Righteousness of the Devout

Metternich is perhaps not a very likable character in history, but reading a work of his for class, I was taken aback by particular passage. After discussing the history of civilization, he states:

Having now thrown a rapid glance over the first causes of the present state of society, it is necessary to point out in a more particular manner the evil which threatens to deprive it, at one blow, of the real blessings, the fruits of genuine civilization, and to disturb it in the midst of its enjoyments. This evil may be described in one word--presumption; the natural effect of the rapid progression of the human mind towards the perfecting of so many things. This it is which at the present day leads so many individuals astray, for it has become an almost universal sentiment.

Religion, morality, legislation, economy, politics, administration, all have become common and accessible to everyone. Knowledge seems to come by inspiration; experience has no value for the presumptuous man; faith is nothing to him; he substitutes for it a pretended individual conviction, and to arrive at this conviction dispenses with all inquiry and with all study; for these means appear too trivial to a mind which believes itself strong enough to embrace at one glance all questions and all facts. Laws have no value for him, because he has not contributed to make them, and it would be beneath a man of his parts to recognize the limits traced by rude and ignorant generations.

I found this in "Confessions of Faith", in a collection purchased for use in my class on 19th century Europe. Metternich was without a doubt a believer in the principle of the Gatekeeper; that the world ought to be made up of an elite few who dole out the true knowledge to the unwashed, ignorant masses, because what lies beyond the gate is too complex for their simple minds to understand.

None the less, I connected with the particular point he was making about the presumptuous intellectual.

Not too long ago, I read the Skeptical Environmentalist, by Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg. It is, without a doubt, the greatest book I have ever read. I state this not on account of its conclusions, but because of how it was written. I have stated before that Lomborg's approach is to me the embodiment of good, honest science. He does not pretend that the information he provides his readers is anything other than a simplification of reality--in fact, he continually pauses from the topics of the book to discuss the shortcomings of the statistics he uses, in terms of what he is attempting to measure with them.

However, the need to boil things down to the greatest possible simplicity is not an excuse for sloppy methodology. The book provides 2,930 detailed end-notes, filling a total of 84 pages at the end of the book. He also has an additional 70 pages dedicated to his bibliography. The man is thorough. When I finished the book, I didn't just have his personal analysis of environmental or economic issues; I had a new passion for science, statistics, and good, honest discussion.

In the time since then, I have fostered an increasing hostility for two sorts of person. The first is the fellow who believes himself to be a gatekeeper. Evidence of this sort of person is not hard to find--the recent IPCC Fourth Assessment Report included both a scientific version, and version that is titled, verbatim, "Summary for Policymakers". Policymakers need not concern themselves with facts or evidence, as you know. They ought simply to follow the guidance of the almighty gatekeeper.

Never mind them. I've gone after the self-crowned gatekeepers for a long time, but they are not the chief object of my contempt tonight. No, my criticism is directed at Metternich's "presumptuous man"; that frivolous person for whom "knowledge seems to come by inspiration", and for whom "experience has no value". Only I say the latter in perhaps a different light than Metternich intended--for the presumptuous man I speak of puts no value on his own experience, yet seems to think that by inspiration alone he can determine what is true science and what is simply the point of view of the ignorant.

To step out of name-calling and into specific examples: in a recent look at Bradford Plumer's blog, I found that he was unhesitantly pronouncing what regulations would "come close to reducing U.S. emissions down to the levels necessary for the country to do its part to avert drastic climate change" (source) even though he has openly admitted that he doesn't "know a whole heck of a lot about the science behind climate change" (source). Plumer believes he can speak much like an expert on the subject, not out of any knowledge acquired by personal experience, but because of a conviction that he is listening to the words of the right Gatekeepers.

Plumer is just a humble blogger, of course, thinking through writing much as I do, and making mistakes much as I do. His example I believe is a good case of what I'm talking about, but an example of greater impact can be found in the case of Al Gore.

I bought and read An Inconvenient Truth. I am not afraid to read the point of view of people that I disagree with, in fact, I think it's where I learn the most. Do you want to know how many endnotes, or footnotes the book provides? Zero. Do you want to know how many sources it puts in its bibliography? I'll give you a hint: it's hard to have any sources in your bibliography when you don't have a bibliography. If I were to count all of the sources he cited in any manner at all on my fingers, I would not run out of fingers. Where he did cite a source, it was for a graph or a picture, and then he didn't provide any bibliographic information about the article or the study it came from, but simply the organization that had provided it for him. Whereas Lomborg gave his readers the organization, the study, the date of study, and numerous pieces of information from that study, Gore gives you a little "IPCC" or "Scripps Institute of Oceanography", when he gives you even that.

More repugnant than his inept methodology is his claim, on page 262 of my version, that 0% of all peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals express any doubt "as to the cause of global warming". Not only does he once again give you no reason to believe this number, but the mere presentation of this information itself speaks to a position more irresponsible and unscientific even than that held by the gatekeepers. He is arguing that we, the many, need to recognize our ignorance and put our fate in the hands of the enlightened few. To me, that is worse than a scientist who grows arrogant on his own experience--this is the inexperienced telling his fellows that they ought to get with it and put themselves at the mercy of the gatekeepers already, chop chop!

Here we hear of "pulling together the scientific consensus", as if scientists belonged to some kind of Council of Elders who need to issue unified decree so that order could be maintained.

I am not Metternich--I believe that it is all well and fine for everyone to have an opinion, even on that which they are not experienced. But if you are aware of your own ignorance on a subject, why on Earth would you pretend that your opinion carries any special weight? The reason one gains confidence ought not to be because you think you parrot the consensus of the learned; it ought to be because you got your own hands dirty and worked at learning a little something. Had you done so, you might indeed have noticed that "consensus is always elusive in science, and conclusions are always tentative" as this article so eloquently put it.

Of course, if you did get your hands dirty, you may have grown arrogant rather than confident, and decided to make a gatekeeper of yourself. That would be a shame, but I would almost prefer the snide remarks of the arrogant over the righteousness of the devoutly ignorant.