from Asia almost
immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals,
and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed
up to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life?
Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly. The people of the New World
lived in a state of constant warfare - generations of hatred, tribal
hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are
famous even today: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs,
Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide and human sacrifice.
And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated or
learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some
measure of safety.
How about the human condition in the rest of the world? The Maori
of New Zealand committed massacres regularly. The Dyaks of Borneo were
headhunters. The Polynesians, living in an environment as close to
Eden as one can imagine, fought constantly, and created a society so
hideously restrictive that you could lose your life for stepping in
the footprint of a chief. It was the Polynesians who gave us the very
concept of taboo, as well as the word itself. The noble savage is a
fantasy; it was never true. That anyone still believes it, 200 years
after Rousseau, shows the tenacity of religious myths, their ability
to hang on in the face of centuries of factual contradiction.
Some of you may know there was even an academic movement, during
the latter 20th century, that claimed that cannibalism was a white
man's invention to demonize indigenous peoples - only academics could
fight such a battle. It was some 30 years before professors finally
agreed that yes, cannibalism does indeed occur among human beings.
Meanwhile, all during this time, New Guinea highlanders in the 20th
century continued to eat the brains of their enemies, until they were
finally made to understand that they risked kuru, a fatal neurological
disease, and so they finally stopped.
More recently still the gentle Tasaday of the Philippines, if you
remember that tribe, turned out to be a publicity stunt, a nonexistent
tribe. And the African Pygmies have one of the highest murder rates on
the planet.
In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful
Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature.
People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may
hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a
sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all living things,
but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat
and to live. If they don't, they'll die.
And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of
days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies.
Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will
have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your
body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears,
you'll have infections and sickness, and if you're not with somebody
who knows what they're doing, you'll very rapidly starve to death. But
the chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't
experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your
entire body with DEET, and you will be doing everything you can to
keep those bugs off you.
The truth is, almost nobody wants to experience real nature. What
people want is to spend a week or two in a cabin in the woods, with
screens on the windows. They want a simplified life for a while,
without all their stuff. Or a nice river rafting trip for a few days,
with somebody else doing the cooking. Nobody wants to go back to
nature in any real way, and nobody does. It's all talk, and as the
years go on and as the world population grows increasingly urban, it's
uninformed talk. Farmers know what they're talking about. City people
don't: they just have their fantasies.
One way to measure the prevalence of fantasy is to note the
number of people who die because they haven't the least knowledge of
how nature really is. They stand beside wild animals, like buffalo,
for a picture and get trampled to death; they climb a mountain in
dicey weather and without proper gear, and they freeze to death. They
drown in the surf on their holiday because they can't conceive the
real power of what we blithely call "the force of nature."
They have seen the ocean. But they've never been in it.
The television generation expects nature to act the way they want
it to be. They think all life experiences can be TiVo-ed. The notion
that the natural world obeys its own rules and doesn't give a damn
about your expectations comes as a massive shock. Well-to-do, educated
people in an urban environment experience the ability to fashion their
daily lives as they wish. They buy clothes that suit their taste and
decorate their apartments as they like. Within limits, they can
contrive a daily urban world that pleases them.
But the natural world is not so malleable. On the contrary, it
will demand that you adapt to it - and if you don't, you die. It is a
harsh, powerful and unforgiving world, that most urban Westerners have
never experienced.
Many years ago I was trekking in the Karakoram mountains of
northern Pakistan, when my group came to a river that we had to cross.
It was a glacial river, freezing cold, and it was running very fast,
but it wasn't deep - maybe two and a half or three feet. Nevertheless,
my guide set out ropes for people to hold as they crossed the river,
and everybody proceeded, one at a time, with extreme care. I asked the
guide what was the big deal about crossing a three-foot deep river. He
said, "Well, supposing you fell and suffered a compound
fracture." We were now four days trek from the last big town,
where there was a radio. "Even if the guide went back double time
to get help, it'd still be at least three days before he could return
with a helicopter, if a helicopter were available at all. And in three
days, you'd probably be dead from your injuries." So that was why
everybody was crossing carefully, because out in nature a little slip
can be deadly.
But let's return to religion. If Eden is a fantasy that never
existed, and mankind wasn't ever noble and kind and loving, if we
didn't fall from grace, then what about the rest of the religious
tenets? What about salvation, sustainability and judgment day? What
about the coming environmental doom from fossil fuels and global
warming, if we all don't get down on our knees and conserve every
day?
Well, it's interesting. You may have noticed that something has
been left off the doomsday list, lately. Although the preachers of
environmentalism have been yelling about population for 50 years, over
the last decade world population seems to be taking an unexpected
turn. Fertility rates are falling almost everywhere. As a result, over
the course of my lifetime the thoughtful predictions for total world
population have gone from a high of 20 billion, to 15 billion, to 11
billion - which was the UN estimate around 1990 - to now 9 billion and
soon, perhaps less. There are some people who now think that world
population will peak in 2050 and that by 2100 there will be fewer
people than there are today. Is this a reason to rejoice, to say
hallelujah? Certainly not. Without a pause, we now hear about the
coming crisis of world economy from a shrinking population. We hear
about the impending crisis of an aging population. Nobody anywhere
will say that the core fears expressed for most of my life have turned
out not to be true. As we have moved into the future, these doomsday
visions vanished, like a mirage in the desert. They never were there -
although they still appear in the future, as mirages do.
Okay, so, the preachers made a mistake. They got one prediction
wrong; they're human. So what? Unfortunately, it's not just one
prediction; it's a whole slew of them. We are running out of oil. We
are running out of natural resources. Paul Ehrlich: 60 million
Americans will die of starvation in the 1980s. Forty thousand species
become extinct every year. Half of all species on the planet will be
extinct by the year 2000. And on and on and on.
