Resisting (watching) pollution of the science communication environment in real time: genetically modified foods in the US, part 2
Just as the health of individual human beings depends on the quality of natural environment, the well-being of a democratic society depends on the quality of the science communication environment.
The science communication environment is the sum total of cues, influences, and processes that ordinary members of the public rely on to participate in the collective knowledge society enjoys by virtue of science.
No one (not even scientists) can personally comprehend nearly as much of what is known to science as it makes sense for them—as consumers, as health-care recipients, as democratic citizens—to accept as known by science. To participate in that knowledge, then, they must accurately identify who knows what about what.
When the science communication environment is in good working order, even people who have only rudimentary understandings of science will be able to make judgments of that kind with remarkable accuracy. When it is not, even citizens with high levels of scientific knowledge will be disabled from reliably identifying who knows what about what, and will thus form conflicting perceptions of what is known by science—to their individual and collective detriment.
Among the most toxic threats to the quality of a society’s science communication environment are antagonistic cultural meanings: emotional resonances that become attached to risks or other policy-relevant facts and that selectively affirm and denigrate the commitments of opposing cultural groups.
Ordinary individuals are accustomed to exercising the faculties required to determine who knows what about what within such groups, whose members, by virtue of their common outlooks and experiences, interact comfortably with one another and share information without misunderstanding or conflict. Because antagonistic cultural meanings create strong psychic pressures for members of opposing groups to form and persist in conflicting sets of factual beliefs, such resonances enfeeble the reliable functioning of the faculties ordinary people (including highly science literate ones) use to participate in what is known by science.
Antagonistic cultural meanings are thus a form of pollution in the science communication environment. Their propagation accounts for myriad divisive and counterproductive policy conflicts—including ones over climate change, nuclear power, and private gun ownership.
In part one of this series, I described the complex of economic and political forces that have infused the issue of genetically modified (GM) foods with culturally antagonistic meanings in Europe.
I also noted the signs, including the campaign behind the pending GM food-labeling referendum in California, that suggest the potential spread of this contaminant to the US science-communication environment.
What makes the campaign a pollutant in this regard has nothing to do with whether GM foods are in fact a health hazard (there’s a wealth of scientific data on that; readers who are interested in them should check out David Tribe’s blog). Rather, it has to do with the deliberate use of narrative-framing devices—stock characters, dramatic themes, allusions to already familiar conflicts, and the like—calculated to tap into exactly the culturally inflected resonances that pervade climate change, nuclear power, guns, and various other issues that polarize more egalitarian and communitarian citizens, on the one hand, and more hierarchical and individualistic ones, on the other.
But as I adverted to, there is at least one countervailing influence that didn’t exist in Europe before it became a site of political controversy over GM foods but that does exist today in the US: consciousness of the way in which dynamics such as these can distort constructive democratic engagement with valid science, and a strong degree of resolve on the part of many science communicators to counteract them.
Both of these writers have been outspoken in criticizing ungrounded attacks on the validity of science on climate change, too. Indeed, Kloor recently blasted GM food opponents as the “climate skeptics of the Left.”
Precisely because they have conspicuously criticized distortions of science aimed at discounting environmental risks in the past, their denunciation of those whom they see as distorting science to exaggerate environmental risks here reduces the likelihood that GM foods risks will become culturally branded.
Science journalists, too, have been quick to respond to what they see as the complicity of their own in participating in dissemination of questionable science claims on GM foods.
In one still-simmering controversy, a large number of journalists accepted an offer of advance access to an alarming study on GM-food risks in return for refraining from seeking the opinion of other scientists before publishing their “scoop” stories. Timed for release in conjunction with a popular book and a TV documentary, the study, conducted by a scientists with a high profile as supporter of GM-food regulation, was in fact thereafter dismissed as non-credible by expert toxicologists—although not before the alarming headlines were seized on by proponents of the California labeling proposition as well as European regulators.
Writing about the controversy, NY Times writer Carl Zimmer blasted the affair as a “rancid, corrupt way to report about science.” It was clear to the participating reporters, Zimmer observed, that the authors of the study were seeking to exclude any critical appraisal from the initial “burst of attention” in the media, thereby “reinforcing opposition to genetically modified foods.” “We need to live up to our principles, and we need to do a better job of calling out bad behavior…. [Y]ou all agreed to do bad journalism, just to get your hands on a paper. For shame.”
Ars Technica editor John Timmer amplified Zimmer’s response. “Very little of the public gets their information directly from scientists or the publications they write,” Timmer pointed out. “Instead, most of us rely on accounts in the media, which means reporters play a key role in highlighting and filtering science for the public.” In this case, Timmer objected, “the press wasn't reporting about science at all. It was simply being used as a tool for political ends.”
One reason to be impressed by these sorts of reactions to GM foods is that they suggest the possibility of using professional norms as a more general device for protecting the quality of the science communication environment.
As I indicated in my last post, there is nothing inevitable about the process by which a risk issue becomes suffused with antagonistic cultural meanings. Those kinds of toxic associations are made, not born.
It follows that we should make protection of the science communication environment a matter of self-conscious study and self-conscious action. The natural environment cannot be expected to protect itself from pollution itself without scientifically informed action on our part. And the same goes for the quality of the science communication environment.
I’m of the view that the sorts of collective action that protection of the science communication environment requires will have to come from various sources, including government, universities, and NGOs.
But clearly one of the sources will have to be professional science communicators. Timmer is clearly right about the critical role it plays—not just in translating what’s known by science into terms that enable curious people to experience the thrill of sharing in the wondrous insights acquired through our collective intelligence (I myself am so so grateful to them for that!), but in certifying who knows what about what so that as democratic citizens people can reliably gain access to the knowledge they need to contribute to intelligent collective decisionmaking.
Animated by diverse motivations—commercial and ideological—actors intent on disabling the faculty culturally diverse citizens use to discern who knows what about what can thus be expected to strategically target the media. Strong professional norms are a kind of warning system that can help science journalists recognize and repel efforts to use them as instruments for polluting the science communication environment.
Unlike centrally administered rules or codes, norms operate as informal, spontaneous guides for collective behavior. They get their force from internalized emotional commitments both to abide by shared standards of conduct and to contribute to enforcement of them by censure and condemnation of violators. Norms are propogated as members of a community observe examples of behavior that express those commitments and see others responding with admiration and reciprocation. That all seems to be happening here.
This unusual opportunity to watch an attempt to inject a new toxic meaning into the science communication environment also furnishes a unique opportunity to learn something about who can protect that environment from pollution and how.
Oh! I said I would share some data on cultural perceptions of GM food risks in the US in this installment of the series. But don’t you agree that I’ve already gone on more than long enough? So I’ll just have to present the data next time—in the third, and I promise final, post in this (now) 3-part (I actually imagined only one when I started) series. (But here's a sneak preview.)
Part one in this series.