With so many past failures, you might think that environmental
predictions would become more cautious. But not if it's a religion.
Remember, the nut on the sidewalk carrying the placard that predicts
the end of the world doesn't quit when the world doesn't end on the
day he expects. He just changes his placard, sets a new doomsday date
and goes back to walking the streets. One of the defining features of
religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they
have nothing to do with facts.
I can tell you some facts. I know you haven't read any of what I
am about to tell you in the newspaper, because newspapers literally
don't report them. I can tell you that DDT is not a carcinogen, did
not cause birds to die and should never have been banned. I can tell
you that the people who banned it knew that it wasn't carcinogenic and
banned it anyway. I can tell you that the DDT ban has caused the
deaths of tens of millions of poor people, mostly children, whose
deaths are directly attributable to a callous, technologically
advanced Western society that promoted the new cause of
environmentalism by pushing a fantasy about a pesticide, and thus
irrevocably harmed the Third World. Banning DDT is one of the most
disgraceful episodes in the 20th-century history of America. We knew
better, and we did it anyway, and we let people around the world die,
and we didn't give a damn.
I can tell you that secondhand smoke is not a health hazard to
anyone and never was, and the EPA has always known it. I can tell you
that the evidence for global warming is far weaker than its proponents
would ever admit. I can tell you the percentage of U.S. land area that
is taken up by urbanization, including cities and roads, is 5 percent.
I can tell you that the Sahara desert is shrinking, and the total ice
of Antarctica is increasing. I can tell you that a blue-ribbon panel
in Science magazine concluded that there is no known technology that
will enable us to halt the rise of carbon dioxide in the 21st century.
Not wind, not solar, not even nuclear. The panel concluded a totally
new technology - like nuclear fusion - was necessary, otherwise
nothing could be done, and in the meantime all efforts would be a
waste of time. They said that when the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change reports stated that alternative technologies existed
that could control greenhouse gases, that the UN was wrong.
I can, with a lot of time, give you the factual basis for these
views, and I can cite the appropriate journal articles, not in wacko
magazines, but in the most prestigious science journals, such as
Science and Nature. But such references probably won't impact more
than a handful of you, because the beliefs of a religion are not
dependent on facts, but rather are matters of faith: unshakeable
belief.
Most of us have had the experience of interacting with religious
fundamentalists, and we understand that one of the problems with
fundamentalists is that they have no perspective on themselves. They
never recognize that their way of thinking is just one of many other
possible ways of thinking, which may be equally useful or good. On the
contrary, they believe their way is the right way, and everyone else
is wrong; they are in the business of salvation, and they want to help
you to see things the right way. They want to help you be saved. They
are totally rigid and totally uninterested in opposing points of view.
In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of
its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.
I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift
in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that
occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was
first heightened. But this time around, we need to get
environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the
mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We
need to start doing hard science instead.
There are two reasons why I think we need to get rid of the
religion of environmentalism. First, we need an environmental
movement, and such a movement is not very effective if it is conducted
as a religion. We know from history that religions tend to kill
people, and environmentalism has already killed somewhere between
10-30 million people since the 1970s. It's not a good record.
Environmentalism needs to be absolutely based in objective and
verifiable science, it needs to be rational, and it needs to be
flexible. And it needs to be apolitical. To mix environmental concerns
with the frantic fantasies that people have about one political party
or another is to miss the cold truth - that there is very little
difference between the parties on this subject, except a difference in
pandering rhetoric. The effort to promote effective legislation for
the environment is not helped by thinking that the Democrats will save
us and the Republicans won't. Political history is more complicated
than that. Never forget which president started the EPA: Richard
Nixon. And never forget which president sold the federal oil leases,
allowing oil drilling in Santa Barbara: Lyndon Johnson. So get
politics out of your thinking about the environment.
The second reason to abandon environmental religion is more
pressing. Religions think they know it all, but the unhappy truth of
the environment is that we are dealing with incredibly complex,
evolving systems, and we usually are not certain how best to proceed.
Those who are certain are demonstrating their personality type, or
their belief system, not the state of their knowledge. Our record in
the past, for example managing national parks, is humiliating. Our
fifty-year effort at forest fire suppression is a well-intentioned
disaster from which our forests will never recover. We need to be
humble, deeply humble, in the face of what we are trying to
accomplish. We need to be trying various methods of accomplishing
things. We need to be open-minded about assessing results of our
efforts, and we need to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions
are good at none of these things.
How will we manage to get environmentalism out of the clutches of
religion, and back to a scientific discipline? There's a simple
answer: We have to institute a far more stringent set of requirements
for what constitutes knowledge in the environmental realm. I am
thoroughly sick of politicized so-called facts that simply aren't
true. It isn't that these "facts" are exaggerations of an
underlying truth. Nor is it that certain organizations are spinning
their case to present it in the strongest way. Not at all - what more
and more groups are doing is simply putting out lies, pure and simple,
falsehoods that they know to be false.
This trend began with the DDT campaign, and it persists to this
day. At the moment, the EPA is hopelessly politicized. It is probably
better to shut it down and start over. What we need is a new
organization much closer to the FDA. We need an organization that will
be ruthless about acquiring verifiable results, that will fund
identical research projects to more than one group, and that will make
everybody in this field get honest fast.
Because in the end, science offers us the only way out of
politics. And if we allow science to become politicized, then we are
lost. We will enter the Internet version of the Dark Ages, an era of
shifting fears and wild prejudices, transmitted to people who don't
know any better. That's not a good future for the human race. That's
our past. So it's time to abandon the religion of environmentalism and
return to the science of environmentalism, and base our public policy
decisions firmly on that.